A recent, long post on Linked-In relates the story of how an attempt to set up a business recycling aluminium cans in the city of Toulouse in France failed for reasons of cost, lack of customer appetite, and ultimately out of the sheer technical impossibility of achieving the desired 100% ‘Green Loop’ for which the enterprise – ‘La Boucle Verte’ – was named.

Having delivered a fairly detailed case history of the business itself, the author – ‘Founder and President’ Charles Dauzet – then gives way to an even lengthier disquisition on what he himself describes as ‘the illusion of green growth’; a diatribe in which all the usual tropes of denialism are themselves lovingly and painstakingly recycled, complete with a supposedly telling graph showing that world GDP per capita tends to move in rough correspondence with total oil consumption (a relation which, in fact, shows we are collectively becoming more sparing in our usage).

Since oil is held to be a finite resource (and passing over the issue of whether, if it truly is so in any meaningful sense, it is the only one at our disposal), the righteous M. Dauzet jumps straight to the conclusion that we must abandon the very idea of material progress itself since, one day, we must inevitably exhaust the means to fuel it.

Oh dear!

Here, let us be frank. No-one likes to see smart, eager people fail at their endeavours. For their attempt, they have my honest admiration: for their lack of success, my genuine sympathy.

But we cannot overlook the fact that the lessons they derive from their sorry experience seem to be little more than the usual platitudes of wishfulness which are always to be found in the weary litany of Eco-nihilism which so plagues us today.

Let’s just all make do with less, they say, from the rarefied comfort of their Western middle-class milieu and at the fringes of their other business running an ‘extreme sports festival’ (!). Let’s ‘go local’ and so shut down the enrichment of the international division of labour, they urge. Let’s abandon economies of scale and not use new things when we can spend for ever trying to fix or re-purpose the old, as if we were all victims of a global shipwreck or each a marooned Matt Damon tending his potato crop on Mars.

Let’s do all this for that gaiamorphistic deity we call ‘The Planet’ and because we can’t comprehend that, properly empowered, all our human minds, working in anonymous co-operation as part of that vast, parallel network we call the ‘market’, can add innovation and invention and entrepreneurship on a scale which readily outstrips the dreaded exponential curve so beloved of Green pessimists.

Let us also ignore the irrefutable evidence that as we all get richer and live longer, healthier lives, we have fewer children, so population increase slows and even reverses. Or that, once we meet our most basic needs, genuine environmental concern – real care for and protection of the beauties around us, rather than the erection of tax-eating windmills, the mandating of land-hungry biofuels, or the gesture politics of plastic straw bans – moves much higher up the ranking of our priorities and simultaneously comes more readily within our combined capabilities.

Let us forget the fact that subsistence agriculture (artisanship, in general, in fact) inevitably tends to the  piecemeal, the inefficient, and the precarious, costing more in land to maintain each poor peasant and to do so more laboriously, less reliably, and less well, into the bargain.

Finally, let us overlook the sad fact that the most polluting peoples tend to be the poorest or the least well-governed (two categories which usually and causally overlap) so our best course is to help satisfy these unfortunates’ innate urge for material improvement along with its concomitant need for good laws and honest rulers. To the extent we are better served with these institutions than they, we should encourage emulation by broadening our dealings with them, not refuse to buy from them simply because they are far away from the hard-scrabbled small-holdings of our unrealistic, Arcadian fantasies.

It is not for me to offer specific advice to either the author of this piece or his associates but since they give all the appearance of being well-motivated, determined, and hard-working, it might be that if they were to refocus those laudable attributes a little less closely on the demands of their ideology and instead gave more rein to the satisfaction of customer needs – something to which they allude, but which they rather seem to deplore for not being in tune with their ideals – they could surely find real solutions to real problems and so make the world in which we live a richer – and thus a cleaner – place for both themselves and their clients – and, by extension, for all the rest of us, too.