A new study has highlighted the inequality underriding the climate crisis.
The paper, published in Nature Sustainability Thursday, looked at the difference in per-capita emissions across the global economic spectrum between 1990 and 2019. During this time, the top one percent of emitters were responsible for nearly a quarter of all emissions contributing to the climate crisis and the top 10 percent are now responsible for nearly half of the total.
“In my benchmark estimates, I find that the bottom 50% of the world population emitted 12% of global emissions in 2019, whereas the top 10% emitted 48% of the total,” the study’s sole author Lucas Chancel of the Paris School of Economics’ World Inequality Lab wrote. “Since 1990, the bottom 50% of the world population has been responsible for only 16% of all emissions, whereas the top 1% has been responsible for 23% of the total.”
Bill Gates called for realism in the climate change debate.
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Bill Gates said only innovation can help solve the climate crisis.
He told Bloomberg Zero it’s “unrealistic” to expect people to radically change how they live.
Gates says he played a key role in the Inflation Reduction Act, which will help cut carbon emissions.
Bill Gates said the climate crisis will not be solved by expecting people to radically change their lifestyle over concerns about the environment.
“Anyone who says telling people to stop eating meat or wanting to have a nice house will basically change human desires, I think, that is too difficult,” he told Bloomberg’s Zero podcast. “You can make a case for it, but I don’t think it’s realistic for that to play a central role.”
The billionaire philanthropist discussed the US climate bill in the podcast and said that climate change could not be solved without innovation.
“We’re not even trying to make breakthroughs, such as inventing an economic way of making aviation fuel, cement or steel,” he said. “The existing tools only apply to areas like electricity generation and don’t apply to most of the emissions.”
Gates has long been a supporter of climate change innovation. In 2015 he founded TerraPower, which designs nuclear reactors, and launched Breakthrough Energy, an investment vehicle that has invested in almost 100 clean-energy companies.
He has also funded a number of start-ups including Turntide, which creates energy-efficient electric motors, and lithium start-up Mangrove Lithium. Last year he published a book titled “How To Avoid A Climate Disaster” that calls for climate innovation.
The world’s fifth-richest person also said in the interview that he played a key role in the Inflation Reduction Act, which has allocated almost $370 billion to help cut US carbon emissions by 40% over the next eight years.
“I am getting governments involved and this latest bill I was personally involved in a lot of what got written into it and working with the key senators in the last month to get it passed,” he said.
Biden says hurricane could ‘be deadliest in state’s history’ as storm regains strength and heads towards South Carolina
The “catastrophic” scale of the damage wreaked by Hurricane Ian’s 150mph deadly rampage across Florida has become clearer as emergency crews rescued trapped residents from flooded homes, and authorities expressed fears of a growing death toll.
As South Carolina braced for Ian to make a second landfall on Friday, search and rescue crews in south-west Florida conducted hundreds of missions in areas that were submerged by a storm surge of up to 18ft after one of the most powerful storms to strike the US swept ashore on Wednesday.
The win was the result of “hundreds of national and grassroots organizations, along with concerned Americans from coast to coast, working together for the health and safety of frontline communities and a livable future for the planet,” said one campaigner.
A network of mutual aid groups in Puerto Rico were quick to react when the island lost power on Sept. 18 before being hit by Hurricane Fiona. Nearly 750,000 people are still without power a week after the storm caused mass flooding, landslides and property damage.
Mutual aid groups like the feminist community-based organization Taller Salud, the collective sustenance and solidarity group Brigada Solidaria del Oeste and LGBTQIA+ support group Waves Ahead have provided Puerto Rico residents with direct economic aid, as well as emergency essentials like first-aid kits, water filters, solar lamps, nonperishable food, toiletries and water purification devices.
Puerto Rico’s infrastructure system had not yet recovered from Hurricane Maria in 2017, which caused the deaths of nearly 3,000 people and decimated the island’s health care, water and power systems.
In 2021, the private company LUMA Energy took over management of the electric power grid. Activists this summer protested the privatization of Puerto Rico’s energy system, citing chronic power outages and frequent price increases. At a protest in Old San Juan last month, thousands of protesters and journalists were met with violence from the police. One protester alleged that they were hit directly in the face multiple times, and an elderly man claimed that he was repeatedly hit in the leg and had to be taken to the hospital because of the police’s use of tear gas.
