Washing green in Europe

I for one am sick of the environment.

Sure, global warming is real, but if I have to listen to yet another lecture from another leader about how I need to reuse, reduce, and recycle before he jumps on his private plane and jets off to his next paid consultancy after signing a bill into law requiring me to buy a new car just to get to work (wonder which lobby was behind that brainstorm? Not the greens I’m guessing, unless the new green is Toyota….), I will buy all my organic coffee on Amazon and drink it through plastic straws out of styrofoam cups for the rest of my unnaturally prolonged life (thank you, modern medicine for allowing us to milk the wealthy aged for all their net worth until they die of ‘natural causes’ after having used up far more than their share of natural resources.)

This tidal wave of anthropocentric aggression against ‘Mother’ nature is not going to be halted by my minuscule efforts, outside of maybe my regular votes for whichever group is “greenest.” But even then, lobby efforts with views far more cynical than mine tend to block whatever green review is currently in progress. The thing is, most European businesses don’t seem to really care how they impact the environment, at least not more than they care about how much green they can make (and yes, most of them still look to the global reserve currency, the almighty American dollar.) European companies simply aren’t built to be ‘sustainable’ in a system that is concerned with ‘growth’ (and not the green kind of growth — well, not the environmentally-friendly green kind…