• for: climate crisis - elites, Kevin Anderson - elites, carbon emissions - elites, adjacency - elites - carbon inequality - incentives - luxury - capitalism

• title: A Habitable Earth Can No Longer Afford The Rich – And That Could Mean Me And You

• author: Kevin Anderson

• date: Nov. 29, 2023

• comment

• adjacency between
  • elites
  • capitalism
  • free market
  • incentives
  • double bind
  • wicked problem
  • inequality
  • carbon inequality
  • luxury industry
• adjacency statement
  • This article was pulled by "The Conversation" for being too controversial
  • It addresses the double-bind / wicked problems that we find ourselves in.
  • It's not just that the elites that are the highest per capita polluters, but
    • it is an indictment of the entire philosophy and worldview of capitalism and the market economy which produces winners and losers and
    • the winners reap enormous resource benefits, including being able to afford luxury items as rewards which constitute the largest ecological footprint of all
  • while at any one time, there is always a minority of the 1%, who hold the most outsized ecological footprint of all, the logic that produced that 1% also serves as the incentives for the majority of the 99%, who because of the inherent precarity created by capitalism, will fight and struggle to become part of that 1%
  • So while one generation of the 1% die off, a new generation is born and created by the incentive structure of scarcity and precarity.
  • In this sense, capitalism has its own self-reinforcing, positive feedback loop that keeps the masses of the disenfranchised aspiring to the same high resource and ecological footprint, luxury lifestyle
  • Look at the culture industry of sports, entertainment, movies, music, TV, etc. and of business in general. The leaders of these and ALL fields are celebrated as heros and they all reward themselves with an ultra-high carbon intensity, luxury lifestyle.
  • Unless we do more than simply demonize the current set of elites, and recognize the root cause and change the incentive structure itself, we will only ever deal with the symptom and not the problem, and continue to generate the next generation of elites
  • The luxury lifestyle industry is a important role-player in the self-reinforcing feedback loop

• for: quote - luxury cannot be democratized, 1% - democracy, elites - democracy, adjacency - luxury - democracy, luxury is not democratic, luxury is inequality, Andre Gorz, Terrestrial website, adjancency - luxury - democracy, quote luxury

• quote

  • ... By its design as by its original destination, the car is a luxury good. And luxury, in essence, cannot be democratized: if everyone has access to luxury, no one benefits from it; on the contrary: everyone cheats, frustrates and dispossesses others and is cheated, frustrated and dispossessed by them.
• author: Andre Gorz
• date: Sept. 25, 2023

• publication: Terrestrial

  • https://www.terrestres.org/2023/09/25/jadore-la-bagnole-andre-gorz-repond-a-macron/

• comment

  • insightful comment reveals an adjacency between luxury and democracy that is obvious in hindsight, but missed seeing in foresight!

• adjacency between:

  • luxury
  • democracy
• adjacency statement
  • luxury is, by definition a premium artefact so by definition is beyond the reach of most people. It is therefore un-democratic by design.

• for: W2W, carbon inequality, carbon footprint - 1%, carbon emissions - 1%, luxury advertising, luxury advertising contracts, carbon emissions - luxury goods
• key insight
  • the elites are often the main popularizers, influencers and propagandists of the fantasy of overconsumption
  • culture of overconsumption
  • such elites have a close tie to the luxury industry via large advertising contracts
  • Media posts critical of the carbon air travel emissions of famous DJ named DJ Snake offers a prime example of a common attitude of privilege and self-righteousness found amongst a number of elites

• for: carbon inequality, decarbonizing luxury, decarbonizing luxury goods, carbon emissions - luxury goods, W2W, TPF,

• question

  • Given that the 1% have the same carbon emissions as the bottom half of humanity, does the sustainability impacts of the decarbonization efforts of the luxury industry measure up to stay under earth system boundaries in time?
• reference
  • carbon inequality
  • https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=carbon+inequality

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Even more recent research adds to this:

See the annotated Oxfam report: Linked In from the author: https://hyp.is/RGd61D_IEeyaWyPmSL8tXw/www.linkedin.com/posts/timgore_inequality-parisagreement-emissionsgap-activity-6862352517032943616-OHL- Annotations on full report: https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Foxfamilibrary.openrepository.com%2Fbitstream%2Fhandle%2F10546%2F621305%2Fbn-carbon-inequality-2030-051121-en.pdf&group=__world__

and the annotated Hot or Cool report: https://hyp.is/KKhrLj_bEeywAIuGCjROAg/hotorcool.org/hc-posts/release-governments-in-g20-countries-must-enable-1-5-aligned-lifestyles/ https://hyp.is/zo0VbD_bEeydJf_xcudslg/hotorcool.org/hc-posts/release-governments-in-g20-countries-must-enable-1-5-aligned-lifestyles/

This suggests that perhaps the failure of the COP meetings may be partially due to focusing at the wrong level and demographics. the top 1 and 10 % live in every country. A focus on the wealthy class is not a focus area of COP negotiations perse. The COP meetings are focused on nation states. Interventions targeting this demographic may be better suited at the scale of individuals or civil society.

