Let’s talk about climate privilege

What does it mean to be privileged? Generally speaking, when we say someone is privileged it is because they have been born with a certain advantage in life.

It’s not always easy to pinpoint exactly what the advantage might be, and that’s often because a privilege is the absence of a problem rather than a tangible gain.

Economic privilege

Someone who is economically privileged, for example, might never have to worry about money. Perhaps they have inherited wealth, or rich parents who can underwrite their lifestyle. They won’t know what it’s like to receive a bill and not know how they’re going to pay it, or to have to choose between paying the rent or fixing the car. The privilege isn’t just the parental bailout or the trust fund, it’s the absence of worry, the freedom from stress.

When privilege comes in the form of immunity, it can be invisible to those who benefit from it.

White privilege

That’s often how White privilege operates. Reni Eddo-Lodge summarises it as “an absence of the negative consequences of racism” in her book Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race.

While White people might occasionally encounter racist prejudice, they are never going to experience the systemic racism that affects People of Colour. Having never witnessed systemic racism, they might not even be aware of it.

Many commentators saw this lack of awareness in the political response to Black Lives Matter protests in the UK, when several government figures insisted that Britain was not a racist country.

Climate privilege

In researching race and privilege for a book on climate and race, I came to realise that there is a similar dynamic at work with climate change. We could call it climate privilege.

If you have climate privilege, you have no personal experience of global warming and its effects. You have immunity — at present at least — to the worst of the climate crisis. You have the luxury of believing that it is a problem for the future.

One of the strongest signs of climate privilege is categorising climate change as an environmental issue, a risk to polar bears and penguins.

Just as white privilege is freedom from the consequences of racism, climate privilege is freedom from the consequences of climate breakdown.

Privilege and scepticism

The climate privileged are the most likely to indulge in climate scepticism. If your house is on fire or underwater, or if your crops are withering in a field, you know first-hand what climate change can do. The facts are pretty convincing.

Like other forms of privilege, climate privilege accrues to the powerful. If you’re already rich, white, and male, the chances are that you’re less vulnerable to climate change already. You are protected by multiple layers of privilege, and global warming is just one more thing that doesn’t trouble your sleep.

With the luxury of being unworried by climate change, those with climate privilege may fail to see it as a priority, or may even obstruct action to reduce emissions. Some may see the action to prevent climate change as a greater risk to their personal circumstances than the environmental disaster itself.

Talking about climate privilege

Climate privilege is not a very common term. Having stumbled on the notion of climate privilege myself, I looked it up to see who else was using it. I only found passing references here and there, and a couple of slightly different usages. The most developed theory of climate privilege, as I describe it, is from a 2016 ethics paper by Cynthia Moe-Lobeda.

The damage of climate change is already being felt across the global South, predominantly by People of Colour. Though not exclusively so, the causes of climate change are mostly rooted in majority White countries of the global North — the very places where climate privilege is most common.

Should we be talking a whole lot more about climate privilege?