In August, the anti-capitalist group Jornada: Se Acabaron Las Promesas took part in the protests, alleging that the U.S. colonial junta was forcing privatization to break up labor unions and continue the legacy of U.S. imperialism in Puerto Rico.
Similarly, activists have asserted that the devastation caused by Hurricane Fiona exemplifies both the legacy of U.S. colonialism and climate change, which has been exacerbated by the Global North. As Puerto Rican doctoral fellow Andrew J. Padilla explained in a tweet: “Puerto Rico is in full blackout in large part because of US imposed austerity & forced privatization of our electrical grid.”
In the aftermath of the damage caused by Hurricane Fiona, activists have demanded that immediate climate action be taken by the U.S. government, along with urgent relief efforts to the island. The Sunrise Movement tweeted in response to the disaster, “The catastrophic flooding and loss of power are the result of colonial policies that put profit over the people of PR. Puerto Rico deserves Green New Deal-style policies that will build a *public* green energy grid, and invest millions into social services.”
Since the U.S. government’s neglect of Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, Puerto Rican communities have organized self-managed spaces known as Mutual Support Centers, or Centros de Apoyo Mutuo. These community support centers are built upon the principles of mutual support, solidarity, community sovereignty, sustainability and justice. What’s more, the networks practice community-self management and provide soup kitchens, collective healing, fair housing and knowledge sharing with community members.
Puerto Rican practices of mutual aid are a direct decolonizing practice that disrupts the colonialist logic of individualism and capitalism. “Mutual aid in Puerto Rico is a story about injustice and lack of access to resources and power channeled into action in order to survive,” Isa Rodríguez Soto, an independent scholar and applied anthropologist in Puerto Rico, explained in the North American Congress on Latin America. “Tired of watching people die after Hurricane María, Puerto Ricans needed to do two things: fill the immediate gaps in order to keep people alive and, at the same time, continue to demand accountability and action from governments.”
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While Puerto Rico does have a strong history of utilizing community solidarity and mutual aid as tools to build community power in the face of U.S. imperialism, activists are adamant about highlighting Puerto Ricans’ resilience as a survival tool developed to endure U.S. driven colonialism, capitalism and climate change.
In an interview with Truthout, Democracy Now! co-host Juan González said, “The reality is that the Puerto Rican people, since Hurricane Maria, have actually been … able to recognize the fact that the government, when it comes to these crises, is inept, and many people have been able to develop their own ability to survive.”
Capitalist measures to fix the climate have not worked, as two recent books show, so the key is to link working-class and ecological movements, argues Elaine Graham-Leigh
Stan Cox, A War on the Earth?
In so many ways, you still wouldn’t know it — not, that is, if you focused on the Pentagon budget or the economic growth paradigm that rules this country and our world — but this planet is in a crisis of a sort humanity has never before faced. Whether you’re considering heat in the American West, floods in Pakistan, the drying up of the Yangtze River in China, record drought in Europe, or the unparalleled warming of the Arctic, we are, as scientists have been pointing out (and ever more of us ordinary people have noted), in an increasingly “uncharted territory of destruction.” In the process, ever more climate “tipping points” stand in danger of being passed as the overheating of this planet becomes the stuff of everyday life.
And sadly, despite all that, Vladimir Putin’s Russia brutally invaded Ukraine, ensuring the release of yet more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere as, among other things, various European countries were forced to turn to greater coal use. Meanwhile, the U.S. and China, the two largest greenhouse gas emitters, are now heading into what’s being called, without the slightest sense of irony, a “new cold war.” In the process, responding to House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s decision to visit Taiwan, China recently suspended planned climate talks between the two countries.
