How the Rich Ruin the Environment

[marmar]

How the Rich Ruin the Environment
The solution? Curb overconsumption and overwork.

BY Alyssa Battistoni

Excerpted with permission from Jacobin magazine.

Environmentalists have long lectured Americans about overuse of natural resources. By now, the talking points on overconsumption are familiar: 5 percent of the world’s population uses 25 percent of its resources, and emits about the same percentage of its greenhouse gases; if the whole world lived like Americans, we’d need four planets, or maybe five. We eat too much meat, drive too many miles, live in houses that are too big and too far apart, shop too much for stuff we don’t need. When it comes to climate change, it’s even worse than the numbers suggest: Western nations outsource a huge percentage of emissions to the places that increasingly produce our goods.

Such international disparities have, of course, long presented a challenge to those concerned with both domestic and global justice: How to acknowledge that America’s poor are wealthier than most of the world without simply concluding that they’re part of the problem? But while discussions of consumption tends to focus on a universal “we,” as epitomized by the famous Pogo Earth Day cartoon—“we have met the enemy, and he is us”—it’s important to look more closely within the rich world rather than simply heaping scorn on national averages.

Depictions of American consumerism tend to focus on the likes of Walmart and McDonald’s, suggesting that blame lies with the ravenous, grasping masses. Meanwhile it’s trendy for the wealthy to appear virtuous as they drive Priuses, live in homes that tout “green design,” and eat organic kale. But whether you “care about the environment,” believe in climate change, or agonize over your coffee’s origins doesn’t matter as much as your tax bracket and the consumption habits that go with it.

Consumption doesn’t correspond perfectly to income—in large part because of public programs like SNAP that supplement low-income households—but the two are closely linked. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the carbon footprint of the top quintile is over three times that of the bottom. Even in relatively egalitarian Canada, the top income decile has a mobility footprint nine times that of the lowest, a consumer goods footprint four times greater, and an overall ecological footprint two-and-a-half times larger. Air travel is frequently pegged as one of the most rapidly growing sources of carbon emissions, but it’s not simply because budget airlines have “democratized the skies”–rather, flying has truly exploded among the hyper-mobile affluent. Thus in Western Europe, the transportation footprint of the top income earners is 250 percent of that of the poor. And global carbon emissions are particularly uneven: the top five hundred million people by income, comprising about 8 percent of global population, are responsible for 50 percent of all emissions. It’s a truly global elite, with high emitters present in all countries of the world. .........................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://inthesetimes.com/article/16096/how_the_rich_ruin_the_environment/

[RobertEarl]

1. Yep

Air travel... fancy homes... big cars... Ain't that America?

I just have to laugh at the 'green' mass consumers.

Laugh because even I have it better than 90% of the world while in the bottom 20% of America. And while I don't fly, or have fancy this and that, I still need two planets to keep me comfortable. Life is good, but how long can it last? And what is the payback?

For 10,000 years humans lived on this planet and left it pretty much the same as when they were born. The last 100 years the planet has been changed. It just isn't the same. But life has never been better for a poor boy like me. Heck, I live better than most of the 1% did 150 years ago.