On Apr 25, 2007, at 12:14 PM, James Heartfield wrote:
> Doug, I think there is a kind of slippage in your language, despite
> what you
> say to Wojtek.
>
> When you are in 'climate change' mode, you (demagogically?) lump
> workers and
> elites together as "you, me and the rest of us in the handful of rich
> countries". First off, handful implies few, but there are more than
> a few
> rich countries if you count West Europe, Japan, Korea. And in
> population
> terms, that is much more than a few.
It's about 20% of the world's pop, responsible for about 80% of its GDP, and therefore its GHG emissions. It's a big handful, but a minority by any measure.
> More to the point, though, if were were not in climate change mode,
> but in
> income mode, I think you would baulk at the (Maoist?) assimilation of
> workers and elites in the first world. You were forthright in
> rejecting the
> idea that US workers were well off in income terms. But when it
> comes to
> energy consumption, it is a different tune.
I never denied that U.S. workers are well off in income terms. I've cited more than a few times Branko Milanovic's compelling factoid: a poverty-line income in the U.S. is at the 98th percentile of the world income distribution. What I've said, many times, is that U.S. real wages have spent most of the last 35 years going sideways and down, and that average household incomes have risen only because of an increased work effort - that despite massive increases in recorded productivity. The gains of economic growth are going mainly to the upper brackets, especially over the last 5 years.
In any case, most greenhouse gases come from transportation, buildings, industry, electricity generation, and deforestation. Almost everyone, even the poorest among us, contributes, unless you live like the Unabomber (while not using the U.S. mail). Elites use more energy and generate more GHGs, but anyone who drives a car, flips on an electric light, or uses wood products adds to the problem.
> Do you think that climate change demands a reduction in working
> class energy
> consumption? And assuming you think that that is a more serious
> problem than
> can be achieved with a little home insulation, are you not calling
> for a
> (further) reduction in wages? Or would you say that can be
> mitigated by some
> kind of re-distributionist strategy?
Demagogy is in the eye of the beholder, I suppose.
I'm not calling for a reduction in average living standards. I am calling for greatly reduced energy use and less polluting forms of energy. This is a matter of the greatest urgency. It's a lot more convenient when you can dismiss human-driven climate change as either a hoax or unproven, but to do that would be to reject science, and I'm not about to do that.
Doug