Widening the Green Lens
Part 5 of the series: “How to make People want to pay for Green”
This is a five-part series, you’ll find the link to each individual post at the end of this one.
Let’s recap
Over the past four posts we set out to identify what enables the successful adoption of a Green product or service. There were four main learnings:
- Most consumers both agree that climate action is an emergency and maintain unsustainable consumption patterns. Higher cost and lower convenience of Green are the main drivers of this dissonance.
- Our purchases carry embedded Maslowian characteristics. A Green brand’s storytelling acts to lighten the perceived burden of cost and convenience by reframing how a consumer imagines him/herself through his/her purchases.
- Without a great product, great stories fall apart. Successful Green companies have shown us that by entering markets from the top, convenience can be addressed as step 1, enabling the scale to fix the cost problem as step 2.
- Many companies’ short-term interest is maintaining the status quo, to which end they co-opt Green messages as a diversion. Many new companies launch to inflated claims of green-ness only to disappoint when they fall short of their promises. As an entrepreneur, you will inherit the cynicism caused by your predecessors and have to overcome it with both your story and your products.
Greener consumption or just less consumption?
From all possible viewpoints, the greening of our consumption is desirable, necessary and urgent. This means many amazing and exciting Green entrepreneurial adventures lie ahead of us. But there are serious challenges to the notion that green consumption will make ever-growing consumption OK.
The world economy grew by about 2.5% in 2019. When I was studying economics 14 years ago, the number was closer to 4.5% and already seemed a dismal failure in light of the 30 years of glorious post-WWII growth.
Economists and politicians today only dream of hitting 4.5% again — that would for sure get them re-elected. But crunch the numbers and even just 2.5% yearly growth for the next 180 years (the time between the end of the Industrial Revolution and now) means global GDP would expand 85-fold. Already, France consumes 2.5 times its share of natural resources, the United States 3.9. Can we really multiply that by 85…?
As we saw in post 1, infinite growth in economic theory is only possible because natural resources are left out of the equation. I don’t really need to demonstrate that natural resources are finite, that’s what Earth Overshoot Day is all about.
A quick regression often used by Jean-Marc Jancovici shows the quasi-perfectly liner correlation between GDP growth and energy use. The implication is that we’ve never seen energy-efficiency gains, i.e. generating more GDP with less energy. So not much hope there.
In 2020, about 85% of global energy use comes from fossil fuels. On top of emitting greenhouse gases, they come in inescapably finite quantities.
And while we toil away on the transition from fossil fuels, solar panels, wind turbines and nuclear plants all require significant mineral extraction to be put in operation. And Earth’s supply of minerals is… finite.
There is the idea (the hope?) that a heavily tertiary economy can liberate itself from the constraints of natural resources. But the tertiary economy we live in does not exist without the energy to power Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Oracle and everyone else’s data centres. The planet definitely doesn’t have 85 times the amount of resources required for 180 years of 2.5% annual tertiary growth.
Maybe we’ll manage to extract resources from other planets. But even then, if that buys us a thousand years of growth, that’s still only a thousand years of growth. A point in time where we’ll hit 0-growth is not a question of if but when. And “when” is a question of whether we get there by will or by force, which in turn brings up a whole different set of geopolitical questions.
What’s likely if we start consuming less only when forced to, is that our planet will be by then in such a sorry state that the very notion of material comfort may be just a dystopian shadow of what you and I, well-to-do readers of Medium, experience right now.
In anticipation of all this it therefore seems necessary to make consuming less desirable, starting with the richest on the planet. Which kind of flies in the face of the entire social structure we’ve built since the Industrial Revolution. So no easy task.
But I’m pretty sure there are still millions of new ideas to think of and build in a world that consumes less.
That definitely keeps things super exciting.
As a marketer, I can’t help but wonder what role, if any, marketers and Marketing will play in all of this. And that’s something I want to explore in writing.
So see you in my next series!
