• WAS Kermit the frog too busy to better represent Britain at the United Nations?

It is, in fact, difficult to be green, subjected as we are to the steady drumbeat of advertising telling us to buy things we don’t need with money we don’t have and propaganda encouraging us to fly back to the same “normality” as brought us both climate change and the pandemic.

Back in the 1880s William Morris noted that, “one man will weave as much cloth in a week as will clothe a whole village for years; and the real question of civilisation has always been what are we to do with this extra produce of labour?”

Just before the Wall Street crash American advertising guru Edward Bernays’s simple answer was that, the task of advertisements was no longer to merely show the public what choice was available but to encourage the purchase of goods that were not needed, simply to facilitate production.

But as Morris had warned, “man cannot use more than he needs – he can only waste it”. And it is the provision of this waste that is overwhelmingly responsible for the greenhouse gases that now threaten our planet.

Some of our politicians’ surfeit of optimism and denial is likely to prevail until such time as a catastrophic climatic event captures their attention. Unfortunately by then it will be too late to rescue our future.

CHRIS GRAHAM
Tollington Park, N4