Climate change wasn’t a big topic in the debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and Donald Trump on Tuesday night. Trump all but ignored the ABC News moderators when they asked what he would do about climate change, and Harris mostly talked about it in economic terms, talking up the Biden administration’s investments in clean energy and the new jobs they created.
But there is another economic lens through which we can look at climate change: Inequality, an issue that has been a concern for many voters in the past.
At least that’s what the French economist Thomas Piketty argues in his new book, “Nature, Culture and Inequality: A Comparative Historical Perspective,” which came out this week.
Piketty’s groundbreaking 2014 book on wealth and economic growth, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” captured the world’s attention and helped push the issue of inequality into the mainstream.
Now, in his new work, Piketty has turned his attention, in part, to climate change and the ways in which inequality could help both explain the issue and help point to solutions.
When we spoke last week, he highlighted figures that showed it isn’t just that the richest countries are the most responsible for the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change; it’s that the richest people in the world emit many times the amount the poorest do.
The top 10 percent of the richest people in the world account for almost half of global emissions, according to 2019 data Piketty drew from the last World Inequality Report. The top 1 percent account for just under 17 percent of global emissions, he found. (The report is worth a read, especially for a deeper dive into the immense carbon inequalities in North America.)
“There’s no way we can preserve the planetary habitability in the long run if we don’t address our inequality challenge at the same time,” Piketty told me.
In the 20th century, many countries, Piketty argues, were largely successful in expanding access to health care and education by taking these parts of the economy out of purely capitalist frameworks. A similar shift could help the world curb climate change and stop biodiversity loss, too, he told me.
What follows are excerpts from our conversation, edited for length and clarity.
Why did you decide to include nature in a book about inequality?
In order to preserve planetary habitability, it is clear that we’re going to have to change our production and consumption regime throughout the world, not only for the rich, but also for the middle class. And, like, everybody. But there’s simply no way that the middle class and lower income groups are going to accept the kind of transformation that is needed if you don’t ask for a much bigger effort from the people at the top who are typically giving lessons to the rest of the world about what we should be doing, while they themselves are taking private jets.
That sort of change sounds very difficult.
When I hear skeptics saying nothing is going to change, you know, and that attitudes toward inequality and billionaires and the current capitalist system are going to stay like that forever, I’m not very impressed. Because the magnitude of the catastrophes that we will have is going to make all of this very absurd and is going to change attitudes.
But still we should not feel that this is a unique historical challenge. We’ve had enormous social inequality challenges in the past, which we were able collectively to address.
Are you comparing environmental catastrophes to the economic crises and wars that helped increase pressure for change in the 20th century?
I think catastrophes like war and environmental catastrophe obviously can play a role, have played a role and will play a role.
But what I want to stress is that catastrophes are not necessary and sufficient. If you look in detail at what happened in terms of inequality reduction in the past, I think constructive collective mobilization was more important in the end than the extreme catastrophes.
If you look at the driver for change in Sweden, it was really more of a collective mobilization. And it’s actually quite impressive to see that Sweden until 1910 or 1920 was one of the most unequal countries in Europe, and in the world, including a very elitist political system where only the top 20 percent richest male individuals had the right to vote. There was a collective mobilization by the trade unions and social democrats to put the state capacity of Sweden to the service of a completely different political project.
So instead of registering income and wealth to distribute voting rights in proportion to income and wealth, they would register income and wealth to make people pay higher taxes to pay for health and education. The case of Sweden is the kind of episode which makes me optimistic for the future.
What has worked in the past?
You had a reduction of inequality during the last part of the 20th century. But this comes also with the partial decommodification of the economic system, in the sense that you have new economic sectors, in particular education, health and, to a lesser extent, transportation and housing, which were developed outside the capitalist logic.
I think, generally speaking, the lesson is that the building of not-for-profit systems — either straight public or through nonprofit organizations — in education, and to a lesser extent, transport, housing and energy, has been an enormous success. And it’s been part of the success of what I call social democratic societies of the 20th century. So if we look at the future, basically we have to continue in this direction.
We want to use this as a leverage to develop new sectors of economic activity outside of the profit logic.
That’s interesting. The economic argument for clean energy is that it’s sometimes cheaper than fossil fuels. But other things, like conserving forests, are always a struggle because it’s harder to make them profitable. Is that the sort of thing you’re saying we should be taking out of the profit logic system because it’s a public good?
Yes, exactly. At some point we have to replace market valuation by a sort of political valuation and democratic valuation in the sense that, at some point, we have to trust democratic deliberation, at the local, national and federal level to try to decide what’s valuable for us.
So I know some people get crazy when you say that and they say, ‘Oh, but how are we going to be able to do that?’
Well, you know, that’s what we did for education and health. We just decided that it was important for all children at age 6 and then at age 10, and then at age 15 and then at age 18 to learn about this, and that. And we didn’t let the market system decide this. And now nobody wants to go back to the previous situation. So we just have to win this sort of intellectual battle.
Youth group tries to bring a landmark climate case to the Supreme Court
Young people who filed a landmark climate change lawsuit in 2015 against the federal government, only to have their suit thrown out, are turning to the Supreme Court in an attempt to revive the case and get their day in court.
This kind of request to the Supreme Court is unusual, but the plaintiffs supported their position by arguing that the federal government had stymied the process with courtroom maneuvers over the years.
“The Department of Justice has entirely blocked our path to trial,” one of the plaintiffs, Sahara Valentine, 20, said in an interview. “It’s really important to us that we get a fair say in court.”
The case, Juliana v. U.S., accused the federal government of violating the constitutional rights of the plaintiffs by failing to curb the use of fossil fuels despite voluminous evidence of the dangers of climate change. — Karen Zraick
More climate news:
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Human activity is putting eight of the planet’s critical life-support systems at risk, according to new research detailed by Bloomberg.
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More than half of Brazil is suffering from drought, The Washington Post reports. It’s the country’s worst drought on record.
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The Guardian reports that firefighters in California are locked in a dispute with the U.S. Forest Service over low pay, short staffing and escalating risks on the job.
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