"the necessity of securing more material wealth"
"Pulled mostly from the ranks of the professional class, mainstream climate activists have largely avoided class warfare in favour of various forms of sacrifice - from limiting personal consumption to campaigning for carbon pricing. Even the climate movement’s more radical currents - fossil infrastructure saboteurs, for instance - tend to position themselves against abstractions like growth, slipping into a ‘politics of less’ that denies the necessity of securing more material wealth for the majority of people. In worst case scenarios, such a politics fuels populist anger more readily captured by the Right than the Left, as France’s 2018 Yellow Vest protests, sparked by a fuel tax hike, suggest."
https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/reviews/individual-reviews/climate-struggle
Can't I combine the class struggle with social sacrifice? I'm in favor of securing more material wealth for the world's poor, defined as those living on less than $6 per day per person, which includes billions of people. But the rest of us would have to live on less than we currently do. [And I'm quixotically trying to lead by example, though perhaps too slowly with an unrealistic 2040 post-retirement endgoal that has so far required little if any real personal sacrifice -- it feels more like a rehearsal for living within my post-retirement income. But, to my credit, I am currently sacrificing 11% of my income, going up to 12% next month, setting an example of 5%/year degrowth.]
But I get that my sort of Solutionism, actually solving both the climate crisis and the poverty crisis, would not be popular among the world's upper, middle, and working classes who aren't living on less than $6 per day, and could send people running for the Right rather than the Left. I'd argue that this has already happened, that what we call the "Left" in our richer countries has already been driven insane by the implicit math of climate change, so has already been captured by the Right. We're all center-rightists now, with 1/3 of us on the right, 1/3 of us on the center, and 1/3 of us vaguely dissatisfied with having to choose between them.
The right-wing fantasy that has captured our entire 21st Century political spectrum is that nobody need sacrifice their personal material comforts to solve any of our problems. We'll simply grow out of our problems somehow by producing ever more stuff for ever more people. We'll keep turning up the planet's output dial and it will never break. The only thing we differ on is whether the rich should pay up to 35% (as of 2003) or up to 39% (as of 2013) of their income in taxes, or maybe up to 37% (as of 2018), and do we run annual budget deficits of over one trillion USD, over two trillion USD, or over three trillion USD. We did cut child poverty by half in the US temporarily but that feels like it was an accidental by-product of COVID-induced insanity that was quickly unfixed once the fever passed and we could fly on airplanes unmasked again.
https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/reviews/individual-reviews/climate-struggle
Can't I combine the class struggle with social sacrifice? I'm in favor of securing more material wealth for the world's poor, defined as those living on less than $6 per day per person, which includes billions of people. But the rest of us would have to live on less than we currently do. [And I'm quixotically trying to lead by example, though perhaps too slowly with an unrealistic 2040 post-retirement endgoal that has so far required little if any real personal sacrifice -- it feels more like a rehearsal for living within my post-retirement income. But, to my credit, I am currently sacrificing 11% of my income, going up to 12% next month, setting an example of 5%/year degrowth.]
But I get that my sort of Solutionism, actually solving both the climate crisis and the poverty crisis, would not be popular among the world's upper, middle, and working classes who aren't living on less than $6 per day, and could send people running for the Right rather than the Left. I'd argue that this has already happened, that what we call the "Left" in our richer countries has already been driven insane by the implicit math of climate change, so has already been captured by the Right. We're all center-rightists now, with 1/3 of us on the right, 1/3 of us on the center, and 1/3 of us vaguely dissatisfied with having to choose between them.
The right-wing fantasy that has captured our entire 21st Century political spectrum is that nobody need sacrifice their personal material comforts to solve any of our problems. We'll simply grow out of our problems somehow by producing ever more stuff for ever more people. We'll keep turning up the planet's output dial and it will never break. The only thing we differ on is whether the rich should pay up to 35% (as of 2003) or up to 39% (as of 2013) of their income in taxes, or maybe up to 37% (as of 2018), and do we run annual budget deficits of over one trillion USD, over two trillion USD, or over three trillion USD. We did cut child poverty by half in the US temporarily but that feels like it was an accidental by-product of COVID-induced insanity that was quickly unfixed once the fever passed and we could fly on airplanes unmasked again.