YES: Nico Macdonald, writer and design strategist, co-founder of the think tank, Design Agenda (www.design-agenda.org.uk).

NO: Robert Webb, director of XCO2 Conisbee, engineer and designer specialising in sustainable energy in architecture.

NM: Sustainability is a rather abstract concept, and a pretty conservative and unambitious one, too. We should be ambitious for a better future, but sustainability’s just about gradual, cautious change – a little bit more of this, a bit less of that. It’s not about innovation, it’s about doing less of something.

Take transport. We’ve had virtually nothing in the last century to compare with the huge strides made in the Victorian age – when people weren’t afraid of the future as we seem to be now. We desperately need some massive innovations just to maintain our quality of life – and yet all sustainability fans have to offer is that we should live and work more locally, be more parochial and so on.

RW: That’s nonsense. Sustainability’s not about gradual change at all: it requires and demands radical innovation that almost certainly wouldn’t happen unless we were facing a major threat to our life support system. Look at the fuel cell car – that’s going to be the next big thing, and that’s entirely driven by the demands of sustainable development.

MW: So sustainability’s on your side, Nico! The environmental crisis is driving the sort of innovation you’re looking for…

NM: In some cases, maybe – though I suspect a lot of environmentalists will resist the sort of massive structural changes that things like fuel cells will require, because environmentalists always resist that scale of change. But I’d frankly question whether there is an ‘environmental crisis’ at any meaningful level. The air in London is cleaner than at any time since the 15^th century, and most people’s living standards are rising all round the world. It’s very strange to be told you’re in the middle of an ecological crisis when all you can see is life getting better.

RW: You’re absolutely right that we’ve come a very long way – it’s been a fantastic trajectory. But sustainable development is all about ensuring that we can keep going. It’s certainly important to stay optimistic – though it can be difficult to do so in the face of the latest scientific studies on climate change. I don’t think you’d continue to feel so good about your life if the way you lived it was helping devastate the lives of hundreds of millions of people in low-lying countries all around the globe.

NM: Yes, but you bet that if everybody in the world said their environment was getting better, some sustainability guru would still come along and say: “No it isn’t, it’s getting worse, and if you don’t understand that it’s because you’re too stupid.” There’s a misanthropic tendency here… you can’t help but think that some sustainability gurus would love to see a climate crisis just to prove them right.

And that’s the really depressing side to all this. They’re always trying to tell people they’re doing the wrong thing, trying to make them feel guilty, rather than actually trying to tackle the problem.

Take travel. It’s stimulating and mind-broadening and it adds hugely to most people’s quality of life. But we’re told that those who enjoy cheap Ryan Air flights to the south of France are morally culpable – it’s like the catholic church chastising men who take another woman!

RW: Yes, pointing fingers at individuals is always counterproductive. It just encourages people to switch off. This shouldn’t be about telling people not to fly; it should be about redressing the massive subsidies which fossil fuels enjoy under the present economic system. When we’ve done that, it may be that fewer people will fly because it will be more expensive to do so. But that isn’t about guilt, it’s about market forces.

NM: OK, but how much can we really hope to innovate when we’re constantly worried about the end of the world? As a species, we’ve always been most creative when we’ve been at our most self-confident. Now society has lost its way: all this talk of sustainability is distracting us from being ambitious about the future. It’s a big, depressing abstraction: it’s like talking about God; you don’t know how big or bad it is - but you don’t want to get on the wrong end of it! If you question some central tenet of sustainability, like the idea that we should all travel less, then you’re branded as some kind of heretic. The focus should be on our overall quality of life, but instead we’re sacrificing this to the political rhetoric of sustainable development.

RW: Well we don’t want to be depressed and we don’t want to get lost in abstraction. Part of the problem is in the words. ‘Sustainable development’ may be a bit abstract but climate change certainly isn’t. Rising levels of CO2 are going to be the biggest constraint on our quality of life, so we need to respond to it straight away. And doing so effectively will need a massive rise in energy efficiency and in renewables. And that’s spurring radical innovation which certainly wouldn’t have happened otherwise – that’s the really exciting thing.

