Call me crazy, but when someone asks me if I’d prefer to carrot or the stick, I tend to go with the carrot – which is why I don’t understand the media’s obsession with making people into eco-villains. This week The Guardian, as part of their ‘we’ve all gone on holiday so please tell us what you thought about during the last decade’ season, have brought back their request for us to vote for our number one ‘eco-villain’.

Don’t get me wrong, I think most of the people on that list are despicable, but I think time could be better spent than by patting ourselves on the back for being better than these people. I love groups like ‘climate rush‘, which use peaceful protesting to not only draw attention to the cause but also to demonstrate how mature (and fun!) we greens are, but when they dumped manure outside Jeremy Clarkson’s house I can’t help but wonder what they’re hoping to achieve. Indeed, it is “very selfish of him not to take responsibility for climate emissions”, and maybe he is a loud-mouthed tit, but what is the message I should take from this? That I shouldn’t drive to the Arctic for fear of having manure dumped on my drive by seven slightly-eccentric climate change protesters dressed as suffragettes? Objective achieved, I’m not going to do that.

Instead, wouldn’t it be better to move away from this idea of ‘carbon sin’ where we must atone for our past mistakes, wander round screaming to the hills that we got on a plane last year and there’s nothing we can do to bring our footprint down, and instead encourage people to do something positive now? As much as I have issues with ‘The Age of Stupid’, it focused on a man who worked for an oil company and who was re-evaluating his lifestyle in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Franny Armstrong didn’t invite the other protagonists to come over and beat him to death with a shovel for his past ‘mistakes’, instead he was congratulated for doing the right thing now, and shown to be a much happier person for it.

It’s one hell of a lot easier to blame someone else for not being a ‘good’ a person you are than to actually change something about the way you live so that you’re happier with it. Heck, it’s probably even better for your mental health. So let he without carbon sin cast the first stone.