Climate Crisis

Destroying the planet to save it — what could possibly go wrong?

Environmentalists, unlike business advocates, can see too clearly how the world works and are willing to call it out

Ryanair chief executive Michael O'Leary pretending to cry whilst holding a laptop during a press conference. Picture date: Photograph: Brian Lawless/PA
Ryanair chief executive Michael O'Leary pretending to cry whilst holding a laptop during a press conference. Picture date: Photograph: Brian Lawless/PA
Karen Ciesielski
Thu Dec 26 2024 - 06:00

“It was necessary to destroy the village in order to save it.” This quote was provided by an American officer to journalist Peter Arnett to explain why they had used so much ammunition and firepower during a battle in the village of Ben Tre during the Vietnam War.

Regarded by many as one of the greatest quotes in journalism history, it also came to symbolise the senseless futility of the Vietnam War. It doesn’t take a genius to realise that bombing something out of existence isn’t necessarily the best way to save it. If you thought that the US military had the monopoly on bizarre quotes to justify their actions, you could just be wrong.

“The best way to deal with the environment is new technology, but also economic growth, because economic growth is what generates the taxation revenues that will allow government to implement sustainable environmental policies.” This was Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary talking to the Business Post last September.

Essentially what this boils down to is that we have to continue polluting and destroying the environment in order to save it. I know that O’Leary has a business to run, but don’t try to cod me that driving demand for flights is saving the planet just because you bought some marginally more efficient aircraft and you pay some tax.

READ MORE

But he is not alone. In an opinion piece in these pages in October, Trevor White lampooned the perverse logic of Donal Moriarty of Aer Lingus who said: “In order to invest in ... new technology aircraft and sustainable aviation fuel, we need to grow.” Keeping the passenger cap at 32 million “is actually environmentally detrimental”.

There’s obviously something in the water that our aviation industry leaders are drinking. But to be fair, it’s not just the aviation industry that indulges the perpetual growth nonsense — every industry does it. Whether it is advising about curtailing flights, warning about the effects of the nitrates derogation on water quality, expressing a desire to see public transport get the same level of investment as roads, seeking a moratorium on data centres, banning fracked gas or advising on the necessity to cut down on eating meat, environmentalists are tarred with the same lazy brush — they’re idealistic, unrealistic theorists and ideologues who don’t understand how the “real” world works.

Maybe the key thing about environmentalists is that they can see too clearly how the world works and are willing to call it out.

For instance, with data centres now using more than 20 per cent of the nation’s electricity in a strained national grid, it is not revolutionary and imprudent to introduce a legal moratorium on data centres until an independent national review of current and projected data centre energy demand is undertaken.

And you don’t have to be an economist or business guru to recognise that our global food production system is hugely inefficient. Not only is meat production a huge emitter of greenhouse gases, but it is also an inefficient way of feeding people. Meat production requires a much higher amount of water than vegetables. But it also requires inputs that are wasteful and not the most productive use of resources — beef has an energy efficiency of about 2 per cent.

This means that for every 100 kilocalories you feed a cow, you only get 2 kilocalories of beef back. These figures are made starker when you realise that less than half — only 48 per cent — of the world’s cereals are eaten by humans; 41 per cent is used for animal feed and 11 per cent for biofuels. So, suggesting people eat less meat is not exactly radical if we want better use of finite resources.

We like to think that fossil fuels make the world go around — one thing for certain is that a lot of time, money and energy is spent making them go around the world. A telling thread on X by Tzeporah Berman, international programme director of Stand. Earth and chairwoman of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty highlighted that nearly half of all shipping traffic worldwide is just moving fossil fuels around.

Fossil fuels are only 37 per cent efficient, she said in the thread. In other words, 63 per cent of the oil, gas and coal we extract goes to waste in the production, refinement, and transportation process, said Berman.

In the context of environmentalists being labelled as ideologues, well, an ideologue is someone who has strong beliefs or opinions and stubbornly sticks to them no matter what. That sounds like business as usual to me. Environmentalists are the ones saying we can do things better, cheaper and without destroying the only world we have in order to save it.

Karen Ciesielski is the co-ordinator of the Environmental Pillar