Child miners are forced to work the mines by the warring groups in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Photo courtesy: ENOUGH Project, Flickr Creative Commons.

As I type this, I am complicit in the funding of rape and war.  You probably are too–sitting on your laptop, listening to your mp3 player, texting on your smartphone–even if you don’t know it.

But that could all change with the passing of Barack Obama’s sweeping financial reform legislation by Congress in July. While the story made headlines across the United States and pundits and politicians debated its potential ability to clean up Wall Street, largely lost in the 2,300 page document was a landmark piece of U.S. legislation that is geared towards transforming a place as far removed from Wall Street as possible—the Democratic Republic of Congo, the rape capital of the world.

Tucked into the “Miscellaneous Provisions” section of the bill, the new U.S. law will require all publicly-traded and electronics companies to disclose the source of the minerals contained in their products and the steps they are taking to ensure that they are “conflict free.”

The DRC is a resource-rich nation with large deposits of tantalum, tin, tungsten, and gold, all of which can be found in every cell phone, laptop, iPod, digital camera and most other pieces of modern technology in the world. If it stores a charge, vibrates, or has gold-coated wiring, chances are it’s got these four minerals in it.  The provision, then, will affect thousands of U.S. companies, including technology giants Apple, Hewlett Packard and Dell.

Activists, U.N. experts and non-governmental organizations have become increasingly vocal about concern that armed Congolese groups—including the Congolese army, rebel militias, and groups from Uganda and Rwanda—are financing themselves with minerals from eastern Congo.  In what’s been called Africa’s World War, the DRC has been mired in violence for more then a decade.  The war began following the 1994 genocide in neighbouring Rwanda and has claimed the lives of roughly 5 million Congolese, displacing another 2 million from their homes. Hundreds of thousands of women and young girls have been raped, as soldiers on all sides of the conflict have utilized systematic sexual violence as a weapon.

As with conflict diamonds, the legislation recognizes the direct correlation between our consumer appetites and the violence plaguing the Congo. While it stops short of placing an embargo on the purchase and use of the minerals, American manufacturers must now be forthright if they do so, essentially saying: “this cell phone helped fund rape and war.”

One U.K.-based advocacy group is taking the initiative to distance our consumer goods from conflict minerals one step further. Global Witness filed suit against the British government last week for failing to recommend that U.K. companies face United Nations sanctions for purchasing conflict minerals from the DRC. UN Security Council Resolution 1857, passed in 2008, calls for a travel ban and asset freeze on all individuals and entities supporting illegal armed groups in the DRC through illicit trade in natural resources. Resolution 1896 strengthened this by calling on UN member states to bring individuals and corporations forward for sanctions.

While the British government has refused to recommend the companies accused by advocacy groups for sanctions and has disputed the evidence brought against them, it has affirmed their countries commitment to the UN resolutions and to ethical mining.

The U.S. and U.K.’s support for due diligence and ethical mining relations with the DRC—lip-service though it may turn out to be—is more then we can say for our country. Canada has not only opposed valuable mining reform but has worked to undermine the DRC itself.

Canada delayed the World Bank and International Monetary Fund’s proposed $12.3 billion debt relief for the DRC, intended to mark the country’s jubilee anniversary of its independence. The decision was delayed following a request from Canada due to a legal dispute between Kinshasa and Vancouver-based mining company First Quantum Minerals Ltd. over mining rights. The proposed debt relief eventually went through, despite Canada’s tacit opposition as the lone abstaining vote.

While Harper claims that the DRC’s transfer of operating licenses violated international law and he used the podium of the G20 to frame the blocking of debt forgiveness as his stand for good governance, the actions of Canadian mining companies in the DRC has largely gone unquestioned by our government.  A UN Security Council report on the illegal exploitation of natural resources of the DRC found that First Quantum, along with several other Canadian corporations, were in violation of OECD guidelines of ethics and that their actions had led to an “economy of war”. That the Canadian government would stand alone on the world stage and hold Congo’s debt relief in limbo in defence of the mining rights of a company found to be acting illegally to pillage the natural wealth of the DRC makes it clear that our government is closer aligned with the mining sector then the international community.

Our government’s opposition to accountability within the mining sector is not without its own calculus—we are, more so then most other nations, particularly invested in global mining projects. The world’s largest source of equity capital for mining companies undertaking exploration and development can be found in the financial markets in Toronto and Vancouver; in 2008, exploration and mining companies based in Canada accounted for 43 percent of global exploration expenditures and 75 percent of the world’s mining companies were headquartered in Canada.

