An environmental organisation campaigning against high energy prices? Something’s amiss, argues Mallen Baker

We know the script, don’t we? The campaigners are selflessly standing up for the just causes, and the companies are pursuing their own interests at the expense of the public good. That’s why, in most countries, trust in NGOs is healthy and trust in companies is sick.

Two things made me reflect on this recently.

Firstly, Greenpeace picketed Centrica’s offices protesting against “rip-off” energy prices.

I could understand a consumer organisation doing this, or an anti-poverty group, or a left wing anti-business group. You name it. But for the champion of the environment, it seemed counter-intuitive and, well, nakedly opportunistic.

The single thing that has historically driven an increase in energy efficiency is high prices. For an environmental group to protest in favour of low energy prices (at least before the majority of energy is produced renewably) is weird.

Of course, high energy prices carry all sorts of disadvantages. People in fuel poverty must be protected. The population generally will feel grumpy since they’ve been trained to believe that low prices are the norm – and lifestyles based on high consumption are their right.

So we have an interest in finding ways for society to adapt to the reality that energy in the future won’t be cheap while preserving the best of what we have and protecting the vulnerable. Nobody said it would be easy.

But for Greenpeace, I guess it is a lot simpler to try to win the favour of energy consumers by aligning with their complaints, rather than working on the more difficult challenge of changing ingrained attitudes. I can’t say I exactly blame them, but I wouldn’t say it was a position that led me to trust them more.

(By way of disclosure, I interviewed Centrica’s chief executive, Sam Laidlaw, at the company’s commission, for Centrica’s online corporate responsibility report. I’m pretty happy that hasn’t compromised my ability to think rationally on the subject.)

Fancy some slime?

Secondly, there has been the rather successful campaign in the US against “pink slime”. If you hadn’t picked up on it, pink slime is otherwise known as lean finely textured beef. It is derived from slaughterhouse trimmings, and finds its way into burgers and other meat products.

No health concerns have been raised about this substance. It has been found to be safe, nutritious and relatively inexpensive. If you believe in making the most of the resources you have, there is a good case for it, since it is about getting every ounce of nutrition from livestock. Without it, you need more cattle to produce the same quantity of beef.

But because the campaign against it came up with the highly successful and evocative term “pink slime” the company that makes it is laying off about 650 workers as orders from retailers plunged in the wake of the outrage.

It is ironic, because there is a strong case for Americans to care more about what goes into their food, and how they eat. They are leading the worldwide obesity epidemic, and this is based on patterns of consumption that continue unchallenged by this particular controversy.

However, the labelling of something as slime that is put into your food by some profit-hungry company – that is the easy end of campaigning.

I don’t blame the campaigners. I remember a couple of decades ago when I was briefly involved with a campaign against food irradiation in the UK. One of the lines we most celebrated was the fact that certain spices that were laid out to dry on the ground in developing countries ended up being mixed with rats’ droppings – which were then made sterile by food irradiation.

We pointed out that if the labels of those spice jars carried full information, the legend “may contain rats droppings made sterile by food irradiation” would probably not have favoured a sales boom for those products.

Of course, it wasn’t our contention that the products were unsafe or that their flavour was in any way tainted. It was the simple fact that people would find the thought of it so completely abhorrent and disgusting, it would be enough to win the day.

The wrong argument but the right result. When getting the right result with the right argument seems too difficult, it’s the easy solution to fall back on.

The companies know that they can win the science and lose the argument. You only have to remember Shell and the Brent Spar (when Greenpeace got it wrong). They have to be smart about how they make decisions and enter the public debate.

The campaigners need to ask what the real changes are that they want to see and ask whether the easy targets are always taking them on the path they actually want to tread.

Mallen Baker is founder of Business Respect and a contributing editor to Ethical Corporation.