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!