Many studies show there are no extra gains in happiness beyond a certain point of material wealth, and point to the harmful impacts of wealth accumulation, known as affluenza, and show many health effects: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1950124/, https://theswaddle.com/how-money-affects-rich-people/, https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-dark-reasons-so-many-rich-people-are-miserable-human-beings-2018-02-22, https://www.nbcnews.com/better/pop-culture/why-wealthy-people-may-be-less-successful-love-ncna837306, https://www.apa.org/research/action/speaking-of-psychology/affluence,

A Human Inner Transformation approach based on an open source praxis called Deep Humanity is one example of helping to transform affluenza and leveraging it to accelerate transition.

Anderson has contextualized the scale of such an impact in his other presentations but not here. A recent example is the temporary emission decreases due to covid 19. A 6.6% global decrease was determined from this study: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00090-3#:~:text=After%20rising%20steadily%20for%20decades,on%20daily%20fossil%20fuel%20emissions. with the US contributing 13% due to lockdown impacts on vehicular travel (both air and ground). After the pandemic ends, experts expect a strong rebound effect.

The bottom-up nature of this cluster makes it the focus area for civil society movements, human inner transformation (HIT) approaches and cultural methodologies.

Changing the mindset or paradigm from which the system arises is the most powerful place to intervene in a system as Donella Meadows pointed out decades ago in her research on system leverage points: https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/

The sleeping giant of billions of potential change actors remains dormant. How do we awaken them and mobilize them. If we can do this, it can constitute the emergence of a third unidentified actor in system change.

The Stop Reset Go (SRG) initiative is focused on this thematic lens, bottom-up, rapid whole system change, with Deep Humanity (DH) as the open-source praxis to address the needed shift in worldview advocated by Meadows. One of the Deep Humanity programs is based on addressing the psychological deficits of the wealthy, and transforming them into heroes for the transition, by redirecting their WEALTH-to-WELLth.

There are a number of strategic demographics that can be targeted in methodical evidence-based ways. Each of these is a leverage point and can bring about social tipping points.

A number of 2021 reports characterize the outsized impact of the top 1% and top 10% of humanity. Unless their luxury, high ecological footprint behavior is reeled in, humanity won't stand a chance. Annotation of Oxfam report: https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Foxfamilibrary.openrepository.com%2Fbitstream%2Fhandle%2F10546%2F621305%2Fbn-carbon-inequality-2030-051121-en.pdf&group=__world__ Annotation of Hot or Cool report: https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhotorcool.org%2Fhc-posts%2Frelease-governments-in-g20-countries-must-enable-1-5-aligned-lifestyles%2F&group=__world__

See the annotated Oxfam report: Linked In from the author: https://hyp.is/RGd61D_IEeyaWyPmSL8tXw/www.linkedin.com/posts/timgore_inequality-parisagreement-emissionsgap-activity-6862352517032943616-OHL- Annotations on full report: https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Foxfamilibrary.openrepository.com%2Fbitstream%2Fhandle%2F10546%2F621305%2Fbn-carbon-inequality-2030-051121-en.pdf&group=__world__

and the annotated Hot or Cool report: https://hyp.is/KKhrLj_bEeywAIuGCjROAg/hotorcool.org/hc-posts/release-governments-in-g20-countries-must-enable-1-5-aligned-lifestyles/ https://hyp.is/zo0VbD_bEeydJf_xcudslg/hotorcool.org/hc-posts/release-governments-in-g20-countries-must-enable-1-5-aligned-lifestyles/

Policy alone may not be sufficient to change this deeply ingrained luxury lifestyle. It may require deep and meaningful education of one's deeper humanity leading to a shift in worldviews and value systems that deprioritize materially luxurious lifestyles for using that wealth to redistribute to build the future wellbeing ecocivilization. Transform the wealthy into the heros of the transition. Shaming them and labeling them as victims will only create distance. Rather, the most constructive approach is a positive one that shifts our own perspective from holding them as villains to heros.

This underscores the critical nature of dealing with the cultural shift of luxury lifestyle. It is recognized as a "hot potato" issue, which implies policy change may be slow and difficult.

Policy changes and new legal tools are ways to force an unwilling individual or group into a behavior change.

A more difficult but potentially more effective way to achieve this cultural shift is based on Donella Meadows' leverage points: https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/ which identifies the top leverage point as: The mindset or paradigm out of which the system — its goals, power structure, rules, its culture — arises.

The Stop Reset Go (SRG) open collective project applies the Deep Humanity (DH) Human Inner Transformation (HIT) process to effect impactful Social Outer Transformation (SOT). This is based on the inner-to-outer flow: The heart feels, the mind thinks, the body acts and a social impact manifests in our shared, public collective human reality.

Meadows top leverage point identifies narratives, stories and value systems that are inner maps to our outer behavior as critical causal agents to transform.