Today, TomDispatch regular Stan Cox, author of The Green New Deal and Beyond: Ending the Climate Emergency While We Still Can, explores just what it means, in climate terms, for the U.S., no matter the administration, to pour ever more taxpayer dollars into the Pentagon and the rest of the national security state. Yes, it’s long been commonplace to claim that war is hell (and if you don’t believe that, just check out the nightmare in Ukraine right now). One thing should be ever clearer: sadly enough, that way of life is now all too literally the path to hell. Let Cox explain. Tom
The Nightmare of Military Spending on an Overheating Planet – A Big Carbon Bootprint and a Giant Sucking Sound in the National Budget
On October 1st, the U.S. military will start spending the more than $800 billion Congress is going to provide it with in fiscal year 2023. And that whopping sum will just be the beginning. According to the calculations of Pentagon expert William Hartung, funding for various intelligence agencies, the Department of Homeland Security, and work on nuclear weaponry at the Energy Department will add another $600 billion to what you, the American taxpayer, will be spending on national security.
That $1.4 trillion for a single year dwarfs Congress’s one-time provision of approximately $300 billion under the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) for what’s called “climate mitigation and adaptation.” And mind you, that sum is to be spent over a number of years. In contrast to the IRA, which was largely a climate bill (even if hardly the best version of one), this country’s military spending bills are distinctly anti-human, anti-climate, and anti-Earth. And count on this: Congress’s military appropriations will, in all too many ways, cancel out the benefits of its new climate spending.
Here are just the three most obvious ways our military is an enemy of climate mitigation. First, it produces huge quantities of greenhouse gases, while wreaking other kinds of ecological havoc. Second, when the Pentagon does take climate change seriously, its attention is almost never focused on reducing greenhouse gas emissions but on preparing militarily for a climate-changed world, including the coming crisis of migration and future climate-induced armed conflicts globally. And third, our war machine wastes hundreds of billions of dollars annually that should instead be spent on climate mitigation, along with other urgent climate-related needs.
The Pentagon’s Carbon Bootprint
The U.S. military is this globe’s largest institutional consumer of petroleum fuels. As a result, it produces greenhouse gas emissions equal to about 60 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually. Were the Pentagon a country, those figures would place it just below Ireland and Finland in a ranking of national carbon emissions. Or put another way, our military surpasses the total national emissions of Bulgaria, Croatia, and Slovenia combined.
A lot of those greenhouse gases flow from the construction, maintenance, and use of its 800 military bases and other facilities on 27 million acres across the United States and the world. The biggest source of emissions from actual military operations is undoubtedly the burning of jet fuel. A B-2 bomber, for instance, emits almost two tons of carbon dioxide when flying a mere 50 miles, while the Pentagon’s biggest boondoggle, the astronomically costly F-35 combat aircraft, will emit “only” one ton for every 50 miles it flies.
Those figures come from “Military- and Conflict-Related Emissions,” a June 2022 report by the Perspectives Climate Group in Germany. In it, the authors express regret for the optimism they had exhibited two decades earlier when it came to the reduction of global military greenhouse gas emissions and the role of the military in experimenting with new, clean forms of energy:
In the process of us writing this report and looking at our article written 20 years ago, the initial notion of assessing military activities… as potential ‘engines of progress’ for novel renewable technologies was shattered by the Iraq War, followed by the horror of yet another large-scale ground war, this time in Europe… All our attention should be directed towards achieving the 1.5° target [of global temperature rise beyond the preindustrial level set at the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015]. If we fail in this endeavor, the repercussions will be more deadly than all conflicts we have witnessed in the last decades.
In March, the Defense Department announced that its proposed budget for fiscal year 2023 would include a measly $3.1 billion for “addressing the climate crisis.” That amounts to less than 0.4% of the department’s total spending and, as it happens, two-thirds of that little sliver of funding will go not to climate mitigation itself but to protecting military facilities and activities against the future impact of climate change. Worse yet, only a tiny portion of the remainder would go toward reducing the greenhouse-gas emissions or other environmental damage the armed forces itself will produce.
In a 2021 Climate Adaptation Plan, the Pentagon claimed, however vaguely, that it was aiming for a future in which it could “operate under changing climate conditions, preserving operational capability, and enhancing the natural and manmade systems essential to the Department’s success.” It projected that “in worst-case scenarios, climate-change-related impacts could stress economic and social conditions that contribute to mass migration events or political crises, civil unrest, shifts in the regional balance of power, or even state failure. This may affect U.S. national interests directly or indirectly, and U.S. allies or partners may request U.S. assistance.”