Canadian policy therefore has a vested interest in the mining sector, since Canadian companies play a major role in it globally.

But that doesn’t mean that Canada can’t follow the suit of our neighbours to the south and legislate for more ethical mining practices. When our MPs return to the House of Commons for the fall session, among the first bills on the agenda will be Private Member’s Bill C-300, the “Responsible Mining Bill.” Introduced by Liberal MP John McKay in 2009, the bill seeks to implement stricter guidelines for corporate social responsibility, to ensure that mining companies receiving funding from the federal government comply with internationally agreed-upon standards of human rights and environmental protection.

It comes down to responsibility: holding companies responsible for the goods they produce and the way they produce them. Of course, this is simply one small step to end the violence in the DRC—the war did not begin over minerals and this will not bring about its end. Every dollar in our society is a vote, though, and the the idea behind initiatives like Bill C-300 and the legislation in the U.S. is that civilian purchasing power, combined with government pressure, can enforce corporate accountability to stop funding the militarization of the region. This action is merely one in the arsenal that is required to stabilize the DRC. But it is an important one.

Artist's rendering of a Masdar public square. Click to enlarge.

Looking out over the site of Masdar City in Abu Dhabi, it takes some imagination to consider that this slice of hardscrabble desert will soon contain the world’s first carbon-neutral, zero-waste city. A six-metre sign at Masdar’s entrance is the only confirmation that my cab driver and I have arrived at the right place. Despite its ambitious nature, Masdar—the Arabic word for “source,” a reference to the sun—is not a household name in the region, and for the moment its seven square kilometres, demarcated by a corrugated white plastic fence, is home to little more than shrubs and debris.

It’s early December, and one of the last hot days of the year before the mild winter begins. Even at 30 degrees Celsius, today’s temperature is nothing compared to the heat of summer. Migrant labourers dressed in white lay paving stones over the sand. Some of the men wear turbans while others are in baseball caps.

Workers in boots, alternating with workers in suits, come and go from the development’s temporary headquarters, a series of white, two-level portables shaded by circus-sized canopies the colour of desert. Inside, an image framed on the wall projects the future HQ, a wavy steel and glass structure that produces more energy than it consumes.

Once complete, Masdar is supposed to be home to 50,000 residents and 1,500 companies with 40,000 people commuting daily from Abu Dhabi. At its centre is the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology, a sustainable-research hub, which as of today is the only building that has started to sprout. By 2018, Masdar is meant to contain two city squares housing day-to-day activity, outside of which will lie all the infrastructure required to sustain an eco-city in a desert: solar-power plants, a waste-to-power plant, an algae farm for biofuel, a solar desalination facility, a tree nursery, and a water-treatment plant.

The form of the city—itself an experiment in sustainable design—will mirror its function, which is to develop a completely new economic sector. Masdar City is the planned home of the Masdar Initiative, a foreign direct-investment fund for renewable energy technology. The end result, its leaders hope, will be Abu Dhabi’s own version of Silicon Valley.

The irony, of course, is that the United Arab Emirates is both a massive oil exporter and produces more carbon per capita than any other nation on Earth. The Abu Dhabi government’s rhetoric is lofty—Masdar will be a “testing ground for the future of humanity,” its purpose to create “a manifesto for sustainable life”—but it’s not empty: there is money behind it. Lots of money, even with Abu Dhabi now feeling the effect of the recession that has been devastating its neighbour Dubai. Oil brought wealth to the tiny emirate only a generation ago, and leaders know the supply is limited. Masdar is an attempt to ensure future security for a newly rich people.

The timing is canny. As the scientific and political consensus has shifted from if there is a climate crisis to how severe it will be, governments, industries, and citizens are increasingly looking for action to take. While change threatens to disrupt many traditional businesses, others see the transition to a post-fossil-fuel economy as a gold rush in the making. In 2008, for the first time, investments in renewables outpaced those in traditional energy: $140 billion was invested in wind, solar, and others, compared with $110 billion for fossil fuel and nuclear. What was once the marginal turf of environmentalists is now fought over by titans of industry. (The UN predicts renewable energy could create as many as 20 million new jobs over the next decade.)

