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Comment by mikepurvis | Hacker News Reader

This is Michael Shellenberger's philosophy around saving the planet/climate. Basically, that economic justice has to come first because only people who are comfortable and middle class can afford the mental and emotional costs associated with caring about that stuff.

And yes, achieving that result on a global scale may well involve the construction of a bunch of new oil and gas infrastructure in places like Africa and South America— well meaning westerners should focus on what can be done at home to reduce, and stop protesting exactly the kind of thing that helps more people enter the middle class.

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"Middle-class-ness" in this context shouldn't be the primary goal, because it's only a proxy for "have enough time and space to care." I assure you, poor people care about the environment, but we've structured our society to prevent the working poor from having enough free time and energy to advocate for things like the environment. Poor people generally don't even have enough time and energy to advocate for themselves for things like affordable housing and the end of food deserts.

Instead of just being like "lets burn more carbon to generate wealth first," we should skip the middle steps and go directly to giving people of all classes, especially the working poor that make up the majority of the human race, a voice and access to voting rights. Give the lower economic classes a larger voice in government and I think you'd be surprised how many would vote for things like investment in clean energy.

Respectfully, saying that you have to be rich enough to have time to care is missing the forest for the trees.

One of the informal definitions of "middle class" that I've heard is "people who have enough wealth and power that they don't have to constantly think about survival, but not enough to have to worry about being a target in the political game of thrones".

The original middle class meant people who can afford to participate in public life, but aren't aristocracy. Ben Franklin is the archetype.

> Give the lower economic classes a larger voice in government and I think you'd be surprised how many would vote for things like investment in clean energy.

What are you basing your belief on? Are you saying that people who have never had the time or means to get any sort of education or ponder over such subjects will still understand why society should care about the environment (and many other things, like technology advancement, health, research, military etc)?

I don't believe that's the case and I just can't see how you might have arrived at such conclusion (which to me amounts to: you don't need any sort of education to arrive at these conclusions).

In practice, I see a lot of people in developing countries who live in a democracy and hence, already have a voice just by being able to vote, tend to vote for candidates who have populist agendas which almost never include green energy (when that will cost the population) and forrest preservation (instead of jobs and more agricultural/logging output) or anything not directly related to their immediate wellbeing (sometimes, against even that).

Why do you claim that poor people have no education?

The OP said "I assure you, poor people care about the environment", but whether you believe that or not, the point was this: "Poor people generally don't even have enough time and energy to advocate for themselves for things like affordable housing and the end of food deserts."

Poor people clearly care about affordable housing. They have to care. You don't need a fancy education for that. But the ability to express that caring in a way that affects politicians and the political system takes a lot more time, effort, and especially money.

Who finances political campaigns, the tenants or the landlords? That pretty much explains the end results. How much money do environmental groups have available to spend vs. industry groups? Our politics is pay-to-play.

> Why do you claim that poor people have no education?

Poor countries almost universally have a much lower rate of education than richer countries. That's not just a coincidence, of course... when you have an educated population, you tend to get out of poverty pretty quickly unless you have something very stronly keeping you back (fundamentalist religion for example). See Singapore and South Korea which are highly advanced societies today, but not long ago were pretty poor.

I am talking about poor, really poor, people. The kind of people who cannot afford caring about education at all. All they have time for is chase food. You may not believe it, but people like that are the majority in much of the developing world.

Well, the United States is one of the largest polluters in the world, if not the largest, so a large part of the solution to the problem has to come from within. And the United States has over the decades been a major barrier to reaching global environmental treaties.

The richer countries are polluting a lot more than the poorer countries. The latter aren't really the biggest problem (yet). So at least in my mind, I was framing this in terms of social classes within richer countries such as the US.

There are plenty of people well above middle class who still fight against any action on climate change. I doubt that lifting poor people in developing countries out of their misery by burning more coal will help change minds in rich industrialized countries.

FWIW, the middle class of Africa is larger than the middle class of North America.

https://qz.com/africa/1486764/how-big-is-africas-middle-clas...

(I don't know what that means, it's just a fact I picked up along the way. Like how more people know English in China than in North America. Just one of those weird thoughts that seems obvious in hindsight. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_education_in_China )

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> economic justice has to come first

Ecologically harmonious living is economical as well: your expenses are reduced, your health is improved, etc. In other words, ecologically harmonious living is economic justice. That's what that looks like in the real world: abundant (cheap) food, medicine, clothing, housing, etc.

The only downside to living in harmony with nature is for people who are committed to making money from waste (in the ultimate analysis.) E.g. GMO's are touted as solving world hunger, but really in practice they are used to lock-in corporate profits. The same company that sells you the poison sells you the seeds that resist the poison, seeds that you must buy each year: the contract states you can't save your own seed.

If you grow food in harmony with nature you don't need fertilizer ($$$) pesticide ($$$) GMO patented crop species ($$$) etc...