Sadly enough, however, as far as the Pentagon is concerned, an overheated world will only open up further opportunities for the military. In a classic case of projection, its analysts warn that “malign actors may try to exploit regional instability exacerbated by the impacts of climate change to gain influence or for political or military advantage.” (Of course, Americans would never act in such a manner since, by definition, the Pentagon is a benign actor, but will have to respond accordingly.)
The CIA and other intelligence agencies seem to share the Pentagon’s vision of our hotter future as a growth opportunity. A 2021 climate risk assessment by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) paid special attention to the globe’s fastest-warming region, the Arctic. Did it draw the intelligence community’s interest because of the need to prevent a meltdown of the planet’s ice caps if the Earth is to remain a livable place for humanity? What do you think?
In fact, its authors write revealingly of the opportunities, militarily speaking, that such a scenario will open up as the Arctic melts:
Arctic and non-Arctic states almost certainly will increase their competitive activities as the region becomes more accessible because of warming temperatures and reduced ice. … Military activity is likely to increase as Arctic and non-Arctic states seek to protect their investments, exploit new maritime routes, and gain strategic advantages over rivals. The increased presence of China and other non-Arctic states very likely will amplify concerns among Arctic states as they perceive a challenge to their respective security and economic interests.
In other words, in an overheated future, a new “cold” war will no longer be restricted to what were once the more temperate parts of the planet.
If, in climate change terms, the military worries about anything globally, it’s increased human migration from devastated areas like today’s flood-ridden Pakistan, and the conflicts that could come with it. In cold bureaucratese, that DNI report predicted that, as ever more of us (or rather, in national security state terms, of them) begin fleeing heat, droughts, floods, and tropical cyclones, “Displaced populations will increasingly demand changes to international refugee law to consider their claims and provide protection as climate migrants or refugees, and affected populations will fight for legal payouts for loss and damages resulting from climate effects.” Translation: We won’t pay climate reparations and we won’t pay to help keep other peoples’ home climates livable, but we’re more than willing to spend as much as it takes to block them from coming here, no matter the resulting humanitarian nightmares.
Is It Finally Time to Defund War?
Along with the harm caused by its outsized greenhouse gas emissions and its exploitation of climate chaos as an excuse for imperialism, the Pentagon wreaks terrible damage by soaking up trillions of dollars in government funds that should have gone to meet all-too-human needs, mitigate climate change, and repair the ecological damage the Pentagon itself has caused in its wars in this century.
Months before Russia invaded Ukraine, ensuring that yet more greenhouse gases would be pumped into our atmosphere, a group of British scholars lamented the Biden administration’s enthusiasm for military funding. They wrote that, “rather than scaling back military spending to pay for urgent climate-related spending, initial budget requests for military appropriations are actually increasing even as some U.S. foreign adventures are supposedly coming to a close.” It’s pointless, they suggested, “to tinker around the edges of the U.S. war machine’s environmental impact.” The funds spent “procuring and distributing fuel across the U.S. empire could instead be spent as a peace dividend [that] includes significant technology transfer and no-strings-attached funding for adaptation and clean energy to those countries most vulnerable to climate change.”
Washington could still easily afford that “peace dividend,” were it to begin cutting back on its military spending. And don’t forget that, at past climate summits, the rich nations of this planet pledged to send $100 billion annually to the poorest ones so that they could develop their renewable energy capacity, while preparing for and adapting to climate change. All too predictably, the deep-pocketed nations, including the U.S., have stonewalled on that pledge. And of course, as the recent unprecedented monsoon flooding of one-third of Pakistan — a country responsible for less than 1% of historic global greenhouse gases — suggests, it’s already remarkably late for that skimpy promise of a single hundred billion dollars; hundreds of billions per year are now needed. Mind you, Congress could easily divert enough from the Pentagon’s annual budget alone to cover its part of the global climate-reparations tab. And that should be only the start of a wholesale shift toward peacetime spending. No such luck, of course.