Just to give one example: we’ve recently designed a vertical axis wind turbine for use on buildings; it’s quiet, it’s efficient, it’s elegant, so it enhances the visual experience of the city – and it provides zero-carbon energy free at the point of use. And it certainly wouldn’t have been thought of if sustainable development wasn’t there as a spur.

NM: Yes, but that’s basically some feelgood design which will have little real consequence beyond a few examples. Surely it’s more important to make existing buildings better?

RW: I absolutely agree that’s one of the main challenges. We can build a new zero carbon building pretty easily. We know how to do it, how much it costs – and it doesn’t cost very much. By contrast, retro fitting is complicated, expensive and can only cut carbon emissions by on average 50%. So to be honest we should be knocking down old buildings and replacing them with new ones on a much more radical scale.

MW: Well that all sounds like sustainability’s spurring innovation again. Where’s it smothering it?

NM: Take Concorde. It’s been forcibly retired, and was criticised because it wasn’t considered to be fuel efficient enough. Frankly the idea that ambition on the scale of Concorde can be constrained by such concerns is pretty uninspiring stuff. It was an amazing technical achievement, and the fact that the Wilson government had the balls to pull that one off, and collaborate with the French to do so, is pretty remarkable! I can’t imagine today’s government having the imagination or the ambition to do anything like that, so it’s pretty sad to see the same tired old sustainability type arguments helping to kill it off.

RW: In 50 or 100 years time, we will have energy profligacy again, driven by renewables, and so we’ll be able to design new Concordes that use as much energy as we like.

NM: Well, take the congestion charge. That’s a direct attack on people’s standard of living. Now it is innovative in some ways – using IT to do number plate recognition on a million cars a day – but it’s doing so for completely negative reasons.

RW: But surely it’s improving people’s quality of life by cutting congestion?

NM: A real improvement in quality of life would see more people travelling, more quickly, more cheaply, to more places. The congestion charge might just win on one of those – but try driving down the Strand and it’s virtually a car park thanks to the daft road re-design around Trafalgar Square! All the congestion charge does is to make us feel bad for having cars.

RW: But alternative-fuelled cars are zero-rated – so it too could be seen as a market stimulus for innovation in this area…

NM: There’s a lot of snobbery around sustainability – treating people like naughty children, telling them what to do the whole time. It extends to the design world, too: “We have this great insight which we’ll deign to impart to you” in a very Fabian, very Sidney Webb manner….. But the truth is that a lot of things which make something more desirable use more resources, involve more complex processes, and so on. So there’s a real conflict there.

This obsession with sustainable development gets in the way of good design by encouraging designers to think about abstractions which have nothing to do with the purpose of the product – and so leads them to design things which are not as desirable or useful as they might otherwise be. It’s design as social engineering, and that’s not a pleasant prospect…

There’s also a growing culture of fear. No wonder people want to hide away in their SUVs when they’re constantly being told of all the terrible dangers there are out there in the world!

It’s really quite disabling to have this millenarian crisis upon us all the time – especially when there’s a sense that we’re to blame for it all. It encourages a defeatist mindset – one which says there’s nothing we can do about anything, when in fact we’re a remarkably resourceful species.

This mindset fails to draw on and elevate what it means to be human – it doesn’t inspire people to be proud of the fantastic things we’ve achieved, and to aim even higher.

RW: It’s easy to see sustainability as a drag, as all doom and gloom – but that’s only because the message isn’t getting across to people. It should instead be a driver for a more optimistic view of the future, because, yes – there are massive problems ahead, of which climate change is the greatest, but, yes – there are solutions to them. Creative, innovative solutions which will actually improve our quality of life, enrich our culture and create more beautiful things around us.

The exchange was chaired and summarised by Martin Wright.