We need to take a much deeper look at the pysche of the luxury lifestyle. Philospher David Loy has done extensive research on this already. https://www.davidloy.org/media.html

Loy is a Buddhist scholar, but Buddhist philosophy can be understood secularly and across all religions.

Loy cites the work of cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, especially his groundbreaking Pulitzer-prize-winning book: The Denial of Death. Becker wrote:

"Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order to blindly and dumbly rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with. The lower animals are, of course, spared this painful contradiction, as they lack a symbolic identity and the self-consciousness that goes with it. They merely act and move reflexively as they are driven by their instincts. If they pause at all, it is only a physical pause; inside they are anonymous, and even their faces have no name. They live in a world without time, pulsating, as it were, in a state of dumb being. This is what has made it so simple to shoot down whole herds of buffalo or elephants. The animals don't know that death is happening and continue grazing placidly while others drop alongside them. The knowledge of death is reflective and conceptual, and animals are spared it. They live and they disappear with the same thoughtlessness: a few minutes of fear, a few seconds of anguish, and it is over. But to live a whole lifetime with the fate of death haunting one's dreams and even the most sun-filled days—that's something else."

But Loy goes beyond mortality salience and strikes to the heart of our psychological construction of the Self that is the root of our consumption and materialism exasperated crisis.

To reach the wealthy in a compassionate manner, we must recognize that the degree of wealth and materialist accumulation may be in many cases proportional to the anxiety of dying, the anxiety of the groundlessness of the Self construction itself.

Helping all humans to liberate from this anxiety is monumental, and also applies to the wealthy. The release of this anxiety will naturally result in breaking through the illusion of materialism, seeing its false promises.

Those of the greatest material wealth are often also of the greatest spiritual poverty. As we near the end of our lives, materialism's promise may begin to lose its luster and our deepest unanswered questions begin to regain prominence.

At the end of the day, policy change may only effect so much change. What is really required is a reeducation campaign that results in voluntary behavior change that significantly reduces high impact luxury lifestyles. An exchange for something even more valued is a potential answer to this dilemma.

This Oxfam commissioned study points to how elites hold the rest of humanity hostage: https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/carbon-emissions-richest-1-set-be-30-times-15degc-limit-2030.

What policy changes will governments enact? Can law against high carbon consumption be drafted into existence based on the premise that such extreme high carbon lifestyle actually constitutes crimes against humanity?

Civil society must act as well. Individual’s must undergo a paradigm shift of the whole idea of luxury. It must be completely decoupled from its high carbon footprint. Carbon offsets are no good. Planting trees is yet another simplistic, one dimensional, reductionist solution....destroy an ancient forest and replace it with invasive monoculture tree crops. It is a false equivalency that enables the continuation of a high carbon lifestyle.

Cultural change is required at this stage. This is an opportunity to educate the wealthy and give them a last opportunity to STOP their high carbon emission behavior, RESET it to low carbon redemptive behavior, and help civilization GO at the greatest speed possible towards a wellbeing ecocivilization.

Another recent report from theNot or Cool Institute validates these findings:

https://hotorcool.org/hc-posts/release-governments-in-g20-countries-must-enable-1-5-aligned-lifestyles/

https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/climate-carbon-footprint-luxury-lifestyle-study/

These should be identified.

Wow! Will carbon neutral fuels be greenwashing or real solutions? Will carbon neutral SpaceX flights be greenwashing, or real carbon neutrality?

The elites point the way for those in even the lowest income brackets to follow. This crosses cultures as well. Capitalism trumps colonialism as former colonized peoples reserve the right to taste the fruits of capitalism. Hence, hard work, ingenuity and leveraging opportunity to accumulate all the signs and symbols of wealth, joining the colonialist biased elites is seen as having arrived at success, even though it means contributing to the destruction of the planetary commons. The aspirations to wealth must be uniformly deprioritized in order to align our culture in the right direction that will rescue our species from the impact of following this misdirection for the past century.

This is an important observation that can be used to develop a transformative strategy. There is a culturally-constructed, positive, psychological affect associated with being in these spaces. How can these be deconstructed?

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Because of an abundance of such luxury goods, trade also followed and therefore was a valuabe part for economics especially when trade was booming. Because it specialized in luxury things like oil and wine, this area likely carried great wealth. One hardship of trying to trade in this area are the mountains itself, with travel technology dim it could take weeks or months to get through mountains.

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If a high-end brand comes out with a low-end offering, it is diluting the high-end part of their brand message. Apple will never come out with a low-end version of the iPhone because it would dilute the message of being a premium phone.

Superhuman is the closest thing Julian can think of to a luxury software product. One reason might be that Superhuman has some signalling built in: It will add a little "sent by superhuman" to your signature.

Julian Lehr posits that because software purchases are less visible, their signalling power is reduced. This is why, for instance, you don't see any luxury software products: Because you cannot signal you're in on it.

Tongue and cheek. The author is trying to show how ridiculous our feelings toward the less fortunate can be.