Capitalism is killing the earth

The main cause of your environmental impact isn’t your attitude. It isn’t your mode of consumption.

It isn’t the choices you make. It’s your money. If you have surplus money, you spend it. While you might

persuade yourself that you are a green mega-consumer, in reality you are just a mega-consumer. This is

why the environmental impacts of the very rich, however right-on they may be, are massively greater than

those of everyone else.

 

The myth of social credit about ecology : 

 

Surface tension dominates even when we claim to be addressing the destruction of our life-support systems. We focus on micro-consumerist bollocks (MCB): tiny issues such as plastic straws and coffee cups, rather than the huge structural forces driving us towards catastrophe. We are obsessed with plastic bags. We believe we’re doing the world a favour by buying tote bags instead, though, on one estimate, the environmental impact of producing an organic cotton tote bag is equivalent to that of 20,000 plastic ones. It is the same with buying a bamboo toothbrush instead of a plastic one. 

Rich people can persuade themselves they’ve gone green because they recycle, while forgetting that they have a second home or fly every month.

 

All of us are expert at using the good things we do to blot out the bad things. We assure ourselves that if our solutions are so small, the problem can’t be so big. That is not to say that the small things don’t matter. Just they should not matter to the exclusion of things that matter more. Every little counts. But not for very much.

 

The great political transition of the past 50 years, driven by corporate marketing, has been a shift from addressing our problems collectively to addressing them individually. In other words, it has turned us from citizens into consumers. It’s not hard to see why we have been herded down this path. As citizens, joining together to demand political change, we are powerful. As consumers, we are almost powerless.

 

We need to level down : 

 

The difficult truth is that, to prevent climate and ecological catastrophe, we need to level down. We need to pursue what the Belgian philosopher Ingrid Robeyns calls limitarianism. Just as there is a poverty line below which no one should fall, there is a wealth line above which no one should rise. What we need are not carbon taxes, but wealth taxes.

 

But wealth taxes strike at the heart of the issue. They should be high enough to break the spiral of accumulation and redistribute the riches accumulated by a few. They could be used to put us on an entirely different track, one that I call “private sufficiency, public luxury”. While there is not enough ecological or even physical space on Earth for everyone to enjoy private luxury, there is enough to provide everyone with public luxury: magnificent parks, hospitals, swimming pools, art galleries, tennis courts and transport systems, playgrounds and community centres. We should each have our own small domains – private sufficiency – but when we want to spread our wings, we could do so without seizing resources from other people.