Don’t blame men for the climate crisis, we should point the finger at the companies | Arwa Mahdawi

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Sorry, folks, but it’s all your fault. Melting ice caps, flash floods, rising sea levels: people are responsible for everything. Please don’t drown the messenger, I’m just relaying the results of a Swedish study which found that men’s spending habits cause 16% more global warming emissions than women. The biggest difference seems to be that men spend more money on gasoline. Another big difference: the men questioned buy more meat than the women. This is how the world ends, eh? Not with a bang, but with guys eating too many burgers.

I don’t know how many studies published in the Journal of Industrial Ecology go viral, but this article was a huge success. Of course, that’s in large part because his findings have lent themselves to delicious click-bait such as men are worse than women for climate change because they love meat and cars. To be fair, the study didn’t look into gender war territory in the way you would expect based on the headlines it generated. The genre wasn’t even mentioned in the article’s title, which was that changing spending on food, vacations, and furnishings could cut greenhouse gas emissions by almost 40%.

The climate crisis is undoubtedly a feminist issue. Climate change is exacerbating growing inequalities and hitting women harder than men. UN data suggests that 80% of those displaced by climate change are women. However, while gender is an important part of the conversation about the climate crisis and an essential part of its solution, it is not helpful to focus on the gendered spending habits of ordinary consumers. Placing the burden of climate change mitigation on individuals, regardless of gender, seems futile as we watch businesses and the 1%, who are the main drivers of climate change, do what they want. I’m not saying we don’t all need to do our part; of course we do. But it’s maddening to be lectured about the evils of theft as billionaires are flattered to shoot themselves into space.

While it’s always practical to blame men for the dire state of the world, you can’t get around the fact that women in rich countries (including me) are responsible for far more emissions than men in countries. poor. The problem is not that some men spend more on cars and meat than their female counterparts, it is the obsession with economic growth at all costs. The rich world does most of the sowing, while the poor world does most of the harvest.

Just look at what’s going on in Madagascar. Over a million people face desperate food shortages due to what has been called the first famine in modern history caused by global warming alone. It is a region of the world that has contributed nothing to climate change, but they are now paying the highest price, a United Nations World Food Program executive said last week.

We are not going to solve the climate crisis by shaming largely helpless individuals or by forcing Western men to eat more plant-based burgers; it can only be corrected by systemic change.

Alas, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. This adage is more and more true every day. While the plebs keep being told that we need to change our ways, the Masters of the Universe have made it clear that they have no intention of changing theirs. Even worse is the fact that billionaires and corporations seem determined to make us believe not only that their greed doesn’t ruin the world, but that it will in fact be its salvation. We have to go to space to save Earth, said Jeff Bezos haughtily. It’s not just the shows that are the problem; it is greenhouse gas lighting.

Arwa Mahdawi is a columnist for the Guardian

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