You must have seen the kind of newspaper columns telling you the various ways in which you can be greener and save the planet. Well, if you're cutting down on paper consumption, you'll have read all that spiel online at any rate.

Some of this advice is of use: recycling your plastic bags; driving a more fuel-economic car - and some of it is worse than useless. In particular I am thinking of the big push towards eco light bulbs. Those things crack faster than the ice at a Billy Connolly show - particularly the swirly sort. I have had three of the buggers smash in my house in the past year. Environmentally friendly? That's so inaccurate anyone saying so should be prosecuted under the sales descriptions act. They are not environmentally friendly, they are environmentally lethal. They contain mercury, did you know?

And you have a mini biohazard to deal with when the inevitable breakage happens. There are some rules on how to embark on the clean up. I suggest you google about this beforehand. You can't just throw them in the trash either, they have to be specially recycled. I can tell you that very few people indeed will go to the trouble of finding where the hell you're supposed to take these pesky things. We haven't even been told of such a location. They'll be dumped along with all the other household waste and they'll contaminate the land and the water table. Whoever thought of this initiative can't have been too bright!

And what is more, while insisting we have to buy these scourges, the government blithely expands airports, motorways and you name it - immediately canceling out the optimistic projections of how far carbon emissions will be reduced by changing the light bulb. And they're going to ban the old style, standard bulbs. Perhaps people will end up going back to candles in desperation.

Companies know that "green" sells. People will pay more for "green" products and so it is a temptation ill resisted by manufacturers to tinker with their goods just enough to qualify them to seem environmentally responsible. Then people will continue on their consumer binging, buying stuff and dumping stuff while entirely guilt free. Almost no one wants to change their habits unless they can see a personal advantage from doing so

There is even an ethos growing amongst the common man that making or doing things yourself is to be looked down upon - it suggests you are a failure in life. This goes with the idea that "if you don't pay for it then it's worthless." Hence there is a general disregard for nature, which is taken for granted as a worthless "freebie." Certainly a shrewd businessman will see his opportunity to sell bottled water and indeed bottled air to a population who show so little interest in their surroundings and who are not at all outraged by the spreading pollution of both these resources, which should always be clean, pure and free.

Perhaps it is a good thing then, that decadence is becoming ever harder for people to afford. They may be prepared to make all kind of superficial excuses for their wish to buy while they can financially afford to, but the days of plenty are numbered. Food prices and the cost of living generally have led to everyone tightening their belts. It would have happened sooner had they not run up extortionate sums on credit, which they now find they can't pay back. Running out of cash is one way to make people genuinely greener. How's this for a slogan: "Make Poverty the Future"?