Hypothetical situation:
You’re a single mom or dad and you work part time to pay the extortionate rent and to feed and clothe your child. You get some benefits because our government is really nice and benevolent and it always puts people before profits. You’re grateful for the money, but it’s not enough to improve your child’s standard of living. You’d like to buy her an encyclopedia, atlases and other books so she can learn more than the standard, exam result-obsessed education that she recieves at school. You’d like to be able to afford music lessons but the school only teaches people whose parents can pay. You’ve given up TV to save the money that you would have had to spend on a license, and because it’s a load of bollocks anyway, nothing but advertising and bullshit celebrity ‘reality’ TV shows, and so-called ‘fly on the wall’ documentaries whose sole purpose is to satisfy other people’s need to stick their noses in other people’s lives instead of finding some meaning and purpose in their own lives.
But despite this the wankers at the TV licensing agency are still trying to make you pay, because you still own a TV solely for watching videos. Wankers. Anyway…. you minimise your energy usage, and you use only what you really need; you only have the central heating on when necessary, you don’t walk around in a T-shirt in winter, you make sure your fridge and freezer are always full, and so on.
But it’s not enough to save you a significant amount of cash for what you want for your child, because in addition to food, clothing, water, council tax and everything else that steadily increases in price as your wages stay comparatively static, fossil fuel is getting increasingly expensive.
Green technology would reduce your dependence on fossil fuels, and although less convenient or reliable, it would save you even more money in the long run if you knew how to run it and maintain it. You would like to learn how, but no-one’s offering to give people like you hands-on experience, only the people who can afford to stop working for a week and pay a few hundred quid for an educational workshop in an alternative technology centre in a Welsh town that you’ve never heard of.
Besides, how are you going to get a photovoltaic solarpanel or a wind turbine anyway? You don’t have enough savings and government grants aren’t enough to cover it, and you’ve read about the nightmares that some people have had with mechanical failures and design faults, and besides, your area isn’t very windy or sunny, and the planning department would no doubt decline any application for a turbine in your back garden even if you could afford to pay for the planning application in the first place, probably by some religious NIMBY wanker who values aesthetics over utility. Your pokey little house (you’re lucky it’s not a pokey little flat) has a tiled garden with no sun, and the local plant nursery has been forced out of business by the new supermarket and the huge out-of-town superstore (which you’d need a car to visit, because it’s ten miles away and they don’t do deliveries like the local shop used to) that sold seeds, compost and gardening equipment at artificially low prices to intentionally crush competition from smaller business, so you couldn’t successfully grow your own organic vegetables even if you wanted to, and all your neighbours’ cats would tear your free range chicken to pieces, if you were to try and keep one.
You saved up and bought a bicycle because you can’t afford a car on your paltry wages, and despite the occasional cost of servicing the bike at the local bike shop, you save money in the long run. The bike would have paid for itself in saved bus and taxi fares by now, except most of the roads in your city are big dual carriageways and fast A-roads, there are far too many cars, LGV’s and HGV’s on the road, and the speed limits are too high, and 0.1% of the driving population are such wankers that you regularly experience frightening behaviour, from sexist comments to verbal abuse to dangerously close overtaking and being cut up by twats who overtake you and then turn across your path, so now you’re too scared to ride the bike anymore in case your kid ends up with a broken mum, or even worse a dead mum.
You move to a smaller place, one of the few council houses left after the majority of them were sold off to wankers who now own two or more houses, thus helping to create a housing shortage, and the new place is cheaper, but your old landlord is pissed off that you switched your electricity supplier to Ecotricity, and the letting agency wants to charge you a £40 admin fee for the simple 5 minute phone call that it takes them to change it back to one of the less environmentally sound energy suppliers.
You try to use eco friendly household products and you even make your own cleaning product out of bicarbonate of soda, which is really cheap, and you’ve read about the suppression by major global corporations of evidence of the long term health damage that the chemicals that are in your body lotion and toothpaste and soap and deodorant are suspected of causing.
But your local wholefood shop shut down last year so you can no longer get pitrok deodorant or kingfisher toothpaste or pure olive oil soap which contains no added colourants or synthetic perfumes (some of which are suspected of causing hormone disruption). You can also no longer get refills of your ecover washing up liquid, which means instead of re-using the old bottle and getting a 20% discount, you now have to pay full price and waste the old plastic bottle each time you buy a new one.
Besides, in general, eco-friendly products cost up to twice as much as ‘normal’ household products, and remember you’re trying to save money. You could make your own soap but you’ve seen the scene in Fight Club and you’re very aware of how dangerous NaOH is, and the thought of risking accidentally burning your kid’s skin off makes you shudder.
*aaaaand, deep breath…*
To you, ‘green living’ is a joke, it’s a luxury, a lifestyle choice for well-paid people who can afford to shell out on conscience-saving technology and products, while less fortunate people like yourself rely solely on fossil fuels, pesticide-laced vegetables and growth hormone-injected meat from the supermarket (although you gave up the meat to save money), and cosmetic products whose chemical ingredients are probably wreaking havoc with your hormones, and worsly, have long names such as 1-methyl-2-dibenzyl-phenoxyhexafluorocancerforsure-o-ethanoate, which cannot be correctly pronounced without at least an A-level in chemistry (which you actually have, but your bastard ex-boyfriend got you pregnant and then disappeared, so you couldn’t go to university).
Besides, why should you bother trying to save the environment if the extra cash you’re going to have to spend could otherwise be used to improve your kid’s life? Why should you bother, when the government allows corporations to feed us toxic cocktails of chemical badness, and pour their waste into rivers and oceans, killing millions of fish, why, why should you care when it’s them, they’re the ones causing all the damage, they’re the ones using chemical weapons that kill entire forests as well as innocent people, and they’re allowing corporations to control nature by allowing their genetically modified organisms to pollinate (i.e. contaminate) wild plants so that they can eradicate the possibility of anyone getting food for free and ensure their future profits, and their rules and regulations and bullshit beaurocracy prevents you from living a more self-sufficient, healthy, community-based, environmentally sustainable life, and no-one else cares either, because they’re indoctrinated, they’re transfixed, they’re too busy watching telly and getting pissed and going down the footy and being obsessed with clothes and hairstyle and brands and their new kitchen and their cheap artificially flavoured cider that they saw in the adverts that pervade our surroundings every single fucking day, and all the rest of the superficial consumerist bollocks that they’ve allowed themselves to become religious slaves to. Hallelujiah, praise to the pound, worship the brands and the celebrities, trust the government, for they are GOD. Amen.
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