I’ve only found this out today by pure chance reading the Metro (which rarely happens these days, yet I saw 2 copies today). So today is apparently Green Britain Day, an initiative in the spirit of the upcoming 2012 London Olympic Games to encourage the British population to become greener together. I’d put the related YouTube video, but all it is is the God Save the Queen behind a green-hued Union Jack so nothing exciting.
Leading to this day however, is a project called Team Green Britain that encourages people to “join teams” related to one specific way one can become greener.
Now, as I was saying, I’ve only found out about this scheme earlier this evening and so doing a little bit of poking around, I came across this rather bitter article from the Guardian. It is true that the Team Green Britain scheme has pretty much the EDF (Electricité de France, yes that’s right supporting Green Britain Day) logo plastered all over it, however, I don’t like to dismiss this kind of initiative in a hurry with the pretense that it’s only meant to bring up the green image of an otherwise unethical company. For the record, EDF is pretty much like British Gas, it used to be called EDF/GDF, now GDF seemed to have merged with a company called Suez and I’m not sure if EDF provides Gas but anyway, I diverge. The point, to keep with the Guardian’s arguments, is that one produces electricity from dirty coal, the other from nuclear power.
Sadly, such schemes need a lot of funding to make a nationwide impact (it pretty much made the Metro change its blue logo to a green one too) and so more ethical companies such as Good Energy or even Ecotricty, who seem to be the ones behind the Guardian’s big rant (just look at their homepage), can’t keep up and make themselves more prominent in the public eye. Unfortunately ranting doesn’t really help either so here’s my take on it.
I believe that government targets, legislations and so on are all nice and good but at the end of the day the people are the ones buying the electricity, the gas, the cars with their petrol tanks, the overpackaged goods and so on. If you can find a way to reach to the population in a fun and attractive way in order to bring more people to realise how important it is to change our attitude towards energy consumption and excessive waste then why not?
Sadly, I have my doubts about this scheme. For a start, it’s not entirely clear how it works and anything that isn’t clear cut for the Joe Bloggses out there isn’t going to have much impact. I tried to register without putting myself in any sort of team just to see what happens. You get an email welcoming you but then you don’t get a chance to join or leave a team at a later stage because there’s no “user” or “member” area that you normally find with these sorts of things. So how exactly this works in practice is really unclear. It seems like they could have used the chance to create a form of “green social network” for lack of a better term, but didn’t quite succeed. Instead it seems you receive updates on what’s going on in your local area… how it gets organised is a little bit of a mystery really.
Still it’s not like nothing’s being done, at the very least the website has tips for greener living, not that I don’t know them all already. Anyone knows if France is doing anything similar? After all they had to import electricity from Britain recently 
