Climate Activism Isn't About the Planet. It's About the Boredom of the Bourgeoisie | Opinion
RALPH SCHOELLHAMMER , ASSISTANT PROFESSOR IN ECONOMICS AND POLITICAL SCIENCE AT WEBSTER UNIVERSITY, VIENNA
ON 1/15/23 AT 8:00 AM EST
The downfall of capitalism will not come from the uprising of an impoverished working class but from the sabotage of a bored upper class. This was the view of the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter in 1942. Schumpeter believed that at some point in the future, an educated elite would have nothing left to struggle for and will instead start to struggle against the very system that they themselves live in.
Nothing makes me think Schumpeter was right like the contemporary climate movement and its acolytes. The Green movement is not a reflection of planetary crisis as so many in media and culture like to depict it, but rather, a crisis of meaning for the affluent.
Take for example a recent interview with Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich on CBS's 60 Minutes. Ehrlich is most famous for his career as a professional doom monger. His first major book, The Population Bomb, gave us timelessly wrong predictions, including that by the 1980s, hundreds of millions of people would starve to death and it went downhill from there. Ehrlich assured us that England would no longer exist in the year 2000, that even modern fertilizers would not enable us to feed the world, and that thermonuclear power was just around the corner.
https://www.newsweek.com/climate-activism-isnt-about-planet-its-about-boredom-bourgeoisie-opinion-1773846?mc_cid=639a93131b&mc_eid=870a48a53b
