• for: elites - secret hotel parties

• for: academic communication to the public - importance, elites - two types, key insight - elites, key insight - science communication

• comment

• key insight

  • Elites are necessary in every society
  • Historically, people who strongly believe that the current elites aren't necessary or are harmful often become the revolutionaries who become the new elites
  • elites need to speak in their own specialist language to each other but there are two kinds of elites
    • those who serve society
    • those who serve themselves
    • often, we have fox in sheep's clothing - elites who serve themselves but disguise themselves in the language of elites who serve others in order to gain access to power ,
    • we normally think of wealthy people as elites, but Harari classifies scientists as also a kind of elite
  • elites may be necessary but
    • We are caught in a double bind, a wicked problem as elites are also the world's greatest per capita energy consumers and their outsized ecological, consumption and energy footprint is now a existential threat to the survival of our species

• references

  • Kevin Anderson: A Habitable Earth Can No Longer Afford The Rich – And That Could Mean Me And You
    • https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fclimateuncensored.com%2F1485-2%2F&group=world
  • The role of high-socioeconomic-status people in locking in or rapidly reducing energy-driven greenhouse gas emissions
    • https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nature.com%2Farticles%2Fs41560-021-00900-y&group=world
  • Millionaire spending incompatible with 1.5 °C ambitions
    • https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sciencedirect.com%2Fscience%2Farticle%2Fpii%2FS2666791622000252&group=world

• for: quote - Kevin Anderson, quote - elite positive feedback carbon inequality loop, climate crisis - societal aspirations, elites - societal aspirations, societal aspirations, key insight - societal aspirations

• quote

  • This 1% of humanity uses its awesome power to manipulate
    • societal aspirations and
    • the narratives around climate change.
  • These extend from
    • well-funded advertising to
    • pseudo-technical solutions,
    • and financialisation of carbon emissions (and increasingly, nature) to
    • labelling extreme any meaningful narrative that questions inequality and power.

• comment

• key insight - societal aspirations
  • it is the societal aspiration of the logic of capitalism and the free market that continues to create the next generation of the 1%
  • How can the luxury industry NOT BE high carbon intensity? It's an oxymoron. High carbon is baked into the definition of luxury, and it is luxury goods and services which accelerate climate breakdown.
  • The elites have a strong feeling of entitlement. They feel they DESERVE to reward themselves with a luxury lifestyle. That aspiration and reward structure multiplied by 80 million (1% of 8 billion) is a major variable driving the climate crisis

• for: carbon inequality, question - new COP - focused on elites?

• comment

  • while COP28 fights over which nations bear what responsibility, from this perspective, there is an entirely different class of people that must be held responsible, not at the nation state level, but at the individual level. Why isn't there a COP where the elites are held responsible?

• question

  • Are we making a grave category error in holding the wrong class of people responsible? Should questions of carbon equity concern both high polluting nations AND individuals?
  • At the very least, should we formally recognize a parallel set of responsibilities and elevate that recognition to the level of COP conventions to deal with the problem?

• 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: Kevin Anderson, transition, climate equity, climate justice, climate justice - Kevin Anderson, carbon inequality - Kevin Anderson, life within planetary boundaries, lifestyle within planetary boundaries - elites, climate crisis - Kevin Anderson

• summary

  • Kevin offers a picture of what a world within the stable climate planetary boundary would look like for the wealthy of the planet.

• for: answer to above question

• answer : two answers

  • first, the elite have the majority of
    • wealth
    • control of setting policies
    • control of the media
    • and they work really hard at controlling policy and media
    • and the people
      • hate the system
      • generally hate them
  • second, social tipping points occur. Something happened in over place, then it spreads to other places

• for: staying within 1.5 Deg C - elites - lifestyle changes - property and building

• example:

  • Vancouver, B.C. has artificially inflated property market
  • Local Vancouver city government does not want to change bylaws that advantage elites
  • Climate change equity issues need to become part of the argument

• reference

  • https://www.straight.com/city-culture/why-did-city-council-vote-to-keep-shaughnessy-for-mansion-owning-elite

• for: elites - lifestyle change, great simplification, worldview transition -materially-excessive and wonder-poor to materially- sufficient and wonder-rich, awakening wonder, Deep Humanity, BEing journeys

• comment

• possible way to have more than one home
• a group can co-create and mutually invest in a regenerative timeshare
  • an example is to co-invest in a regenerative local community economy based around a regerative agroforestry system which has community owned and supported agriculture with year round Regenerative work and sustainable accommodations
  • Deep Humanity BEing journeys can play a role to re-awaken wonder

• for: W2W, inequality, 1%, oligarch, elites, kleptocrats, civil society - exploitation, TUSN, Transnational Uncivil Society Network
• title: How the kleptocrats and oligarchs hunt civil society groups to the ends of the Earth
• author: Peter Rinko
• comment
  • This article explores the research work of Alexander Cooley, John Heathershaw and Ricard Soares de Oliverira who coauthored the paper

Transnational Uncivil Society Networks: kleptocracy’s global fightback against liberal activism - reference - https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:5e5a3052-c693-4991-a7cc-bc2b47134467/download_file?file_format=application%2Fpdf&safe_filename=Cooley_et_al_2023_transnational_uncivil_society.pdf&type_of_work=Journal+article

• 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

• One energy demand reduction strategy
  • Cap the top 20% of energy users
  • while allowing those people
    • who use little energy and
    • have poverty-level incomes
  • to be able to
    • increase their consumption levels and
    • improve their quality of life.

• Documentary on wealth in Germany
  • It is good to analyze the attitudes of the elites to understand their motivations and worldviews

• Table
  • Interrelationship of wealth and emissions per capita. //
• It is clear that we have an urgent need
• to bend the curve of emissions of elites

!- Thomas Piketty : climate change impacts on inequality - climate change extreme events can very quickly cause the public attitudes to the elites to deteriorate very rapidly

!- Michael Hudson : critique of Thomas Piketty's books - Hudson comments that Piketty's books were not politically threatening to the elites - Piketty's solution is to tax the elites but this is no threat to the elites because they have wealth concealed in offshore accounts - billionaires strategy: don't make one penny of TAXABLE income

China and India will have the largest growth of elites between 2015 and 2030. Therefore, strategic, culturally appropriate interventions need to be applied to this elite demographic.

Good terminology- space of flows, denoting the necessity of (carbon intensive) travel to move from one place to another. Seen from the 19th century, even the average car-driving citizen of the 20th century is elite. A 100 hp car, which is now almost an average power rating of most internal combustion engines, is the power equivalent to the 19th century analog of maintaining 100 horses.

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 may be the case for high-earners, but where do these people sit with respect to the higher elite or "leisure class"?

Are these hard working high-earners a new class of people that has emerged that aren't the previous elite of the mid-1900s?

What effect does the rise of finacialization (versus manufacturing or service sectors) since the 1970's have on this shift? Did these high-earners arise out of a hole in the market to service the elites on the highest rung up to make their wealth grow faster?

There seems to be a hole in this argument with respect to the prior quote:

Fifty, 60, 70 years ago, you could tell how poor somebody was by how hard they worked. Today, that relationship has been completely reversed. Elites work for a living. They work harder than they used to. They work harder in terms of brute hours than the middle class on average, and they get most of their income by working.