The Cost of Going Green by Carey Lenehan

Who bears the cost of the world ‘going Green’?
When saving the future might inconvene
Our freedom to travel, to consume to extreme,
to create and discard plastic waste by the yard?
Or slavishly poison our life-giving seas?

Who pays to be Green? You, ‘them’ or Me?,
If the cost is in jobs and our prosperity?
When politics sells its integrity
To corporate, capitalist, inherent greed?
So we increase our wealth at the price of our health?
and trade the clean air that we need.

Who pays for the cost of a million lives lost,
or cities of starving, who shoulders that cost?
Does OPEC accept that it owes us a debt
For the millions and millions and millions and millions, and millions and millions….
Of dollars its made for itself. At what cost?

Why seek to reduce all this energy use
When for fifty years now, we’ve all had it so good
When we might have to pay a bit more for our food
Go by foot or by bike when we’re not in the mood?
With lives counted cheaper than Shares on the Ether,
Is it too much to ask if we would?

Who gives up on gain to save dry Spanish plains
from a future of droughts or earth-stripping rains?
Who’ll rescue the Arctic, all melted away
Or the snows of Mont Blanc, now renamed ‘Mont Grey’?
Just be rich and well fed, when the planet is dead
All of our debts will remain

As long as we count our wealth in amounts,
Sell our souls for flash cars and fat credit accounts
Keep our heating turned up and don’t voice our doubts
Ignoring the warnings and cyclonic stormings
We can go on believing this wealth we are stealing
Will save us from Globally warming.

So here’s to those a-holes with prosperous goals
Pump out your tarpits and dig up your coal
Make yourselves fortunes and trade-in your souls
For flat-screens TV’s, for cars with AC,
For a life built on excess, on envy and greed
Just live, do not think, bring the world to the brink
And the balance of life to its knees.