🏡💚 Structural inequality is driving the climate crisis
September 27, 2024
Last week I was sent a rival newsletter (the New York Times’ Climate Forward) with a piece that has stuck with me ever since. The article had a brief interview with economist Thomas Piketty, famous for his research on inequality and the smash-hit book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which may have won the prize in 2014 for Book Most Bought But Never Read (not because it’s not good, but because it is very dense with economic research).
Turns out that Piketty has been working on a new book that was released earlier this month, Nature, Culture and Inequality: A Comparative Historical Perspective. Perhaps not quite as immediately striking a title as one that borrows from Karl Marx, the book nevertheless promises important contributions to the debate about inequality — this time through the lens of climate change.
Most of you probably already know this, but it is also probably understated in our movement messaging: not only are the richest countries most responsible for greenhouse gas emissions, but actually the richest people emit far more than the poorest. According to Piketty’s research, the top 10 percent of the richest people in the world account for almost half of global emissions, and the top 1 percent account for just under 17 percent of global emissions.
For Piketty, climate solutions must also tackle inequality. “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.”
Addressing inequality is not just a moral or social imperative. He claims it’s also a necessary part of any political solution. “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.”
So what does it look like to address inequality? Tax the rich!!! (you might say). Well, yes… but not just that. Piketty does not talk about the solution as pure wealth redistribution — meaning, not just a direct transfer of money from the top to the bottom. Instead, he points to historical examples of decommodification.
Piketty argues that successful reductions in inequality in the 20th century happened by taking parts of the economy out of purely capitalist frameworks — things like education and health care. He gives the example of Sweden, now well-known as a case study of social democracy and a strong safety net, which was until the 1910s one of the most unequal countries in Europe. Over the course of the following decades, “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.”
Collection mobilization for decommodification… hmm 🤔… that sounds a lot like a campaign for green social housing…
And indeed, Piketty says that declines in inequality came with “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.
“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.”
Of course, in the United States we did not take housing out of the capitalist framework nearly as much as many European countries. The highly means-tested public housing we have was restricted to the very poor, making it politically and financially susceptible to disinvestment (exacerbated by a racialized stigma of public housing residents). That is in contrast to things like public education, which is available to everyone — though obviously not immune to attack and disinvestment, as we have also been seeing.
Piketty does not just talk about the need to decommodify housing, but also the ways in which the climate crisis uniquely highlights how some social goods are incompatible with an approach based on market valuation alone. Things like forest conservation and biodiversity have no clear market value in a capitalist framework (much as we try to put them in one with things like carbon offset markets), yet they are essential to a healthy environment and livable future. So instead of letting markets dictate value, “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.”
That can be tough to swallow at a time when democratic deliberation seems to be open to fascism. The right wing has been hugely successful in eroding public trust in government by undermining the social safety net and government systems. But this has only led to privatization and a shift of wealth and power back to corporations and the rich.
To my mind, the solution is not just to take the money from the rich and give it directly to the poor (though, really, that sounds good too). That relies on a post hoc after-the-fact redistribution — it does not inherently change the core structures of the economy and how we access wealth, privilege, education, and services in the first place. Decommodification, on the other hand, has the potential to fundamentally transform the economy, to shift wealth and power.
That is why green social housing is a core part of our vision and solution to addressing the climate and housing crisis. And it’s a reminder of the history we can learn and take inspiration from as we continue this fight.
As we reach the final weeks of Governor Newsom’s window to sign and veto bills, I also just want to give a huge congratulations on the news this week that Newsom has signed into law three bills that made up the Make Polluters Pay package: AB 1866 (Hart), AB 2716 (Bryan), and AB 3233 (Addis).
These wins came in the face of a huge push by Big Oil to kill these bills at the end of session. It’s a testament to the organizing, messaging, and strategy of the people who led these efforts, including many of you all. So, congratulations!!! And onwards.
Thomas Piketty. Source: Getty Images via NYTimes Climate Forward
WHAT WE’RE READING
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Tina Smith: Our Solution to the Housing Crisis (NYTimes) — I didn’t get around to writing about the release of the federal social housing bill last week, but I hopefully will soon!!
Building Social Housing from the Ground Up: Grassroots Perspectives (Nonprofit Quarterly) — feature our friends Rae Huang from Housing Now and Shanti Singh from Tenants Together
Housing protesters occupy Capitol Swing Space lobby in Sacramento (SacBee) — video from 1 Million Homes campaign event in Sacramento yesterday
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