Changing the Climate, From the Top Down

I WAS BORN POOR (as, technically, nearly everyone is), and raised poor. The word "poor" might be a bit misleading. My older sister and I were raised by a single mother, who worked as a registered nurse. In those days, the 1950s and sixties, nurses were not nearly as well paid, comparatively, as now, and she worked the night shift,party because it paid a bit better, partly because the patients, being asleep, were easier to deal with. We lived in a small frame house, got a good education, and had friendly neighbors with enough children in the neighborhood to work up a good whiffle ball game on those long, halcyon summer days of yore, when kids played outside, unsupervised, drinking out of garden hoses and coming home only when called home for supper and the street lights came on. When darkness fell, hide and go seek took over. But you didn't have to go far to see neighborhoods with much larger, prettier houses and more cars in the garage. We didn't care. We never felt any envy, sense of deprivation, or lack. In fact, in those days there was a tendency for America's middle and lower middle class not to envy the very wealthy, but to admire them. (how things have changed!) We vacationed every summer,usually to a big city for major league baseball. Nobody but a few pointy headed scientists knew anything about climate change, though it was as real then as it is now. The idea that there existed a wealthy class whose members were disproportionately responsible for the impending destruction of the planetary ecosystem would have seemed alien to me. And yet, there was, they were, and they still are. In an illumating new book by Dario Kenner, "Carbon Inequality: The Role of the Richest In Climate Change", we learn the details. Author Kenner is currently a researcher at Sussex University in Great Britain, the author of several books of the sociology of climate change, and the editor of a periodical on the same topic. "Carbon Inequality" focuses on the wealthiest contributors to carbon pollution in the United States and Great Britian, with a familiar theme. Just as the wealthiest nations are much more responsible for global warming through industrialization than most of the world's developing countries, and yet less impacted by its disastrous effects,so the super wealthy class has more per capita responsibility for atmospheric carbon pollution than the teeming mass of the world's poor majority, while being far more insulated against its harmful impact. Much of the material he uses is not new. The billionaires are the primary shareholders in fossil fuel companies. Just as eighty percent of all corporate stock is held by less than twenty percent of investors, so a disproportionate number of fossil fuel shares are owned by billionaires, who manage the companies. The decades old public relations campaign to deny and deflect climate responsibility from the mega corporations may be placed squarely at the feet of their billionaire share holders, who occupy the board rooms and make corporate policy. Private jets, helicopters, and fleets of luxury automobiles, as well as fuel consuming "second homes", mansions spread out all over the world, combine to render the super wealthy "guilty" of excessive wealth, and thus, of excessive carbon consumption. The solution is not to elevate the rest of us to a higer level of affluence and consumption; the solution is to bring the uber wealthy down to our level, or at least, to a more restrained, reasonable standared of living. And that, as we say, is the rub, the fly in the ointment. Consumer capitalism is not an economic system which invites material restraint. In a culture which espouses the virtues of upward mobility through hard work,and in which most poor folks envision themselves as potentially future affluent,voluntary restraint in consumption is not popular.It may be that the most urgent requirement for fighting climate change involves not only change in the consumer habits of the wealthy, but also, in the attitudes harbored by all of us.