The Cost Of Going Green Poem 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,
clock up the miles in our gas-guzzling cars
or slavishly poison the 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 billions and billions and billions and billions....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,
if 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 that 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,
sure 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