The Rich Cause Environmental Problems. The Poor Do Not.

George Monblot has an absolutely fantastic piece up at Comment is Free where he convincingly argues that all talk about population growth causing environmental problems is a chimera covering up the real problem: rich people.

While I'm not quite willing to say population growth isn't an environmental problem, Monblot correctly states that this is much more of a future problem than a current one.

But there has always been a strong current in environmental thought blaming poor people for environmental problems. In the early 1900s, poor people were supposedly responsible for declining wildlife populations. Meanwhile, Theodore Roosevelt and friends were dining on wild game at fancy New York restaurants. In the 1930s, dirt farmers in western Oklahoma were causing the Dust Bowl, not the logic of capitalist agriculture. Today, poor people cut down tropical forests, have too many children, and poach wild animals as opposed to first world demanding developing world natural resources, the wealthy flying around the world, and development placing wildlife populations in jeopardy in the first place.

Not surprisingly then, Monblot points out that the wealthy are spearheading the anti-population growth movement. Meanwhile, what are those very same rich people doing?

While there's a weak correlation between global warming and population growth, there's a strong correlation between global warming and wealth. I've been taking a look at a few super-yachts, as I'll need somewhere to entertain Labour ministers in the style to which they are accustomed. First I went through the plans for Royal Falcon Fleet's RFF135, but when I discovered that it burns only 750 litres of fuel per hour I realised that it wasn't going to impress Lord Mandelson. I might raise half an eyebrow in Brighton with the Overmarine Mangusta 105, which sucks up 850 litres per hour. But the raft that's really caught my eye is made by Wally Yachts in Monaco. The WallyPower 118 (which gives total wallies a sensation of power) consumes 3,400 litres per hour when travelling at 60 knots. That's nearly a litre per second. Another way of putting it is 31 litres per kilometre.

Of course, to make a real splash I'll have to shell out on teak and mahogany fittings, carry a few jetskis and a mini-submarine, ferry my guests to the marina by private plane and helicopter, offer them bluefin tuna sushi and beluga caviar, and drive the beast so fast that I mash up half the marine life of the Mediterranean. As the owner of one of these yachts I'll do more damage to the biosphere in 10 minutes than most Africans inflict in a lifetime. Now we're burning, baby.

Someone I know who hangs out with the very rich tells me that in the banker belt of the lower Thames valley there are people who heat their outdoor swimming pools to bath temperature, all round the year. They like to lie in the pool on winter nights, looking up at the stars. The fuel costs them £3,000 a month. One hundred thousand people living like these bankers would knacker our life support systems faster than 10 billion people living like the African peasantry. But at least the super wealthy have the good manners not to breed very much, so the rich old men who bang on about human reproduction leave them alone.

Damn, that's some good anti-rich writing there. However, I do think Monblot lets the western middle class off a bit too easy. I have no doubt that his analysis of what rich people do nature is spot-on, but the imitation of the wealthy by hundreds of millions of people in the western world and east Asia also causes massive damage. It's not just CEOs. It's you and me who drive SUVs, fly around, eat lots of beef, and contribute far more than our share to climate change and other environmental problems.

The environmental movement has largely failed in providing any sort of class analysis since it's beginning. It has done a great deal to preserve consumer prerogatives and invent supposedly "green" products that don't address consumption at all, but simply claim to make that consumption less harmful. Plus, the environmental movement has long relied on the wealthy for funding. So I'm skeptical that the mainstream organizations are ready to take this analysis on as their own.

But, I am tremendously confident in the next generation of environmental leaders to integrate much more of this analysis into their work. I teach these people and I find them incredibly refreshing, not just because they are young and full of energy and hope, but because they have a much more sophisticated understanding of the connections between class, race, and environment than than elders and a much better honed idea of environmental justice. They understand that you have to center people in any effective environmental movement. Blaming poor people of color for having lots of kids is no way to build a movement or create a sustainable world.

