New green bullshit

Life is beautiful and sometimes funny. So, I enter the hotel room, the bed is well draped, the stately chair in the corner, the bright wallpaper, the inviting backdrop. My gaze falls on the lovingly designed card attached to the bedspread. The owners of this venerable hotel give me a hearty welcome, moved, I think, and I begin to read.

“Dear guest,” it says. And further in bold: “Don’t clean your room and thereby reduce your CO₂-Track. We’ll be happy to give you something in return.”

Hmm, I understood correctly – I will stay in a good hotel for a few days to feel at home? The point of all good hotels in this world is service, but I have to do without it in favor of planet Earth. Really now?

“Please let us know if you would like to opt out of housekeeping and what kind of thanks you would like to receive from us.” Again, haste, shyness, we are talking about gratitude, the most condescending of all words. But then he says nasty: I either get a one-time €3 rebate on my account, or I donate €3 to charity – or I don’t get any rebate at all. Because: “I love doing this for the environment and our future.”

Ha! I give up hotel amenities in a hotel. And I’m not doing this for base reasons like saving money. No, I do it solely for the sake of it – the only true reward is the rejection of all reward. Oh, so generously, the hotel offers me a license for moral self-aggrandizement, for self-ennobling, even for eco-social sanctification.

I am learning: only those who do nothing, firstly, do nothing wrong, and secondly, they do the right thing, because they do not harm anyone or anything. Live like you don’t cast a shadow, like you don’t live. If that was my motto, I wouldn’t be staying at the hotel. I wouldn’t go either. Maybe I wouldn’t even live. But what does the environment care about whether people are alive or not? They don’t care, but others clearly care how I live.

I can only smile. A small greeting card with warm intent turns out to be pure ideology. I crumple them up and put them away in the wastebasket, which is also nicely draped. I take a deep breath, order a bottle of premium red wine to my room, and enjoy life. On the spaceship Earth.

René Scheuil is a philosopher and director of the Swiss Institute for Economic Policy (IWP) in Lucerne. He writes to Blick every second Monday.

Source: Blick