Under a global economic system predicated upon endless growth on a planet with finite resources, there exists a fundamental contradiction between resources and wealth. While wealthy individuals in wealthy nations profit from the exploitation and overconsumption of the world’s natural resources, the rest of the world suffers the consequences.
Climate change has quickly evolved into a climate crisis. As acknowledged by world leaders such as the U.N. Secretary General, urgent, transformative action is required by the end of this year to avert utter catastrophe. The U.N. International Resource Panel estimates that overuse of natural resources is responsible for more than 90 percent of ecological destruction, biodiversity loss, and resulting human health damages. A recent study by economic anthropologist Jason Hickel published in The Lancet found that, as of 2017, the world economy consumes 90 billion tons of materials (including biomass, metals, minerals, and fossil fuels) per year, far exceeding the sustainable yearly limit of 50 billion tons of consumption set by the U.N. Industrial Development Organization and other industrial economists.
The Lancet study quantifies national responsibility for global excess material use, estimating that the United States and other high-income nations are responsible for 74 percent of global excess material use. While mean wealth per person in the Global North is more than six times that in the Global South, the South is left bearing 82-92 percent of the economic and social costs and 98-99 percent of deaths associated with climate change, according to Hickel’s recent research. The material benefits of resource extraction are realized in the North, while damages of that extraction are offshored to the South.
Hickel’s work reveals that central to this dynamic is unequal exchange, or an unfair trade balance, between the North and South. Today, unequal exchange results in a net extraction of value (in the form of labor, resources, and commodities) amounting to roughly $10 trillion each year, which is 30 times the amount of net aid the North sends to the South, in terms of global average prices. Hickel’s study also finds that, on average, people in the North consumed 27 tons of materials (water, food, and natural resources) in 2015, roughly four times the sustainable per capita consumption threshold of 7 tons of materials, based on a total resource consumption limit of 50 billion tons per year and a global population of approximately 7.3 billion in 2015. According to Hickel’s research, almost six-tenths of excess consumption in the North is made possible only by the extraction of value from the South.
The blame for the climate crisis, however, is not shared evenly by all individuals in all high-income countries. A complete understanding of climate accountability must include major domestic and transnational power structures and relations, such as class, race, gender, and indigeneity, which determine and affect the perpetrators, material impacts, and human tolls of environmental injustices. For instance, to imply that all residents of the United States are equally culpable for the nation’s ecological damages is to disregard the nation’s extensive history of settler-colonialism, Indigenous genocide, racialized slavery, and economic violence. All of these injustices continue to disproportionately harm minoritized and disenfranchised peoples within the United States in ecological, economic, and health outcomes.
For example, the U.S. food supply and distribution chain wastes 31 percent of all food that passes through it, while more than 10 percent of the U.S. population is food-insecure, consisting predominantly of poor, Black, Latine, and other marginalized children and adults. Moreover, communities situated near resource extraction sites, including pipelines, refineries, and mines, face staggering health disparities nationwide, including astronomical rates of cancer, asthma and chronic respiratory illnesses, and premature death, particularly—again—among low-income and racialized populations.
Both within and between countries, the global economic system produces different versions of the same hierarchies of inequitable ecological, environmental, and human harms; a privileged minority commit the greatest offenses and reap the greatest benefits, while the global masses suffer the worst of the consequences. According to a 2020 study from Oxfam International, the richest 1 percent of individuals worldwide—approximately 76 million people—now own twice as much wealth as the poorest 90 percent of the population, some 6.9 billion people. Research from the OECD shows that the world’s poorest residents suffer the worst effects of climate change.
Both the extreme wealth of the few and the suffering of the many are owed to the same root causes of resource exploitation and waste. Nature’s 2020 Scientists’ warning on affluence states clearly that the world’s wealthiest citizens are responsible for the most environmental harm and warns that the current system based on endless economic growth is not tenable.
To date, political and economic forces have fueled global society’s acceleration toward climate collapse, enabling a select minority to accumulate unprecedented levels of wealth at the expense of the majority—and of the planet itself. The world economy’s existing wasteful practices of resource extraction and oppressive hierarchies of wealth are unsustainable and incompatible with a healthy climate, and immediate, radical change is required to save the planet from disaster.