Despite the economic potential, Canadian government policy—fixated on the tar sands—has not kept pace with science. Short-term thinking, buttressed by entrenched industrial interests, has stunted innovation here. Abu Dhabi, by contrast, has kept a long view, developing a vision for a fossil-fuel-free future, and is working to realize it. The motive is self-interest, but the results have the potential to be world-changing.

Political will, of course, is easy to mobilize in a wealthy monarchy unconstrained by democracy, election cycles, or budgets. But still, in striving to wean its prosperous economy off ever-scarcer fossil fuels, the tiny Muslim territory can be seen as a microcosm for the rest of the world, and one we would do well to take a lesson from. Whether it succeeds or fails—and there are bets placed on both outcomes— the emirate knows something that Canada doesn’t seem to: you can’t build a sustainable future without a blueprint.

Arriving in Abu Dhabi, the 20-kilometre drive from the airport to the city’s centre is quick in time more than distance. People in the UAE drive fast: traffic accidents are the number one cause of death here. Brand new SUVs hurl themselves down a 10-lane desert highway that not too long ago was desert itself. The drive to Dubai takes about an hour, but anyone over 50 will recall when the trip could be made only by camel, taking three or four days.

Abu Dhabi’s history reads like a rags-to-riches screenplay: the largest of the seven independent sheikdoms that comprise the United Arab Emirates, it was a poor pearl-farming outpost for the first 60 years of the 20th century, watching from the sidelines as oil strikes elsewhere in the Persian Gulf made its neighbours rich. When Abu Dhabi’s own huge oil reserves were discovered in 1959, residents expected the new wealth would bring long-awaited modernization, but nothing happened. Crown prince Sheik Shakhbut had grown paranoid from decades of dealing with the British, who maintained a presence in the region, and hoarded the wealth in case he should need it to fight off a military threat. By the mid-1960s, the problem was obvious to all, and Shakhbut was overthrown by his youngest brother, Zayed, kicking off an overnight transformation into a modern petrocracy. The nomadic population traded palm huts for air-conditioned villas, camels were swapped for cars (though there were few roads to drive them on), and high rises sprouted. Each Abu Dhabian received at least two plots of land—one for home, another for business—and a lump-sum cash payment. For most, it was a bewildering windfall: it was not uncommon at the time to see residents unaccustomed to keeping bank accounts leaving banks with cardboard boxes full of cash on their heads.

In 1968, when Britain announced its plan to withdraw from all territories east of the Suez, Zayed—fearing the prospect of being swallowed by a larger neighbour—successfully united the region’s quarreling sheiks under the flag of a federated UAE in 1971. Abu Dhabi is the largest and richest of the emirates, holding 90 percent of the country’s oil, about 10 percent of total global reserves. The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, the notoriously secretive sovereign wealth fund tasked with keeping the country rich, is thought to be worth about US$350 billion.

Headquarters of the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority. Click to enlarge.

ADIA, as the investment authority is commonly called, makes its home in a 36-storey black skyscraper with rounded edges that wouldn’t look out of place in a Star Wars movie—and it dominates the view from where I am staying. My friends’ Abu Dhabi home is a four-bedroom, four-bathroom apartment, palatial, with marble floors and high ceilings. It rents for US$50,000 per year—a bargain by Abu Dhabi standards. With the influx of Western expatriates seeking large, tax-free incomes here, demand for housing outpaces the supply.

Our 14th floor balcony looks directly onto ADIA’s five-storey, airconditioned parking garage, which is topped by a gym featuring a pool that looks like it should be filled with dollar bills—which, in a way, it is. Water in the UAE is desalinated from the Gulf: nine million tonnes of oil are used each year to turn salty water sweet. (Even so, the UAE is number three in water consumption globally— behind the U.S. and Canada.)

I pour a smaller version of the ADIA pool in my en suite bathtub and think about what’s on the other end of the water pipe. In my imagination, it’s sinister machines belching black smoke while men in robes sit around lighting shisha pipes with dollar bills—but at least they are talking about wind farms.

The truth is the sheiks are talking about oil and wind farms—and Formula One racetracks and branches of the Guggenheim designed by Frank Gehry. Along with the new economic sector represented by Masdar, Abu Dhabi is focusing on tourism, aiming to make itself the cultural centre of the Middle East. Call it bet-hedging. The emirate has a lot to lose. If Masdar is successful, it may just happen that Abu Dhabi, a latecomer to the industrial age, will be among the first out the other side.

