What Greens should focus on

Why co-opting industry into the Green agenda is a mistake.

 
Greta Thunberg is one step ahead of the majority of political commentators. She realised early on that politicians make promises and don’t keep them. Whether you are talking about co-ordinated action on climate change or the delivery of vaccines to poorer countries, the G7 can always be relied upon to disappoint.

I also fear that Green national politics could end up in disappointment. This could well be the decade in which Green parties end up in government. The German Greens are tantalisingly close. In Austria they are already there – and realising the limits of what they can do

The German Greens have a lot of good ideas, but when I look at Annalena Baerbock’s grand scheme to entice German companies to invest in green production technologies, I feel this is where they are going wrong. The future does not lie in the production of green widgets – the extension of Germany’s analogue production technologies into a world with green-tinted glasses. Germany needs to modernise the economy from the ground up. It will be process of creative destruction. Don’t assume VW and BASF are your friends.

So if multilateralism and green corporatism is not going to help, what will? I have two suggestions for how it can happen – a benign or a malign scenario. The malign scenario of successful climate change action is one where Green politics fail. Given the asymmetry with which climate change affects continents, we should not dismiss eco-wars and eco-terrorism as low-probability scenarios. When more young people are starting to realise is that the G-7 and the G-20 are only there to fool them, and Green governments don’t deliver either. A larger than present segment of the Green movement may conclude that violence is the only way forward. In that world, the Green parachuter who descended over Munich’s football stadium last week would be a suicide bomber.

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