What’s the link between the global economy and the climate? Consumption drives extraction and carbon emissions. But there is more.
The inequalities of the global economy don’t just shape what goes into the atmosphere. They affect our understanding of the climate and our perspectives when it comes to possible solutions. The lenses through which we see the world reflect the inequalities within it. The greater the centralisation of power, the greater the control over our knowledge about it.
This was a conclusion that the writer and revolutionary Antonio Gramsci reached, while languishing in prison after a failed revolution against the fascist Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. Unable to understand why ordinary people didn’t rise up against the dictator, despite their clear economic interest in doing so, he coined the term “hegemony”: the conflation of power and knowledge, whereby the views and interests of a political economic elite are adopted by the rest of society as common sense.
This perspective explains a lot about our seeming inability to escape the environmental status quo.
Successive polls indicate overwhelming public support for resolving excessive carbon emissions and the problems this excessive use of fossil fuels is creating for communities around the world.
In the UK, 60% of people support net zero. In Germany, 81% of the population want to expand renewable energy, while 55% cite it as “very important to them”. In Italy, 80% of people support a renewables only energy policy. Even in the US, 57% want the government to do more to address climate change.
With the exception of the US, this majority is greater than that which has elected any political party since the turn of the 20th century. So with a super-majority in favour of decarbonisation, how does the world remain stuck on such a steep upwards trajectory of carbon emissions?
Almost every country has a stated commitment to decarbonisation. Wind and solar energy are the cheapest forms of energy in history.
Yet a record quantity of carbon was pumped into the atmosphere last year. And record amounts of coal, oil and gas are still being extracted from the Earth.
Statistics like this can make even thinking about climate change a demoralising business. This is precisely the problem. Our overwhelming political will is sapped by being locked into a system that obscures the most effective pathways (phasing out fossil fuels, for example), while continually moving us towards less effective ones.
If you’re worried that global garment production is on course to triple in size by 2050, common narratives suggest that simply choosing the “greenest” brand will help fix the problem. Worried about the carbon cost of flying? Never fear: a budget airline’s apocryphal claims to be sustainable can assuage that nagging guilt.
Feeling the heat?
But the politics of climate change isn’t just about what we buy. It’s a full-body experience.
Take heat stress. According to the UN’s International Labour Organization, 70% of workers experience heat stress throughout the year. That figure falls to 29% in Europe and rises to 93% in sub-Saharan Africa.
These two continents have big differences in temperature, but temperature is in fact only a small part of the problem.
The largest determinant on whether a person becomes heat stressed (the point at which their body is pushed beyond its normal thermal limits) is the work that a person does. People working in construction, agriculture and other high-intensity roles – the kind that dominate in developing countries – are at the highest risk. Sedentary service sectors, or office jobs to you and me, are the safest in terms of heat stress.
When it comes to the environment, what you feel depends on what you do.
My new book, Climate Hegemony, highlights how a farmer is almost twice as likely as a garment worker to experience changing rainfall patterns, because everybody’s experience of the environment is filtered through how they spend their life.
That’s the problem. The populations of the developed world, consumers of most fossil fuels globally, may favour climate action. But as long as they continue to benefit from a global economy that reduces their risk through air conditioning and wealth, tackling climate change will remain alongside world peace and eliminating global hunger: moral aspirations, rather than tangible policy.
It is a testament to the persuasive powers of the fossil fuel industry that this hegemony is sustained – even in the face of precipitously falling renewable energy prices. Campaigns outflank arguments for renewable energy through widespread political lobbying and by support for conservative thinktanks and social movements, such as the campaign against net zero.
Individually, these activities might seem nefarious, but together they present as common sense, just as Gramsci complained from his cell in 1929.
As Gramsci found out, it is not easy to change minds. Yet by challenging the deeply embedded norms and assumptions of our current environmental impasse, it is possible to access something many environmentalists have felt starved of in recent years: hope.
The changing climate acts not only through emissions, but through everything we do, make and think. With different assumptions about which climate actions are possible, we arrive at different politics and different outcomes.
So, however much it might feel like it, the climate impasse is far from insurmountable. A world of ways to reshape our relationship to the environment are waiting, if only we can learn to see them.
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