Via Globalisation and the Environment

Concentrated Wealth

The always excellent Sociological Images presents this graph charting the amount of wealth held by the top 1% of American families, updated to include 2007. It is now significantly higher than any year in the past 94. I do wish the graph went back into the Gilded Age to see how today compares.

Guest Post: Governor Mark Sanford is an evil, stupid swine.

I'm exhausted and sick, so I don't have it in me to rail about the AIG bonuses or Mark Sanford's stupidity. Thankfully, Daisy at Daisy's Dead Air did so for me, and has kindly agreed to let me repost her comments. I'm a former South Carolinian and Daisy lives there still, and I am disgusted by what Sanford wants to do to my former home.

South Carolina state flag.

(Cross-posted from Daisy's Dead Air.)

Our Governor, Mark Sanford, wants to cheat the people of South Carolina by refusing fully a QUARTER of the economic stimulus.

We have serious problems with health care, prenatal care, unemployment, bad roads, education, etc etc etc in this state, since the Republicans have been "running" it (ha!) since the 60s. Sanford wants to stay BACKWARD and STUPID, just like he is.

Sanford grew up rich and privileged on a 3000-acre plantation near Beaufort. Of course he doesn't give a fuck about the less privileged. I say, SELL THAT FAMILY LAND, Sanford, and throw the money into the DEFICIT that you helped make. I mean, since you claim to be so concerned--how about you contribute some of that family fortune?

When not in the Governor's mansion, Sanford lives on Sullivan's Island, so he is pretty well off. Of course he can't identify with poor people out of work. He is an upper class PIG with no compassion... can you hear voice of Ebenezer Scrooge?: "Are there no poorhouses?"

We need to throw his disgusting ass out, now, yesterday, last week, last month, last year. Sanford is from the RICH SOUTHERN WHITE MAN past, and he needs to go back to the past, where he so obviously came from.

"I've got a 15-year pattern of doing exactly this kind of thing," Sanford said. I think 15 years in federal prison might be enough to repay the people of South Carolina for his continuing obstinacy, greed, southern-rich-boy ignorance and general assholery. What do you think?

SC Gov. Sanford set to reject stimulus millions

By BETH FOUHY
Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford...
But the governor's announcement this week that he may reject nearly a quarter of the money headed to South Carolina has stirred criticism in the state and elsewhere that he has placed his own political future ahead of the needs of the state's most vulnerable citizens.

Several GOP governors, including Rick Perry of Texas, Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Haley Barbour of Mississippi, have said they would reject a portion of the money that would expand unemployment benefits to those not currently eligible to receive them. Sanford says he will also reject those funds, but he has threatened to go much further, requesting a waiver to spend some $700 million targeted for education and other programs to pay down some of the state's debt instead.

"I have come to conclude that it would be a mistake to simply accept the money as offered," Sanford wrote to state legislators in announcing his decision. "When one is in a hole, the first order of business is to stop digging."
...

"I've got a 15-year pattern of doing exactly this kind of thing," Sanford said.

But his announcement came the same week that South Carolina's unemployment rate shot to 10.4 percent, the second highest in the nation. With those dire figures as a backdrop, national Democrats — keenly aware of Sanford's rising national stature — piled on...

South Carolina's senior senator, Republican Lindsey Graham, voted against the stimulus. But he said the state should take the money if it's a choice between the dollars going to South Carolina or going somewhere else.

But he says that may not be possible if Sanford rejects the money...

Clyburn issued a frustrated statement in response.

"I would hope the various leaders of this state would spend as much time and energy finding ways to bring relief to South Carolina's families rather than looking for creative ways to get around the federal help that has been made available and that other states are using very effectively," he said.

Clyburn also criticized Sanford on Thursday for a comment he made at a news conference in South Carolina likening Obama's economic stimulus efforts to the hyperinflationary economy in Zimbabwe, one of Africa's most corrupt governments.

"What took the man to Zimbabwe?" Clyburn said in Washington. "Someone should ask him if that's really the best comparison. ... How can he compare this country's situation to Zimbabwe?"...

