Polluter Elite

Discussion

Tim Parrique:

"The “polluter elite” is a term coined by Dario Kenner when launching a database of rich people holding significant amounts of shares in polluting companies (see Carbon Inequality: The Role of the Richest in Climate Change). The climate problem with wealth is not only a matter of lifestyle but also of investment. Wealthy individuals only consume part of their income, the rest being invested in various projects, many of them disastrous for the planet. Shareholders tend to defend their financial returns by sidelining social and ecological concerns while organising production, which is why the most lucrative activities are often the least socially and ecologically sustainable. Driven by short-term, financial objectives, these actors have an incentive to boost sales. The more money they get in return, the more they can re-invest, giving them an even bigger control over production.

Of course, lifestyle emissions matter too. The term “super-rich” comes from an article in Nature by Otto et al. (2019) which estimates the footprint of a typical super-rich household at around 129.3 tCO2e per year. Lynch et al. (2019, p.1) calls the consumption of super yachts, large homes, luxury vehicles and private jets criminal since “they disrupt the normal regeneration and reproduction of ecosystems by generating excessive ecological disorganization.” The paragraph references an 2015 Oxfam report showing that the richest 10% of people in the world are responsible for around 50% of global emissions. Because the rich emit so much more than the rest, a widening of inequality drives total emissions up, as shown by Jorgenson et al. (2017) for the case of the United States. Unless it’s not obvious already, the essential point to grasp here is that rich people must consume less.[iv]

(…) “Since no country now meets its citizens’ basic needs at a level of resource use that is globally sustainable, while high levels of life satisfaction for those just escaping extreme poverty require even more resources, the need for transformative shifts in governance and policies is large (O’Neill et al. 2018; Vogel et al. 2021).”

This sentence is ambiguous, so let me rephrase. We live in a world where poverty remains and those with unmet needs require more resources to satisfy them. We also live in an ecologically-constrained world struggling to cut emissions as fast as possible. In that context, by reducing consumption in the global North (and more generally for all of those who are over-consuming), one could free some of these resources for the people who need it the most. Ensuring basic needs and well-being for all necessarily implies limiting consumption in high-income regions and wealthy households in order to enable resource-poor countries and households to reach decent standards of living. In other words, degrowth in the global North is a prerequisite for sustainable development in the global South."

(https://www.resilience.org/stories/2022-05-06/sufficiency-means-degrowth/)