Least Affected, Most Responsible: Why we must understand economic inequality and stop the glorification of wealth to stop the climate crisis
In the efforts to keep climate change from getting worse and eventually to a point of no return, climate activists and advocates are passionate about sharing and spreading ways each of us can help the cause. Cutting plastic, using public transport and going vegan are common ones. Many celebrities are also coming forward, incentivizing us to take action. These are all nice and are all important steps forward, but they are all derived from one underlying idea. Summarized, that idea is that each individual has the responsibility of becoming greener and more eco-conscious for the sake of the planet. That’s a loaded statement on its own — there’s a lot of complex, heavy terminology that are far reaching and can mean many things. But it implies that that everybody’s actions and everybody’s daily lives have a more-or-less equal amount of impact on the world and thus on climate change — and this is where lies the problem. Unfortunately, it’s a fallacy to say that everybody’s lifestyle has played an equal part on putting the planet on the path that it is on right now, and that everybody’s possible lifestyle improvements is equally as important to saving it. Thus, it’s also wrong to create one moral benchmark to evaluate whether a person is green or not, then apply it to all without considering vastly different lives that people lead.
Although initiatives like avoiding plastic bags and recycling are genuinely good, they tend to dominate the discussion when talking about how to save the planet. It makes sense at first — as small as a plastic bag may be, plastic is what we see most abundantly around us — being consumed, being thrown into our oceans and landfills as well as harming animals and their habitats. By consuming less plastic we are helping the planet. The problem is that we focus too much on this specific checklist we’ve created; judging and become indignant at those who don’t abide by it. As a NYT article reported, asking for a plastic straw has become something unthinkable — a server in one of the busiest parts of town reported that "Everyone knows [plastic straws are] a taboo thing now". By doing this, we focus too little on the bigger picture — which is that, unfortunately, our lives don’t all carry the same weight regarding their impact on the planet. The checklist is inherently flawed as it does not take into consideration the different realities of people from different socioeconomic backgrounds; nor does it look at who is really doing the most damage.
The reality is that carbon emissions, for example, are divided extremely inequality among the global population. Those with lower economic power produce virtually no carbon emissions relative to those with the most. Ironically, they are also the ones most affected by the other’s damage. When looking at carbon emissions data from a 2015 report, the opening line states: “… it is a crisis that is driven by the greenhouse gas emissions of the ‘haves’ that hits the ‘have-nots’ the hardest”. It also says that “the poorest half of the global population are responsible for only around 10% of global emissions yet live overwhelmingly most vulnerable to climate change — while the richest 10% of people in the world are responsible for around 50% of the global emissions”. Therefore, the thing that determines somebody’s ecological footprint the most is income — and a higher income allows one more consumption choices as well as just more consumption, in general. This report looked at exactly that — “lifestyle consumption emissions”: how much a person’s lifestyle emits in terms of carbon dioxide. Turns out that these lavish lifestyles are the ones most costly to the planet.
Yes, people of lower socioeconomic backgrounds worldwide do use plastic bags and the vast majority don’t sort or recycle their trash. They use diesel cars and certainly consume more fast food. Yet they often face judgement for these things — for not complying with our very strict and very misguided criteria of what must be done to save the planet. Turns out that this part of the population, especially in developing countries, have minimal carbon footprints. They don’t have nearly as big of an impact on the planet and play an almost negligible part on human induced climate change.
On the other end of the spectrum, there’s a tiny percentage of the population with excessively large footprints. This wealthiest minority collect properties, cars and private jets; maintaining lifestyles that those in lower socioeconomic classes, no matter how hard they work, will never be able to afford. This wealthiest majority, especially in the developed countries, have a much bigger impact on the world than anyone else — any green initiatives that this wealthiest minority may try to have — whether that be using an electric car, for example, or a bamboo toothbrush — are entirely insignificant in the face of other consumption choices and decisions they make. Yet somehow, it’s as if they no scrutiny for these lavish lifestyles — sadly, we continue to save our indignation for the lifestyle of the former and continue to look up to the lifestyles of the latter.
This is why it’s important for us to encourage the conception that a green or sustainable lifestyle is already something good on its own; it has its own merit — using a bicycle is better for your health, as is eating organically — and that it doesn’t have to be, exclusively, a means to reach an overarching end. Having a ‘green lifestyle’, the way that we typically conceive of it, is not synonymous with helping save the planet.
It is also the wealthiest from the developed, whiter countries having the most damaging lifestyle choices. Even the wealthiest percentage of the Indian population isn’t emitting nearly as much carbon as their American or European counterparts — in 2008, the average emissions of a person in the 10% Chinese elite “was about the same as the average carbon footprint of someone in the poorest 40% of Europeans”.
This international elite are the ones most protected from the damage they’re the biggest contributors to. It’s the poorest percentage, instead, who are the least responsible for climate change, who are most exposed to it and who are the least prepared to face it.
In cities across the United States, it is the low-income neighborhoods that are the hottest and that have worse air qualities. It is in reserves where indigenous communities live in Canada that have unsafe and contaminated public water systems by chemicals and bacteria and have to boil water for all purposes. It is women facing more risk than men — women make up a larger percentage of the food-producing workforce in developing countries, and that’s agriculture that’s rain dependent. So this dynamic between climate change and economic inequality replicates itself in a number of different settings and contexts, but always causes the most damage to the most vulnerable.
Again, this isn’t to say that a person’s own initiative of not using plastic bags, of choosing to go vegan for the environment and so on aren’t noble on their own — they are. Trying to build an environmentally friendly lifestyle is already an achievement on its own. But when we look at the greater and global discussion on climate change, we can’t put the same amount of responsibility on the hands on the overworked, unpaid lower class family as we do on the hands of an elite. That’s simply because the latter is way more responsible for global warming than the former. That has to be clear. We should instead move the energy and attention that we give to those who don’t have it as easy and instead focus it on those who have too much and who are responsible for a disproportionate amount of damage: we have to rethink the glorification of unsustainable lifestyles like private jets and immense luxury homes. If we wish to truly stop the planet from continuing down this road, we must stop looking up to these wealthy majorities and instead hold them accountable for the damage they do.