As the National Priorities Project (NPP) has pointed out, increases in national security funding alone in 2022 could have gone a long way toward supporting Joe Biden’s expansive Build Back Better bill, which failed in Congress that year. That illustrates yet again how, as William Hartung put it, “almost anything the government wants to do other than preparing for or waging war involves a scramble for funding, while the Department of Defense gets virtually unlimited financial support,” often, in fact, more than it even asks for.
The Democrats’ bill, which would have provided solid funding for renewable energy development, child care, health care, and help for economically stressed families was voted down in the Senate by all 50 Republicans and one Democrat (yes, that guy) who claimed that the country couldn’t afford the bill’s $170 billion-per-year price tag. However, in the six months that followed, as the NPP notes, Congress pushed through increases in military funding that added up to $143 billion — almost as much as Build Back Better would have cost per year!
As Pentagon experts Hartung and Julia Gledhill commented recently, Congress is always pulling such stunts, sending more money to the Defense Department than it even requested. Imagine how much crucial federal action on all kinds of issues could be funded if Congress began deeply cutting, rather than inflating, the cash it shovels out for war and imperialism.
Needed: A Merger of Movements
Various versions of America’s antiwar movement have been trying to confront this country’s militarism since the days of the Vietnam War with minimal success. After all, Pentagon budgets, adjusted for inflation, are as high as ever. And, not coincidentally, greenhouse gas emissions from both the military and this society as a whole remain humongous. All these years later, the question remains: Can anything be done to impede this country’s money-devouring, carbon-spewing military juggernaut?
For the past twenty years, CODEPINK, a women-led grassroots organization, has been one of the few national groups deeply involved in both the antiwar and climate movements. Jodie Evans, one of its cofounders, told me recently that she sees a need for “a whole new movement intersecting the antiwar movement with the climate movement.” In pursuit of that very goal, she said, CODEPINK has organized a project called Cut the Pentagon. Here’s how she describes it: “It’s a coalition of groups serving issues of people’s needs and the planet’s needs and the anti-war movement, because all of us have an interest in cutting the war machine. We launched it on September 12th last year, after 20 years of a ‘War on Terror’ that took $21 trillion of our tax money, to destroy the planet, to destroy the Middle East, to destroy our communities, to turn peacekeeping police into warmongering police.” Cut the Pentagon, says Evans, has “been doing actions in [Washington] D.C. pretty much nonstop since we launched it.”
Sadly, in 2022, both the climate and antiwar struggles face the longest of odds, going up against this country’s most formidable strongholds of wealth and power. But CODEPINK is legendary for finding creative ways of getting in the face of the powerful interests it opposes and nonviolently upending business-as-usual. “As an activist for the last 50 some-odd years,” Evans says, “I always felt my job was to make power uncomfortable, and to disrupt it.” But since the start of the Covid pandemic, she adds, “Power is making us more uncomfortable than we are making it. It’s stronger and more weaponized than it has been before in my lifetime.”
Among the hazards of this situation, she adds, social movements that manage to grow and become effective often find themselves coopted and, she adds, over the past two decades, “Too many of us got lazy… We thought ‘clicktivism’ creates change, but it doesn’t.” Regarding an education bill early in the Trump administration, “We had 200 million messages going into Congress from a vast coalition, and we lost. Then a month later, we had only 2,000 people, but we were right there in the halls of Congress and we saved Obamacare. Members of Congress don’t like being uncomfortable.”
As the military-industrial complex and Earth-killing capitalism only seem to grow ever mightier, Evans and CODEPINK continue pushing for action in Washington. And recently, she believes, a window has been opening:
For the first time since the sixties and early seventies, it feels like a lot of people are seeing through the propaganda, really being willing to create new structures and new forms. We need to go where both our votes and our voices matter. Creating local change — that’s our work. Our divest-from-war campaigns are all local. Folks who care about the planet need to figure out how do we make power uncomfortable… It’s not a fight of words. It’s a fight of being.
The major crises we now face are so deeply entangled that perhaps grassroots efforts to face them might, in the end, coalesce. The question remains: From the neighborhood to the nation, could movements for climate mitigation and justice, Indigenous sovereignty, Black lives, economic democracy, and, crucially, an end to the American form of militarism merge into a single collective wave? Our future may depend on it.
