Environmentalism: A Luxury
During the Great Recession in 2008, a few different articles implied a relationship between socioeconomic status and concern for the environment. “When Environmentalism is a Luxury” and “Is 'green living' a luxury affordable only to the middle and upper classes?” — the headlines read. While these articles are each about a decade old, they have actually aged quite well. In 2019, climate change and environmental activism still seem to divide Americans along the lines of class. And although America is not currently in the midst of an economic downturn, these articles and the context in which they were written help explain why complacency and inaction continue to define America’s relationship with climate change.
A study published in 2014, titled “The Varied Influence of Socioeconomic Status on Environmental Concern,” found that countries with high national income have greater levels of environmentalism. Based on this finding, it is hardly surprising that in 2018, the countries with the best Environmental Performance Index (EPI) were Switzerland, Denmark, and Sweden, and that most other high performers were European Union members. After all, the EU was a vocal party at the recent UN Climate Summit, with European Council (EC) President Donald Tusk reaffirming the EC’s intention to meet the 2020 Sustainable Development Goals. These include reducing emissions and alleviating dependence on non-renewable energy.
But the EU’s current urgency on climate and sustainability does not tell the whole story: it is important to recognize that, historically, European countries have contributed almost as much to climate change as the United States. In fact, the EU is responsible for twenty-two percent of cumulative global carbon dioxide emissions, compared to twenty-five for the US.
With this in mind, the rather pessimistic observations of the Great Recession articles seem to carry more weight. Indeed, even as delegates at the UN Climate Summit expressed their intentions to support sustainable development, their silence on certain topics was actually condemning. For example, Somini Sengupta and Lisa Friedman, writing for the New York Times, noted that China had failed to set new goals for sustainability despite its successful report on carbon reduction. Sengupta and Friedman associated this with the China-US rivalry, saying that China’s reservations were due to its unwillingness to fall behind in economic advancement. Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India behaved in a similar manner, refusing to mention India’s continued reliance on coal power.
From what these governments have said, can we then conclude that the fully-developed, “rich” countries of Europe have already done their worst, and therefore have become wealthy enough to devote significant attention to the environment? The statistics are pretty incriminating: China and India’s GDP are growing at a rate of 6.9 and 6.7 percent, respectively. In Switzerland, the growth has slowed down to 2.5 percent, and to 1.5 percent in Denmark. These numbers make it sadly likely that those advocating for climate action are only doing so because they have less at stake.
In spite of these economic realities, inaction on climate is disappointing. Scientists have been trying all too long to educate the general public that human existence is truly in danger. Given that we may only have a decade to act before the consequences are irreversible, why hasn’t there been more of an international effort to make change happen?
In economics, there is a social dilemma problem called the “Tragedy of the Commons,” which was first presented by ecologist Garrett Hardin. Hardin uses the analogy of herdsmen in a shared pasture to explain this dilemma. Since a herdsman is naturally inclined to maximize personal gain, he will want to keep as many cows as possible on this pasture. Of course, due to limited resources, the result of all the herdsmen pursuing this course of action is the ultimate depletion of the pasture. No individual herdsman would independently choose to stop adding cattle to his herd if the others did not, so this ultimate loss to society would occur even if the herdsmen knew that they were contributing to destruction. In other words, their short term, rational motives are diametrically opposed to the long-term interests of society— it is in their immediate interest to ignore the unfortunate truth.
How to transcend this predicament? Hardin did present readers with possible ways to overcome this collective action problem, such as regulation and mutually beneficial agreements. In other words, if one herdsman has the assurance that other herdsmen will not deplete the pasture, this information will redefine his short-term incentive structure and realign the interests of the individual with society at large. Applying this to climate change, it follows logically that governments will need to engage in international cooperation to share the burden of reducing emissions and investing in renewable energy. Businesses could also lead the way on climate by committing to fossil fuel alternatives and promoting sustainability around the world. Individuals, too, have the capacity to reshape the future with environmentally-conscious choices— eschewing single use plastics and monitoring one’s own carbon footprint. But on a more fundamental level, as inspiring teen activist Greta Thunberg reminds us, confronting climate change head on will require a triumph of conscience. Leaders will need to stop telling “fairytales of eternal economic growth,” and start to care more about the future of the pasture than about the number of cows in their own herd. The consequences of this choice are life and death.