Nicholas Parker knows something about trying to move past fossil fuel dependence. The Canadian coined the term “cleantech” eight years ago when he founded Cleantech Group, a venture capital company that specializes in technology and knowledge related to the mitigation of ecological crises. Cleantech as an investment category includes everything from energy production to wastewater management to compliance management, and today, it’s the fastest growing sector there is.

Parker sits in the backyard of his home in Toronto’s High Park neighbourhood on a sunny June day. In a sweatshirt, sandals and socks and khaki pants, he looks much more at home than in the suits his business dealings often demand. Parker comes across as generous, gregarious, and as something of a rebel.

To me, he represents the convergence of environmentalism and business that has become our best hope for progress. “I’ve always had a passion for two things: entrepreneurship—I really celebrate that—and sustainable development, social justice, the environment,” he says. “Most of my life I felt schizophrenic; my lefty friends think I’m a right-winger and my right-wing friends think I’m a hardcore revolutionary.”

Parker says he founded Cleantech to “bring the radical disruptive mentality that exists in Silicon Valley and put it at service of the major sustainability challenges of our time.” That, and he claims to be unemployable. It’s true Parker is hard to pin down. He’s a venture capitalist who hasn’t owned a car for 23 years, a lifelong Liberal—but for a dalliance with the Green Party—and a Zen Buddhist.

In his business, the stakes here are high, both financially and environmentally. “If we’re focusing on energy, this is a $6-trillion-a year industry,” says Parker, adding that no other industry gets measured with numbers close to those for power generation. By now, most people know generally what is at stake with global warming. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that Earth’s average temperature will rise somewhere in the range of 1.1 to 6.4 degrees over pre-industrial times by the end of the century. The IPCC’s overall veracity was called into question last year with the exposure of emails suggesting it used questionable sources to advance questionable claims in its groundbreaking 2007 report, but “Emailgate” aside, these warming estimates are widely believed to be conservative, as actual increases have so far outpaced projections.

Beyond two degrees Celsius, the scenarios become apocalyptic: polar ice caps melt, three-quarters of the world’s species face extinction, and rising sea levels threaten coastal settlements. As it is, we’re 0.7 degrees above pre-industrial temperatures and the carbon we’ve emitted so far has us committed to at least another 0.2 degrees. To avoid the worst, environmental scientists believe we must reduce emissions by 80 percent before 2050. The numbers don’t leave a lot of room for optimism.

Parker’s company is at the forefront of innovation in trying to keep us away from the precipice, and he says he spends a lot of time spurring competition in the race toward a greener future. “My job is to run around telling everyone they’re behind everyone else,” he explains with enthusiasm.

When it comes to the environment, Canada has chosen to lag in pretty much every way. Our Kyoto commitment was a six percent reduction below 1990 levels, but we’ve increased emissions by 22 percent since signing on. Environment Canada attributes this trend primarily to increases in fuel production for export (specifically, the Alberta tar sands), as well as new vehicles on the road and our continued reliance on coal-fired power plants. In keeping with its demonstrated priorities, government spending on clean technologies has been almost entirely earmarked for non-renewable nuclear as well as carbon capture and storage, in which emissions are captured at the source and injected into the ground—at best a technological stop-gap. The Tories’ 2010 budget committed Canada to becoming “a leader in green job creation,” but failed to back the pledge with investment in renewable energy technologies.

Canada’s approach to climate change, or lack thereof, became hard to ignore in the weeks leading up to December’s UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, and during the proceedings, where the Canadian government’s disregard for emissions reduction led to loud international scorn. (For the third year running, Canada won the “Fossil of the Year” award, presented by the Climate Change Action Network to the country that has done the most to obstruct progress on climate change.)

This country’s regressive stance means Parker doesn’t do a lot of business close to home. “Canada doesn’t have a top 10 company in any cleantech category,” he says. “That’s why I live here, and I don’t work here.”

Parker is hopeful about the future, but not convinced we will make enough progress to avoid catastrophe. “I think this is an experiment,” he says, “and it’s quite possible we’ll fail. It’s incredible to be smart enough to know we’re fucking it up and stupid enough to still be doing it—it’s an amazing thing to be a human being.”

José Etcheverry is trying to make sure we succeed. A member of the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University and president of the Canadian Renewable Energy Alliance, Etcheverry argues that a future in which all energy is derived from renewable sources is possible, if only government would wield policy to stoke innovation—not to mention the jobs it would create. “What we need to do is implement policies that make it possible for project developers to do what they do best,” says Etcheverry. “Entrepreneurs are by definition very creative and what we are missing is the political will to open market possibilities and create policies that give people the will to invest.”