A first-of-its-kind public database launched Monday estimates that burning all of the world’s known fossil fuel reserves would spew 3.5 trillion tons of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere — more than all of the emissions released since the Industrial Revolution.
The new database, known as theGlobal Registry of Fossil Fuels, also warns that emissions produced by combusting all of the planet’s oil, gas, and coal reserves would exceed the world’s dwindling “carbon budget” seven times over, underscoring the urgency of keeping fossil fuels in the ground to avert climate catastrophe.
“The science is crystal clear,” Inger Andersen, under-secretary-general of the United Nations and executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, said in a statement Monday. “The transition away from fossil fuel-powered economies is critical to the survival of people and the planet.”
“For this to happen we need to deploy every solution in our toolbox to decarbonize our economies,” Anderson added. “The Global Registry of Fossil Fuels is an important step in providing insights to policymakers and investors as we embark on a just transition away from fossil fuels.”
Led by Carbon Tracker and the Global Energy Monitor, the expansive new registry includes data for more than 500,000 oil, gas, and coal fields in 89 countries around the world, with the goal of providing transparency around fossil fuel reserves and production at a time when the climate crisis is fueling increasingly devastating extreme weather events across the globe,pushing up sea levels, and threatening to render large swaths of the planet uninhabitable.
“To date, climate change policy efforts have focused on reducing demand and consumption of oil, gas, and coal, but ignored the supply of those fuels,” notes Carbon Tracker, an independent think tank. “The Paris Agreement, for example, does not even mention fossil fuel production, despite the fact that such fuels account for over 75% of global greenhouse gas emissions.”
The organization goes on toobservethat the newly released data shows “the U.S. and Russia each hold enough fossil fuel reserves to blow the entire global carbon budget, even if all other countries ceased production immediately.”
“Of the 50,000 fields covered by the registry,” Carbon Tracker points out, “the most potent source of emissions is the Ghawar oil field in Saudi Arabia, which produces approximately 525 million tons of carbon emissions each year.”
Suneeta Kaimal, president and CEO of the Natural Resource Governance Institute,saidin a statement that the new registry marks “a welcome step toward open access to vital information about fossil fuels.”
“A fair global energy transition requires greater transparency, better coordination between states, and stronger accountability for fossil fuel production,” said Kaimal. “Now citizens and investors everywhere have an essential tool to hold governments and companies responsible for their decisions.”
Category 1 hurricane already knocked out a third of island’s energy grid as flights out of main international airport are canceled
A category 1 hurricane bringing heavy rains, dangerous winds and power outages to Puerto Rico was expected to make landfall on Sunday afternoon, as the island braces itself for “life-threatening” flash floods and landslides.
Hurricane Fiona, which was located about 40 miles off the coast of the Caribbean island at midday on Sunday, threatens to cause widespread flooding and damage to infrastructure in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic as it continues to strengthen and dump torrential rain over the next 24 hours.
What should we make of Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard’s decision to transfer ownership of his company to a special trust and nonprofit dedicated to environmental values? It’s hard to say, given that the public hasn’t been given any details on the matter. Despite this information scarcity, people all over the world are applauding the decision, including the journalists who first reported it. When The New York Times published the exclusive on Wednesday, the deputy editor of their climate newsroom presented the story as a climate “scoop.” Nowhere in this tribute to Chouinard did anyone discuss Patagonia’s questionable “sustainability” initiatives in the past.
The New York Times exclusive, “Billionaire No More: Patagonia Founder Gives Away the Company,”called Chouinard’s move “an unconventional spin on capitalism.” The 83-year-old was concerned, according to reporter David Gelles, that when he died the company might diverge from his environmental values. Now, Patagonia’s “socially responsible business” approach will be guaranteed by the Patagonia Purpose Trust, while a separate nonprofit organization will “use the company’s profits to combat climate change.”
In a world ravaged by the climate crisis, with one third of Pakistanis displaced by floods, the Amazon rain forest releasing more carbon dioxide than it absorbs, and carbon cowboys abusing indigenous rights to get their hands on lucrative carbon credits, reporting one privileged man’s decision to donate the wealth he accrued over decades by running a for-profit business as a climate “scoop” is already murky territory. More worrisome still, however, is that the story didn’t mention any of the scrutiny Patagonia’s past initiatives have recently come under for misleading consumers over sustainability claims.