"What I think's happening here is he has made headlines again, national headlines, and that is what he is after," said state Senate Finance Committee Chairman Hugh Leatherman, a Republican who introduced a measure Thursday that would allow the Legislature to circumvent Sanford's actions.

"It's my intent to take every dollar we can get," Leatherman said, calling Sanford's efforts "tomfoolery."...


___

Associated Press writers Mary Clare Jalonick in Washington and Jim Davenport in Columbia, S.C., contributed to this report.

Mr Daisy is beside himself, and I am getting there.

And what the fuck was that about ZIMBABWE? Code. (I think we all know what our spoiled southern-rich-boy governor was actually saying, don't we?)

Swine. Please God, make him go away.

Save South Carolina! DUMP SANFORD!

Class Warfare, 2009 Budget Style

In the car a few minutes ago, I caught the tail end of an NPR story about Obama's budget and the plan to raise taxes on the top earners.

Publius already mentioned that the brilliance of Obama's tax plan is that it separates tax cuts for most of America--those of us earning under $200,000 a year--from tax cuts for the rich. By proposing to cut taxes for most of America while raising taxes on the rich, Obama is splitting Reagan's coalition.

Publius referenced this excellent NYT Magazine piece, and I'll requote:

Dating back to Reagan, Republicans have packaged tax cuts on high earners with more modest middle-class tax cuts and then maneuvered the Democrats into an unwinnable choice: are you for tax cuts or against them? Obama, however, argues that this is the moment when the politics of taxes can be changed.

To do this, he is proposing tax cuts for most families that are significantly larger than those McCain is offering, along with major tax increases for families making more than $250,000 a year. “That’s essentially a major part of our economic plan,” Obama said. “But it’s also a political message.” Economically, he is trying to use the tax code to spread the bounty from the market-based American economy to a far wider group of families. Politically, he is trying to drive a wedge through the great Reagan tax gambit.

Anyway, the mainstream media--even the publicly funded mainstream media--is used to treating every political move as one part of a binary. Obama debuts a budget, automatically the Republicans get to respond. This, I'm used to. It's not quite the Fairness Doctrine, but it's what passes for "balance," which is the closest we can get to "objectivity." (Never mind verifying the facts, that's way too hard).

But this story crossed a line. In addition to noting that the Republicans plan to "torpedo" the budget, NPR followed up by saying that nonprofits are concerned with Obama's tax increase because it will impact, and this is a quote, "high net-worth individuals," who are the ones who donate to nonprofits.

See, we shouldn't raise taxes on those "high net-worth individuals" because they'll donate money to the nonprofits that are going to take care of the soup lines we'll be having in the not-too-distant future.

The kicker, of course, is that they then have to admit that donations are already down just now when they're needed the most. Because even though those "high net-worth individuals" still have plenty of cash around (it's the economy! Really! it's sooo hard to buy less caviar!) they're not donating as much. With the Bush tax cuts in place.

The answer to all this is fairly bloody obvious, really. You cannot rely on rich people--even "progressive" rich people--to take care of poor people in an economic downturn (or any other time). When it's panic time, everyone takes care of herself first. The only entity that doesn't is the government.

But you know, even NPR has to recycle Reagan-era arguments that have long been disproved.

Sharpening the pitchforks, indeed.

What about the Dirty Jobs?

When I ranted about the privilege check needed on NPR's science friday show on electric cars, and when I've complained about the discussion of the Big 3 bailout, what I'm essentially talking about is a class bias against blue-collar workers.

People even on the left like to blame the unions for their implicit support of the gas-guzzling beasts that the Big 3 automakers churned out. The battle between Henry Waxman and John Dingell over control of the House Energy and Commerce Committee was just the most obvious face of this dispute.

Most of the people in the media, though they make crap for money, come from the educated middle class, and tend to look down on blue-collar workers. Sherrod Brown noted this bias on Maddow last night (video here) about the difference in attitude toward the bankers who come looking for cash and the auto companies.

While reading my print copy of Mother Jones today (yeah, I still read print!) I came across this article on the "dirty jobs"--the people who still work in coal mines and car factories, and what we do with them.