This is what Abu Dhabi is trying to do, and it’s hardly a new idea. Denmark currently derives 19 percent of its energy from wind, thanks to an aggressive policy of government incentives implemented in the 1970s, spurred by the energy crisis. The windswept nation used to get 90 percent of its energy from petroleum sources, and the transition was pure self-defence. Today, Denmark is an energy exporter, and has reduced its carbon emissions by 13 percent since 1990.

John M. R. Stone is an adjunct research professor at Carleton University and until recently was on the bureau of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Opportunities here are abundant, he says, but Canada has not stepped up. “We’ve got a prime minister who doesn’t want to tackle this issue, who would prefer if it simply went away,” says Stone. “And the main reason is because he doesn’t know how to square it with the development in the tar sands. It’s unimaginative.”

Parker says there’s no shortage of imagination: researchers have shown that, theoretically, the planet’s total energy needs could be met with solar arrays covering around four percent of the world’s desert (if it were one plot of land, it would be about the size of the Gobi). “You can make deserts into valuable land,” says Parker, “leave the lights on all night, and it won’t matter, if we get this right. We’re five years, maybe 10, from solar being cost competitive from baseload fossil fuel power, so why aren’t we pursuing it?”

In a plush-seated auditorium in Abu Dhabi’s Chamber of Commerce, Masdar’s leaders are gathered for a specific, important purpose: to convince local businesspeople to sign up for the ecocity’s vision. They are having trouble sourcing materials and labour locally due to the stringent green standards inherent in the project. For local companies—providers of everything from lighting systems to floor finishings to roofs—to do business with Masdar, they must first green their own supply chains, rising to the same environmental and ethical standard Masdar has set for itself.

Masdar City is planned to be 99 percent carbon-free, with the remaining one percent (of what a comparably sized community would emit) offset or stored. The city is being constructed using the World Wildlife Fund’s One Planet Living principles, which include zero-carbon and zero waste, as well as sustainable transport, sustainable water and local food.

The WWF initiative began as a public relations campaign designed to communicate the ecological consequences of overconsumption. By 2035, the WWF figured, Earth’s residents would require a second planet, having exhausted the resources of the first. Its involvement in Masdar, however, goes beyond cheerleading. One Planet Living also acts as an accreditation system. Each principle of sustainability is a target that a project must meet in order to get WWF’s seal of approval. According to WWF, Masdar City goes beyond their expectations.

But even with all the political will and money in the world, people need to be convinced that the change is worth the risk.

At the chamber of commerce, a row of men in flowing white dishdashas take turns speaking, introducing Masdar and its aims in an effort to win the attendees to their view. There is interest—the 400-seat room is more than half full—but this is not an easy sell. Sultan Ahmed al Jaber, CEO of Masdar, lectures to the crowd, his talking points jargon-filled and clearly well-rehearsed. “We are going to direct you. But you must look for opportunities and solutions around the world. Contribute to the knowledge transfer, the making of a knowledge economy. You as the private sector have a major role to play. Don’t underestimate your contribution; the opportunity here is huge. The project we are working on now is a paradigm shift. You must be aggressive.”

But the people who have gathered here are still a few chapters back, and with good reason. This, after all, is a city that doesn’t even have a recycling program. “Why is Masdar next to the airport?” asks the first person to stand up. (He is reassured the development is not under any flight path.) Other questions range from how multicultural the city will be to how fast carbon neutrality can realistically be achieved. A cynical comment gets al Jaber back on his feet, full of fight. “We need to make a choice,” he says, fiercely. “We can do what we usually do—sit in the passenger seat and have others develop the technology and sell it to us. Or, we can take that pioneering and become owners of intellectual property and shop it around the world. Which one would you choose?”

As far as al Jaber is concerned, the choice is made, and the big-picture elements are well under way. The Masdar Initiative’s $250-million venture capital fund has invested in about a dozen early-stage companies around the world. One is Atlanta-based EnerTech, which does waste-to-energy conversion. Since coming on board with Masdar as a small shop, it’s signed a contract with the city of Los Angeles, and could end up meeting as much as 20 percent of L.A.’s energy needs through the conversion of septic sludge. (The process is called SlurryCarb, and it works by using heat and pressure to mimic the natural processes that turn once-living materials to fossil fuel.) Masdar also has high-profile investments in projects such as London Array, the world’s largest offshore wind farm.

