What is it going to take to save the planet from environmental devastation?
Sheer people power? We certainly saw that on the eve of last week's UN Climate Summit in New York. Some 400,000 marchers packed the streets of Manhattan. Millions more rallied the same day in over 2,600 other actions in 162 countries.
Or can simple shaming get world leaders to start seriously addressing the climate change challenge? We saw some serious shaming last week, too.
Spoken-word poet Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner from the Marshall Islands -- the nation climate change most immediately endangers -- helped open Tuesday's UN summit with an open letter to her baby daughter that reportedly brought many of the 120 world leaders present to tears.
That letter, unfortunately, wouldn't be enough to bring those world leaders to their senses. Last week's summitry, a Christian Science Monitor analysis notes, left the international community "without a comprehensive strategy to fight climate change," just the hope that maybe the next summit "would enact a plan to slow and eventually reverse the upward growth of global carbon emissions."
People have been entertaining hopes along that line, British commentator George Monbiot has observed, ever since world leaders first started gathering for environmental summits back in 1992.
"These summits have failed for the same reason that the banks have failed," Monbiot explains. "Political systems that were supposed to represent everyone now return governments of millionaires, financed by and acting on behalf of billionaires."
Expecting these governments to protect the biosphere, Monbiot adds, makes no more sense than "expecting a lion to live on gazpacho."
Why should that be the case? Over recent decades, analysts and activists have made all sorts of links between the increasing degradation of our global environment and the increasing concentration of our global wealth.
The super-rich, for starters, stomp out a huge carbon footprint. The best symbol of this stomping? That may be the private jet.
These high-powered playthings of the global elite emit six times more carbon per passenger than normal commercial jets. Between 1970 and 2006, the number of private jets worldwide multiplied by ten times over.
The super-rich don't just consume at rates that dwarf the consumption of mere financial mortals. Their profligate spending stimulates endless consumption all the way down the economic ladder.
"Large income gaps," as Rob Dietz and Dan O'Neill point out in their book Enough Is Enough, "lead to unhealthy status competition and consumption of materials and energy beyond what's necessary to meet people's needs."
In more equal societies, analysts note, most people can afford the same things. In that environment, things don't matter all that much.
But things become a powerful marker of social status in unequal societies where most people can't afford the same things. In these societies, you either accumulate more and bigger things or find yourself labeled a failure.
How do we begin to reverse this endless consumption cycle? We can overcome "socially and environmentally destructive status competition," social scientists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett argue in their just-published pamphlet A Convenient Truth, by working to "extend democracy into the economic sphere."
Firms with worker representatives on their governing boards, employee-owned companies, and co-op enterprises "typically have much smaller pay differences within them," note Wilkinson and Pickett, the authors of the landmark bestseller The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better.
huffingtonpost