Some quotes:

...The idea of sustainability, as envisioned by Hawken and other lead theorists, was to reconcile modern business civilization with the urgent mandates of preserving the earth's household. It is, in other words, management theory, with its eye firmly fixed on maximizing production efficiencies—and its accounting hand eager to put the messier business of displacing workers, shuttering industries, and increasing the cost of living of the less well off far on the margins of that "framework of a broader perspective."

...After NAFTA, too, workers were assured they would be retrained to be credentialed members of the brave new information order. Then, too, their livelihoods were not so much "recycled" as kicked to the curb.

...Under cap and trade, by contrast, one surefire winner will likely be, you guessed it, Wall Street investment banking concerns brokering carbon credits to major energy companies. Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse have already created US-based carbon-trading desks; Goldman also holds a 19 percent interest in the London-based Climate Exchange. The last time we let financial-services companies drive economic policy, we got the mortgage meltdown. What could possibly go wrong this time?

...It seems that carbon-control policy has taken its peculiar shape in part because environmentalists can't seem to shed their class biases—or blind spots. The popular "feebate" mechanism, for example, imposes consumption taxes on high-carbon automobiles, home heating systems, and the like, while passing on the savings to savvier consumers. Now, there are sound reasons to suggest that feebates could speed up production of better, carbon-neutral consumer goods by ramping up market demand. But they also, like many such design-driven responses to the climate crisis, aim at rewarding the conduct of already privileged segments of the market—while advancing few immediate and practical remedies to market's lower reaches. And as emissions-control measures, feebates, like cap and trade, are at best an ambiguous means of shaping actual consumer behavior. "They do nothing to influence how much vehicles are driven and risk [the] unintended consequence of additional driving," concluded a 2003 study by the nonpartisan Resources for the Future.

...But for any of this to happen, our prophets of sustainability need to form real political alliances with their counterparts in the labor movement—and to do so as their political equals, not as patrician managers who want to fine-tune workers' consumption patterns while earnestly lobbying them out of a job. Other species may have devised more invidious survival strategies, but the surest path to human sustainability is through solidarity.

Once again, I urge you to read the whole damn thing. It may be more questions than answers, but they're questions we really need to be asking.

The Horror. The Horror.

In these times, what kind of sacrifices are our super-rich making?

It's rough out there.

A nose job in a hospital with a private nurse in attendance had been something of a rite of passage for Joan Asher's children. But when her fourth and last child was ready for her own rhinoplasty recently, Ms. Asher asked her to postpone it.

The financial markets were simply more out of whack than her 16-year-old's proboscis.

"The other noses were more prominent," the stay-at-home mother from a tony New York City suburb in Westchester County told her 16-year-old daughter. She could get hers done when things settled down.

Ms. Asher was able to let her daughter get her nose job before school began after plastic surgeon Alan Matarasso said he could do the procedure in his office operating room on Manhattan's Upper East Side for about $2,500 less than if they went to a hospital, stayed overnight and hired a nurse. At home, Ms. Asher stayed up most of the night after the surgery, putting cold compresses on her daughter's eyes every 20 minutes. "She was fine," she says. "It came out great.

In other horrors:

For her 50th birthday, Annette Pucci, a New York retail manager, planned to treat herself to a facelift by cashing in $15,000 in stocks. But after consulting with her husband, a manger with Consolidated Edison Inc., she realized their stock portfolio had taken such a hit that it was out of the question.

"It was a very big disappointment," Ms. Pucci said. Her consolation: a $1,200 Botox treatment she had this week instead.

Expensive jewelry -- one of the few bright spots in the luxury-goods industry until now -- appears to be a new victim of the financial crisis. Patricia G. Hambrecht, who helps private clients buy and sell high-end jewelry, this week watched a client in the financial-services industry slash his budget for his wife's wedding anniversary present to $20,000 to $25,000 from $50,000.

It's nice that the Wall Street Journal is out there reporting on the real suffering going on in America.

Via Roger Ailes.