As an idea, Masdar is irresistible. It’s compelling, the thought of a green utopia springing forth from the desert within the world’s biggest polluter, funded by the oil money of far-sighted sheiks trying to diversify away from a diminishing and damaging resource. And it’s still early enough that Masdar is a blank canvas on which everyone involved can project their fondest hopes.

Gerard Evanden sits overlooking the Thames at a small round table in the Foster and Partners London offices. Evenden, a stylish fortysomething with spiky salt-and-pepper hair, is lead architect for Masdar City. The architectural firm founded by celebrated British architect Lord Norman Foster is a pioneer in sustainable design—the firm renovated Germany’s Reichstag, the world’s first energy-positive parliament building—but Masdar is their biggest project yet, a chance to engineer a complete city from scratch.

Evenden shows me slides illustrating Foster’s vision: pedestrian walkways elevated seven metres off the ground, with driverless electric taxis bustling below and monorails gliding overhead. According to the plan, no resident will ever be more than 150 metres from emissions-free public transit.

“It’s not just about providing power for buildings and it’s not just about collecting energy,” Evenden says. “It’s about everything from the research through to the way people live, through to the way people move.” Evenden believes Masdar is the most important project in the world right now, and for this team of architects, it’s a dream come true.

Others, however, think of it more as a pipe dream. Christopher Davidson is a fellow at the Institute for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at Durham University in the U.K., who studies the UAE, and has published numerous books on the region. He points out the political dimensions to Abu Dhabi’s motives. As a monarchy, he says, Abu Dhabi continuously needs to prove itself legitimate. “Abu Dhabi in the past couple of years has hit on a fantastic new legitimacy resource, which is championing the environment,” says Davidson. “It’s political and economic. Anyone who claims that Abu Dhabi can diversify away from oil and all related industries is living in a dream cloud. That’s just not accurate.”

But that doesn’t mean its leaders can’t have it both ways. “Despite the titillation we may feel over Abu Dhabi, a massive oil exporter, doing this, once we get over that irony, I think what we can see is a great initiative,” Davidson continues. “They’ve seized on a great opportunity, and in the long term, they might become an international hub for environmental industry.”

When I reach John Stone on the phone, he has just come from a meeting at Parliament in Ottawa—a gathering of a conservation caucus that brings together MPs with scientists and members of NGOs to talk about environmental issues. “They even listened to me,” he jokes.

Stone points out that it’s possible now, with existing technology, to rapidly move to a low-carbon future, and questions why we in Canada are not doing just that. “We should be working as hard as we can toward a new energy system that is carbon free, if possible,” says Stone. “And we have the technologies that we need already: photovoltaics, solar thermal, wind and the like. We basically know what we need to do. We just need to go on and do it.”

Despite the federal government’s foot-dragging, there’s more hope at the regional level. Etcheverry calls Ontario’s energy legislation the most progressive on the continent: the Green Energy Act of May 2009 is the first in North America to mandate feed-in tariffs, compelling electricity utilities to pay renewable energy providers at a premium rate. The law makes it possible for every home, office building, or neighbourhood to produce renewable energy and guarantees a market to sell it. Such a system currently provides 12.5 percent of Germany’s electricity, and adds about $2.20 to the average German home’s monthly energy bill. Solar City, a development in Freiburg, Germany, produces all its own electricity from solar arrays (in one of the cloudiest spots in Europe) and sells the surplus into the grid. A combination energy plant in Kassel, Germany, sells wind and solar power, and switches on biogas combustion to meet peak demand. Based on the Combined Power Plant, German scientists believe that country could be powered entirely with renewables within 40 years.

“It’s very difficult to make a quantum leap if you’re stepping into the unknown,” says Etcheverry about imagining a different future. “For me it’s easy. I have solar power in my own house, and have seen what others have done, and what we could do if we got our collective act together.”

Currently, nearly 60 percent of Canada’s grid is powered by a renewable source: hydro. Other renewables are a tiny 0.5 percent, with the balance coming from coal, natural gas and nuclear. According to world average numbers from the Canadian Renewable Energy Alliance, coal is still the least expensive power source at four to seven cents per kilowatt hour. Wind comes in second at six to nine cents, followed by nuclear at 10 to 13 cents (CanREA factored building-cost overruns into its equation). Expensive carbon capture and storage facilities, which are key to “cleaner coal” schemes, will soon push the price of coal above 12 cents per kWh. The prices for solar and coal are expected to meet within the decade.

