The Green Opportunity: Having our cake and eating it too

The concept of trade-offs has become unfashionable. Politicians around the world like to pretend that their choices will bring us nothing but superlative benefits.

Nowhere is this whitewashing more pervasive or accepted than in climate change. There is a prevalent, comforting notion that we can have our cake and eat it too: that cutting carbon need not involve financial sacrifice.

We hear this rhetoric so often that we almost don’t notice it. In announcing plans to make the UK a global hub for “green finance,” the British minister of state for climate change and industry Claire Perry said, “The transition to a low carbon economy is a multi-billion pound investment opportunity.” Norway’s Prime Minister recently claimed climate change offers “an opportunity for development and growth.”