Ban private jets to address climate crisis, says Thomas Piketty
“We have to put class and the studies of inequality between social classes right at the centre of our analyses of environmental challenges in general,” Piketty said.
“If you don’t, you will just not be able to get a majority [of people in favour of strong action] and will not be able to make it.”
The prominent French economist is the author of the seminal work Capital in the Twenty-First Century and one of the world’s leading thinkers on inequality.
His work was highly influential after the financial crisis of 2008, and he is increasingly turning his attention to the climate crisis as a co-director of the World Inequality Lab.
While environmentalists have taken aim at developed countries, contrasting their high emissions with the plight of the developing world, any form of
👉class analysis – addressing the concerns of poor people within rich countries – has been largely missing, according to Piketty.
“One of the big failures of the environmental movement so far has been that they tend to ignore the class dimension and social inequality. I find it very striking.”
He said the issue of carbon inequality was now one of the world’s most pressing problems.
The carbon inequality gap “is now bigger than it has been since the 19th century”, he said.
This is a major factor in the attacks that are being made on climate policy from some quarters.
Poorly targeted policies on energy around the world place a greater burden on poor people, for whom energy, food and housing take up far larger shares of household budgets than for the well-off.
This is provoking a backlash, according to Piketty.
If climate policies are seen as unfair, affecting people on low incomes while those with luxurious lifestyles carry on untouched, protest movements will emerge, like the “gilets jaunes” who brought France to a standstill five years ago, he said.
“Everybody now understands that everybody would have to make some effort [to cut emissions], it’s not going to be only the rich.
But this effort has to be distributed in a way that can be accepted by the population.
If you don’t address this, we are going to have a gigantic yellow vest movement everywhere.
And that’s a little bit what we have.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/22/ban-private-jets-to-address-climate-crisis-says-thomas-piketty?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
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