Lifestyles of the Rich(ish) And (Carbon) Shameless

“Can’t someone else do it?” — Simpson for Sanitation Commissioner Slogan
Let’s start with the unmitigated praise. Mathieu Munsch’s “As the Climate Clock Strikes Midnight It’s Time to Look to the Morning” is the best overview of current climate debate and policy that I’ve read this year. I have two different draft blog posts that attempt to get at half of what he does, and now I don’t have to finish them. Few things please me more than unexpectedly getting out of work, so for that alone I am thankful.
But Munsch’s essay goes far, far beyond just saving my lazy ass some time. If you’re the least bit confused about what’s up with climate policy these days, you should read the whole thing. You will not spend a more informative 10 minutes today, I promise you. He clearly explains a number of the gaslighting oddities of the current moment, including:
- Noting that the 2C target that climate hawks are fighting for is utterly arbitrary, poorly understood, and a lot harsher than people imagine
- Pointing out the hypocrisy of the EU lambasting Trump (whom Munsch mercifully only mentions once and then dismisses) and then claiming the moral high ground for a policies that might, maybe, if we’re very lucky and everyone plays along, keep things to 2C
- Clearly explaining what the “carbon budget” is and why it’s so easily abused by policy makers who can barely think past next year
- Decrying biofuel and carbon capture for the grossly irresponsible accounting dodges that they are, magic asterisks that excuse people from necessary and immediate changes
- Aiming the blame for this squarely at rich countries that haven’t even begun to address the changes necessary to meaningfully reduce their carbon output
It is a masterful summary that manages to go through a lot of issues without getting bogged down in any of them. Read it. Seriously. It’s much better than this little addendum you’re reading now.
All that said, I think it falters near the end by staying a bit too high altitude over the issue of why rich countries aren’t doing anything adequate, in fact aren’t even preparing to do anything adequate. Citing data from a 2015 study by Lucas Chancel and Thomas Piketty, he notes that:
To get emissions to fall at the speed required by our very limiting carbon budget, we must turn our attention to where — and most importantly who — they are coming from. Indeed, by failing to recognise the fact that the lifestyle of the richest 10 percent is responsible for half of all global emissions or that the poorest 50 percent only emits a mere 10 percent of it, the idea that climate change is an unfortunate consequence of our inevitable day-to-day activity will restrict our search for solutions.

Although individuals belonging to the top 10 percent class can be found on all continents — often well isolated from the life experienced by most of their fellow citizens — they tend to be so widespread in North America and Europe that the characteristics of their lifestyle have come to define local cultures and are very rarely recognised as the idiosyncrasies they in fact are. Indeed, while only 7 percent of Latin Americans, 4 percent of Chinese and 1 percent of Indians and Africans belong to the top 10 percent of global emitters, as many as 60 percent of North Americans and 30 percent of Europeans are reported to emit more than 15 tons of CO2 a year — the threshold at which one begins to earn top-10-percent status.
Since the “North America” cited above doesn’t include Mexico, it’s actually a euphemism for the United States. (Canadians make up just 10% of the combined US-Canada population.) He goes on to (rightly) decry the empty hearted, consumer based society that strives above all else to hide the environmental damage that it assumes is necessary for a decent life:
Yet, is there possibly a structure more pervasive than that which makes the culture of the dominant group seem so mundane? Is the normalisation of highly destructive habits not something to be called out and resisted? By putting the focus on what makes the lifestyle of the rich so much more harmful than the way the majority of the human population lives and by dispossessing those activities of the prestige they enjoy, they will cease to be aspirations for the rest of us. Only then might we be able to achieve the sudden turnaround in emissions that is needed to ensure our survival.
Here, however, he misses the mark, flying right over the commercial realities of the fossil economy and landing on a nebulous cultural indictment:
Meeting the incredibly strict deadline imposed by climate change will require nothing short of a dramatic shift in how we think the human experience, our measures of success and our idea of a life well lived. Holidays to far-away locations, luxurious possessions and ever so frequent splurges — the defining elements of ‘the good life’ as experienced by the 10 percent — are indefensible with a moral compass tuned in to the logic of climate change.
That’s all fine as far as it goes, but it blows past the two huge impediments to serious climate action:
1. The big fossil fuel companies (and the vile people who own and run them) stand to lose hundreds of billions (possibly even trillions!) of dollars from effective climate action. They have a proven track record of doing everything they can to prevent that from happening.
2. Even the rosiest scenarios that get us to 100% renewable energy involve enormous reductions in overall energy demand (often 50% or more), which is fundamentally incompatible with huge pieces of existing infrastructure, including (but not limited to): commercial air travel, suburbia, and an awful lot of international trade. You know, little things.
I am all for reorienting our societal moral compass. I would very much like to see disposable consumption become as frowned upon as audible farts at the dinner table. But huge chunks of Americans live in housing that, even in the rosiest Elon Musk fantasy of solar roofs and electric cars, simply cannot be heated or cooled with even theoretically available renewable power sources. There’s no way to move them all to dense and sustainable housing (or renovate what they have) within the next couple of decades, even if they all wanted to go. And nevermind doing all of that in the face of a well connected and bottomlessly funded media and advertising campaign of denial and delay.
To take a more concrete example, the United States is a rich country, but it has a lot of poor people with huge carbon footprints. Driving hundreds of miles per week to work a service job in a rich area, for example, would put you way over 15 tons of CO2 per year while maybe earning you $10/hr if you’re lucky. And that’s just transport. Energy efficiency is among the very last considerations when it comes to housing stock for working class people. Fast food, which is heavily subsidized, meat heavy, and carbon intense, is ubiquitous and among the best options in many poor areas. The list goes on.
Consumerism is deeply immoral, generally gross, and should be condemned and reformed away. But the basic physical and political structures of American society (and that of many other rich nations) are just as important and need to be mentioned in any discussion of mitigating climate change.
As stated above, Munsch has written the best and most comprehensive climate article I’ve read in a long time. But calls to heroism and moral uplift alone won’t get us where we need to go. There is active opposition and more physical inertia than you can shake a stick at, both of which should have been mentioned.
Still, that’s a minor critique. Read his article. You’ll come away with a much better grasp of the current state of the climate than most policy makers seem to have.
