Environment

Try a search on Google or Yahoo for the terms "oil spill" or "oil disaster" and you will see a sponsored link at the top of the page referring you to BP's website. The disgraced oil giant paid an undisclosed amount for the privilege. Following the link shows you photographs of people who appear very happy to be victims of the spill, and since the pictures of the clean-up are entirely oil free perhaps that is no surprise.

Some weren't impressed. "I think one of the risks associated with his rhetoric on the spill is that it hardens the divide between the Democratic Party and the business community," said David Rothkopf, a former commerce department official under Bill Clinton. "And that's something that while it seems to be in the spirit of the moment now, could have serious ramifications come election time."

But business and government appear to be working together as well as ever, aside from the rhetoric.

Green guru Jonathon Porritt recently lambasted the politically correct for ignoring the demographic elephant in the living room - "exponential population growth". Is he right?

When Paul Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb in 1968, our rising numbers were seen as the primary threat to the planet's future. Only strict birth control could prevent doomsday. Some demographers said we should require a licence to have children, as you would for a dog.

This drive to make money means that anything that increases costs, such as reducing pollution, will be resisted by those in charge. Investment in energy reduction or improved processes may have a long term logic, but in the short term they risk reducing a company's ability to compete for profit.

The negotiations in the run-up to the 7-18 December Copenhagen Summit confirmed that northern states and their corporations won't get their act together. Nor will southern elites in high-emission countries, especially South Africa.

Imagine a United Nations conference on the environment. It brings together representatives of every major economy, with NGOs and scientists. In the run up to the conference the participants have been locked in negotiations for over three months. There has been deadlock on almost every key point of the agreement. The president of the world's most powerful economy prevaricates about even attending. Afterwards proclamations from government leaders everywhere are issued claiming that the event marks a new beginning for the planet.

First, they have changed the debate about wind power. It's not true that onshore wind development is stalled in this country. There has been a 500 percent increase in onshore wind power in Britain in the last five years.

But it is true that among environmentalists many people took the NIMBY opposition to wind farms seriously. Now the balance has shifted decisively.

I gave myself a mission to get an environmentally friendly job, something that didn't stress me out and I could take something positive away from. I got to Vestas and realised that everyone was bullied by management. Health and safety was not up to scratch. They claimed at the start that there was no expense spared, but air extraction wasn't good enough and people were getting resin on their skin. When I first started we didn't have a finishing time - it was work until the job's done. They'd just have you working more. They'd move the goal posts, make you clean the floors and so on.

Of these, 450 were to go at its plant on the Isle of Wight.

Such a news item would perhaps not excite much comment in these difficult economic times - except that Vestas is the world's largest manufacturer of wind turbines. Given the urgent need to deal with climate change the announcement caused disbelief and anger throughout the environmental movement.

A recent, bad TV programme made one interesting point - that devastating transformations in the climate, as a result of the apparently slow build up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, will hit people at some point with the same suddenness as the economic crisis that is now sweeping the world.