It's more profitable for the farmer and the product is healthier (reducing medical expenses, eh?)

Compare with, e.g.: Grow BIOINTENSIVE ( http://growbiointensive.org/ ) a system that uses around 5000f² (~450m²) per adult, produces a balanced complete diet, and increases soil volume and fertility year-on-year, while requiring no external inputs and little labor.

I have lots of other examples, poke me for more...

Anyway, the point is, "economic justice" is living in harmony with nature: they are the same thing.

> Like how more people know English in China than in North America.

This is definitely false. China has ~3x the population of the US, but far less than 1/3 speak English well enough to give directions on the streets of the major cities. (And indeed, your link estimates 100M to 200M English speakers in China, whereas North America has 334 million English speakers.)

I wonder if there is a group of people that is even more comfortable than the "middle class" that could afford this cost.

Sure, but that's a much smaller group. The historical argument is that the rise of the environmental movement in the US coincided with the postwar boom. Yes, some people became very wealthy during that time, but millions of people became wealthy enough that they started wanting things like national parks, clean rivers, breathable air, and so on.

The strength in numbers is worth a lot more that asking a few zillionaires to make it happen single-handedly.

Not when the few zillionaires are in command of zillions of dollars of capital, which is by far a more effective lever to do just about anything these days than any lever available to middle class and below.

This is totally wrong. Public opinion is by far the biggest roadblock. Believing that only some evil rich people are in the way is a coping mechanism. Read David Shor or Matt Yglesias on this.

You’re straw-manning. There is a solid argument with plenty of supporting evidence that a small minority observably has virtually all the political power in the United States[1].

That’s not to say public opinion is completely irrelevant, but when it can’t be directly controlled through mass media persuasion techniques it can be neutralized in various ways. Isn’t it interesting how the US is somehow evenly divided on so many “controversial” issues? One explanation is that those who are manipulating the public intentionally play up issues with that property.

[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...

Public opinion doesn’t develop technologies and materials and techniques. Huge, huge, huge amounts of capital does.

Also note: I didn't ascribe evil to them at all, please don't put words in my mouth.

In a democracy, public opinion controls the largest amount of capital in the world.

The US Federal government spends Elon Musk's net worth every month or so.

More like every week, if you include pensions, medicare, medicaid, social security, etc...

Right, 330,000,000 people in aggregate control that capital through countless layers of abstraction explicitly designed to prevent the vast majority of it from being allocated quickly. And this is in general a good thing because it’s an important mitigation against autocracy and catastrophic negligence.

The differences in the dynamics of these pools of capital are so enormous and so obvious I have to doubt that even you give your argument any credence.

Is the US Federal Government a democracy if the will of the people and political decisions negatively correlate?

https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746

Whether some is considered to be something (aka: "is") is typically just subconsciously checking off a few boxes, typically according to bias, which is affected by propaganda...and "democracy" has received a lot of marketing, and extra "guerrilla" marketing (Jan 6 coverage, etc) in the last few years.

> The strength in numbers is worth a lot more

Sentimental moment: I remember hearing this argument in the 1970s, and I even believed it then!

Fifty years later, I don't think there isn't going to be a negotiated solution with the rich. It was "us" (i.e. the biosphere) or them, and they already won, dooming our ecosystem.

All we have left is revenge at this point.

Economic justice would be benificial for the world as a whole. Also, poorer countries have to go through economic growth more or less the same way as the steps the richer countries took. There are very few shortcuts possible since the growth is gradual.

I think the problems are more around rich people not caring than poor people not caring.

The rich have a much larger impact on society, themselves and through corporations.

Well fortunately we recently passed a tipping point. Over half the population of the world are now middle class. This is largely due to a few hundred million Chinese, and more in SE Asia generally, entering the urban middle income bracket over the last few decades. The next few years are probably going to be rough, but global incomes have been going in the right direction for quite a while.

As for fossil fuels, utility scale solar is now cheaper than coal. Global development definitely means more CO2, but we’re right at an inflection point towards renewables.

If half of people are middle class, the rest is either poor or belongs to the few percent of people who happen to own half the world's assets. Would you describe such a situation as 'fortunate'?

Oh I’m not for one moment saying the situation now is good, or acceptable. We were discussing progress and particularly the growth of the global middle class. I’m pointing out the trend, that’s all.

> economic justice* has to come first

So shall we put the ongoing ecological and climate catastrophes on hold while we take 200 years to reach an egalitarian utopia? On the other hand, we're told that these catastrophes affect the poorest countries the most. From that point of view, environmentalism is "economic justice".

*Interesting term. Does that mean the economically better off have committed a crime, and must be punished?

I understand economic justice not as a justice system but as fairness. Everyone has the right be part of a good economy. When that is achieved, on such a level field, it is more easy to tackle important things like efficient use of resources.

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