The good life, the green economy and global catastrophe: the changing rhetoric of renewables
In a recent BBC Radio 4 programme on the origins of the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT), the founders discussed why, in 1973, they’d felt moved to set up an eco-centre in an old Welsh slate quarry. Long before renewables were anything approaching mainstream, CAT was building wind turbines out of canvas and wood, and solar panels out of old radiators.
Since then renewable technology has been on a rhetorical journey. The sustainable “good life” dream of the CAT pioneers has given way to issues of economic viability in the twenty-first century “green economy”. But is the shift in framing from good life to green economy a movement betraying its principles, or evolving to address contemporary issues and concerns?
From Good Life to green economy
CAT’s mission, states Radio 4’s Sue MacGregor, “was to promote alternatives to the modern, high polluting technologies that produce so much of our energy, food and buildings”. CAT’s founders use phrases like “limits to growth” and “how to blend science with a way of doing more with less, and working with nature rather than destroying it”. It’s the philosophy that inspired Surbiton couple Barbara and Tom’s pursuit of the sustainability dream in 1970s sitcom The Good Life.
40 years on, CAT is described as “one of Europe’s leading showcases for sustainable living”. While the founders were “largely unskilled environmental enthusiasts”, its current team is comprised of “leaders in their field, advising industry, lobbying government and educating the future students of sustainability”. The “hippies in the hills” have become part of the establishment.
Just as CAT’s role has changed, so has the presentation of renewable energy in public discourse. The rhetoric of the “good life” has largely gone, and in its place is the language of business and industry, of cost and efficiency.
In short, the “good life” frame has been replaced by the “green economy” frame: economic efficiency has replaced sustainable living, and although “small is beautiful” might still inspire people to set up community energy schemes, it has mostly given way to ambitions for larger-scale energy production.
Trade organisations like Renewable UK use the language of business, industry and technology to present wind and marine technologies as serious contenders. Others, like theEnergy Savings Trust, tap into concerns about increasing energy prices, and present wind and solar as solutions.
The rhetorical shift underlies an effort by renewables advocates to mainstream renewable technologies. The anti-consumer rhetoric of the 1970s has undertaken a volte-face, to be replaced by the language of economic viability.
Adopting the language of markets and economics might also be an effort to distance renewables from their left-wing political heritage. As Bob Todd of CAT asserts, The Times refused to run a CAT advert in the 1970s because the paper considered it to be “an anarchic organisation”. More recently, the latest Green Party manifesto combines environmental objectives with left-wing social policy.
There’s nothing inherently political about a form of energy production. The example of Germany illustrates this point. In Germany, environmentalism is detached from social politics. The greenest of the German states, Bavaria, is also the most socially conservative. Many of Germany’s eco-cities are also in the conservative south: Erlangen in Bavaria, and Freiburg and Heidelberg in Baden-Württemberg.
In one sense, the green economy frame reflects that the renewables of today are not the string and radiator contraptions of the seventies. But adopting the rhetoric of business and industry is also designed to mainstream renewable power, and distance it from the left-wing environmentalist movement that championed the idea.
The end of the world is nigh? Hyperbole and satire
There’s another significant rhetorical frame associated with renewables that evolved from 1970s concerns about the limits to growth: “catastrophe”. This frame might not sit so easily with the rhetorical journey of the renewables industry.
The catastrophe frame focuses on two themes: apocalyptic warning and “saving” the planet. It’s frequently evoked over climate change, appearing most often in promotional material from some NGOs and in feature-length documentaries on climate change, like Age of Stupid and The 11th Hour. Renewables, we are often told, are the answer to climate change.
The framing relies on alarmism and hyperbole; perhaps not surprising, given that from the Book of Revelation to The Day After Tomorrow, apocalypse is a tried and tested dramatic plot-device.
But such hyperbole can be alienating. The catastrophe framing of renewables doesn’t really address, for example, questions about how to make renewables work on a large scale, and it has little to say to the concerns of the local communities who will host them. Moreover, there’s a disjoint between the optimistic narrative of the green economy, and the doom-laden predictions of catastrophe.
This can alienate people and open up environmental concerns and renewable technology to satire. Take, for example, the South Park episode ‘Two Days Before the Day After Tomorrow’, in which ‘climate change’ is a sentient being, intent on destroying life as the South Park community knows it.
Image - Screen Shot 2013-05-09 At 10.54.24 (note)
What is important here is that the hyperbole on which this satire is based originates from the environmentalist message, not from the writer’s pen. This hyperbole may be born of urgency, but its absurdity is exposed by the satire, and this urgency is precisely what is deflated.
Inconvenient truths?
The rhetorical heritage of renewables leaves their advocates some problems. The catastrophe frame suggests that it’s too late or that the scale of the problem is so big it defies easy solutions. It is fundamentally disempowering and out of touch with what matters to people, and can be used by detractors to accuse the renewables lobby – and environmentalists in general – of scaremongering. By presenting the very real challenge climate change poses as a narrative borrowed from fiction, it can easily undermine the positive green economy frame.
The good life and green economy frames, on the other hand, are both attractive visions of the future that despite their differences focus on the social and economic benefits of renewable technology relative to the concerns of their own historical moment. But the two framings can sit uneasily with each other. One suggests small and localised, the other large and globalised. Both frames originate from the environmentalist message of the 1970s, but their divergence could (rightly or wrongly) indicate fragmentation of purpose. The green economy frame is also deployed in the UK by opponents of renewable power, to argue that renewables – especially wind farms – are industrialising the countryside, destroying the rural economy and disregarding the wishes of communities.
Such attacks can resonate because, as with the catastrophe frame, the frames are one-dimensional: over-simplifications that avoid their own inconvenient truths.
It may be that one answer to some of these issues lies in the shared rhetorical origins of the frames. Perhaps it is time to dust off the original CAT mission, and reintroduce some elements of “good life” rhetoric – looking again at community benefits to wind farms, perhaps, to marry large-scale economic viability with the small-scale “good life”, and concentrate on empowering individuals and communities.
These are obviously good things to do in and of themselves, but they might also strengthen the legitimacy of the frames that people use to talk about renewables. And Tom and Barbara would almost certainly approve.
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