Think Before You Drink the Green Kool-Aid

Sometimes the green economy shows a sickly tint. Consider: I patronize a Manhattan coffee bar called Think Coffee, and it patronizes me right back. Walk through the flagship branch with me to see how we plant landmines under ourselves when we render “green” as a premium brand rather than a way to transform the whole economy.

The gimmick, legible on chalkboards around the languid baristas and laptop jockeys, posits that you are a smarter customer for taking your coffee from shade-grown and fair-trade farms and mixing it with local, hormone-free milk. As indeed you are, in a narrow sense. You’re smarter than you used to be. But are you smarter than the underpaid bus driver who buys coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts or the working mom who buys milk in bulk at CostCo? Or are you just more leisurely? You can’t be that smart if you don’t know the value of what you’re buying.

And what you’re buying here has to stretch to qualify as green. Incandescent bulbs line the ceiling, each one attached to a rotating fan, burning much more fuel than the space needs. The baristas brew the coffee in big urns that must use more electricity than a kettle and a series of Bodums would. So my carbon footprint per gulp of  shade-grown coffee may be higher than that of the folks outside, drinking factory-grown coffee from a small truck.

The calculations are easy to manipulate, of course. And I’ll keep visiting Think Coffee because I’m lucky enough to get to choose ethically grown coffee at the cost premium it brings- and because it’s on my way to work.(The drip coffee’s been running watery lately, though, which makes me suspect the managers are using more water than they need too.)

The point is that we build a green economy by challenging everyone to make everything work more efficiently. Trotting out a set of status symbols you can buy at retail limits ingenuity.

Are you absolved for the wasted electricity because you’re drinking shade-grown coffee? Or are you drinking shade-grown coffee because it tastes better?

Put another way:  if we’re building an economy that capitalizes on human ingenuity without wasting natural resources, shouldn’t  we think a little more expansively about everything we do?

More power to Think Coffee for encouraging me to think about these riddles. But more power to the consumers, and entrepreneurs, who resist the fake claim that “thinking green” stops at the cash register.

Doing things sustainably means rigging our economy to grow peaceably in the global South and efficiently in the rich countries. It means a lot of competition over intellectual property, international policy and attention. It requires a lot of coffee and a goodly amount of light.

But its winners will be those who never stop thinking.