In June, I exposed how a network of for-profit and nonprofit organizations at the heart of the fashion industry were using fake data to promote fossil-fuel based materials as sustainable. Patagonia, partnering with Walmart in 2009, created and funded the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, which developed the dodgy database in question: the Higg Materials Sustainability Index. Critics of the Higg MSI claim it was created to greenwash fossil fuel manufacturing for the fashion industry, which depends on cheap synthetic fibers—allowing for massive profits, while masking the products’ true environmental costs. They all point to the fact that the Higg MSI rates polyester, a fiber derived from petroleum, as the most sustainable of all fibers. This is pretty convenient for companies that sell clothes, since polyester is also the cheapest fiber available.
How has fashion gotten away with claiming that cheap petroleum-based fibers are sustainable? Unlike their fossil fuel friends, the fashion industry appears to have gotten ahead of the sustainability problem first by acknowledging it, then by pumping tens of millions into developing their own gold standard for sustainability, creating a closed loop of shared stakeholders with nobody to hold them to account.
The world’s institutions—both brands and NGOs alike— welcomed the Higg MSI with open arms and little to no research. After partnering with the global NGO World Resources Institute, Higg Co., the for-profit selling the index, raised $50 million in funding in April this year, and its index full of dubious data became the accounting metric for New York’s Fashion Sustainability and Social Accountability Act. The legislation has not yet passed, but H&M is now being sued in New York for using Higg data to fleece customers with premium prices for “sustainable” clothes.
A few days after my investigation was published at The Intercept, The New York Times published a similar article, How Fashion Giants Recast Plastic as Good for the Planet, in which they identified Patagonia’s role in leading the organizations that have essentially rebranded petroleum-based fibers. It’s odd not to mention this context when reporting Chouinard’s decision to give the company to the fight against climate change.
Patagonia has had both successes and failures in terms of sustainability. But instead of presenting those side by side, the piece paints both Chouinard and Patagonia as pioneers of sustainability and generosity. “By giving away the bulk of their assets during their lifetime, the Chouinards,” Gelles writes, “…have established themselves as among the most charitable families in the country.” Elsewhere the piece praises Patagonia as “an early adopter of everything from organic cotton to on-site child care,” and notes that Chouinard doesn’t own a computer and “wears raggedy old clothes, drives a beat up Subaru and splits his time between modest homes in Ventura and Jackson, Wyo.”
Celebrating Chouinard’s low-key lifestyle in one paragraph whilst trumpeting capitalism as the world’s solution to the climate crisis is questionable, and feeds into the rhetoric created by the fossil fuel industry which emphasizes individual change over systemic reform. Focusing on Chouinard’s personal attributes, rather than asking how the new trust will ensure prior mistakes are not repeated, skews the narrative. Likewise, quotes from Chouinard, saying he hopes his move promotes “a new form of capitalism that doesn’t end up with a few rich people and a bunch of poor people,” land poorly in a piece that ignores the economic system and neo-imperial globalisation that has allowed Americans like Chouinard to amass billions in the first place.
The message this kind of reporting sends is that billionaires could save us from ourselves if only more of them had the Patagonia spirit. Yet given the raw data on billionaires’ emissions, it’s clear that far more people need to be saved from billionaires than are saved by them. And the society as a whole needs to be saved from the grip their mythology has on our cultural narratives.
Yes, it is critically important to encourage billionaires to redistribute their wealth, but it is equally important to critique claims of authoritative magnanimity in the process. Failure to do so donates collective power to the select individuals who have enough power to wield, often at the expense of the vulnerable.
Who will run this trust? Will it have scientific experts on payroll? Which experts? Which data will be used to decide how to fight climate change? And what will the trust do in the face of overwhelming evidence that economic growth is driving environmental destruction? These are the kinds of questions we need to ask when hearing that Patagonia’s founder has created a trust he thinks will help the world. Without those questions, we’re left with only a PR piece promoting a capitalist future at the expense of us all—from frontline climate communities to factory workers hunched over polyester patterns, far from billionaire sight.
