Today you can read the Carbon Cutters review of Jonathan Porritts book “Capitalism as if the World Mattered”. We didn’t really say too many good things. We felt bad about this because he is a great guy and we support him fully. It just wasn’t a great book and we were puzzled by the rave reviews so many leading (“serious”) newspapers gave it. It gave us the impression that the book supplied a great Vision for our shared future. However, it didn’t. In fact Porritt was almost embarrassed to mention the “vision thing”. Indeed the one he presented (from Forum for the Future) was a wish list to Santa in that included things like “no crime” and “safe streets” for our children. All great ideas but lacking any focus or inspiration.

Any one of us can sit down and dream up our idea of heaven on Earth. Sorry guys. This is not a vision. It is a delusion. We need to FOCUS. We need an Agenda. A vision that doesn’t inspire is not any vision worth sharing.

So, what was Porritt trying to sell in this book? Well, we are not too sure but he was trying to convince us that the only way to build sustainable development was to use the engine of capitalism. Um… That was it really. Big book, small idea. The trouble is that most people don’t need convincing of this! The fact that a “green” said “let’s use Capitalism” was the only reason the serious papers loved it! At last! They have achieved the capitalist conquest of the last Marxists on the planet! Those pinko-commy-subversives – the Environmentalists! Victory!

This is just dumb. Capitalism in its modern fossil-fuel-fuelled state is bound to burn out and be replaced by some other market-driven paradigm. This is self-evident. You could live in some ideal anarchist government-less society and free markets will still make everything work. People will still have property, money and invest in Business. Some people will have more than others. Centralised State Planning and a Command Economy is not on the cards. Never has been. Maybe this is the biggest victory of all? We convinced ourselves that we could never take environmentalism seriously because it was just a load of communism?

I got the idea from Porritt that we could slip "sustainability" in through the back door of capitalism. Our Business leaders just need to get with the plan if they wish to build sustainable business. Some will. Most won’t under current conditions. All this focus on Business is missing the point. Business isn’t the problem. It is the lack of free and informed markets that is. If we had internalised the replacement cost of Oil thirty years ago, when we realised it was going to run out and that the atmospheric sink for CO2 was filling up, then Business would have made different decisions. The market failed, not because markets suck but because we didn’t accept the information available. Powerful people with lots of money are not interested in the well being of future generations. They obscured the market mechanism and buried the data. They gave us bad leadership. Too much market power is held by too few people. We went to sleep because the dreams were easier than the reality. This is human nature.

It takes leadership and vision to overcome human nature. I wanted so much to see that in this book. I felt let down. It seemed to be telling me something that I already knew. I hate to sound like a scratched record but until this problems hurts the “people who matter” then there will be no top-down solution. It will remain a people-first solution.