Traditional problems with renewables—only being able to produce power when the sun shines or the wind blows—still pose challenges. The most compelling fix is to reconfigure the energy grid as a two-way, distributed system linking together many different types of generation facilities. The same redundancy and flexibility is what makes the internet possible: when one node fails, others pick up the slack. The electricity equivalent, advocates say, would be greener, more efficient, and more resilient.

But business as usual is tempting. It’s easier, for one, and there is still a lot of money to extract from the ground. North America is sitting on a lot of coal—probably enough to last at least 300 years, if we don’t mind tearing mountaintops off to get it. Oil has maybe 100 years; accessible uranium, 40. But climate change is the real catalyst for developing alternatives. From an ecological perspective, diminishing oil stocks are irrelevant. “The Stone Age didn’t end because we ran out of stones,” quips Stone, “and the oil age is not going to end because we’ve run out of oil.”

When it comes to energy and climate change, the path forward is as fundamentally uncomplicated as it is urgent. It’s last call for the oil age. The only question now is, how long until we kick the old drunk out of the bar?

Artist's rendering of the completed Masdar City development. Click to enlarge.

A sign at the entrance to the Masdar site dwarfs everything around it. At its top is an aerial illustration of what the city will look like on completion. The rest of it lists the various businesses that are partnering to make it happen.

Masdar’s associates undoubtedly feel good about the project’s noble cause, but the sign would be empty if these companies weren’t making money. The Masdar Initiative is a business: the city is intended to be a magnet for foreign investment, the eventual home of 1,500 companies looking to profit from clean technology. The physical city is one big carbon offset project, generating carbon credits that will be sold on international markets. There is no ambiguity: the motive here is financial; environmental benefits are a bonus. Regardless of the reason for its existence, the Masdar Initiative shows what clearly defined policy and political leadership can do.

Through its two facets, the city and the initiative, Masdar shows that climate change is both an individual problem and a macro one, and that the best tool for change is policy. The city, with its emphasis on living lightly, while retaining a high standard of living, shows what individuals—in intelligently planned surroundings—can do. The initiative is political and economic, creating an environment favourable to the pursuit of alternatives.

There are politicians in Canada who have attempted, in smaller ways, to use policy to fight climate change. Stéphane Dion wanted to put a price on carbon to reduce emissions, but his Green Shift plan—centred on a carbon tax—failed to connect with voters. Similarly, B.C. premier Gordon Campbell did not come away unscathed after implementing a revenue-neutral carbon tax. The public knee jerks at the mention of the word “tax,” but just as there is consensus among scientists that humans are changing the climate, economists are in agreement that carbon pricing is essential if we are serious about reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Before the October 2008 federal election, 230 of Canada’s leading economists from universities across the country signed an open letter to the federal parties urging a coherent economic plan to combat climate change. “In the absence of policy, individuals generally don’t take the environmental consequences of their actions into account, and the result is a ‘market failure’ and excessive levels of pollution,” reads the letter, which goes on to warn: “Even those who are not convinced by today’s scientific evidence need to consider the costs of not acting now. Any action (including inaction) will have substantial economic consequences and, thus, economics lies at the heart of the debate on climate change.”

Industrialization produced the emissions that threaten the climate balance, and moving to a low-carbon society must also largely be driven by economics. Yale University economist William Nordhaus believes that all the conflict and contortions of 2009’s Copenhagen summit, and the next round of wrangling scheduled for November 2010 in Cancún, Mexico, could be avoided if the world could simply agree on a price for carbon. He told a pre-Copenhagen conference that “to bet the world’s climate system on the Kyoto approach is a reckless gamble. Taxation is a proven instrument. Taxes may be unpopular, but they work. The Kyoto model is largely untested and the experience we have tells us it will not meet our objective—to stabilize the world climate system.”

The threat to polar bears may not stir their consciences, but slashand-burn capitalists will respond to threats to their pocketbooks: Sir Nicholas Stern, former chief economist of the World Bank, projected in 2006 that investing one percent of global GDP in emission-reduction measures would spare the world an economic contraction of as much as 20 percent this century. As an investment, that’s a winner. (Two years later, Stern has revised his figure to two percent because climate change is progressing more rapidly than anticipated.)

The first evacuations directly attributable to man-made climate change occurred in 2009 in the Carteret Islands in the South Pacific without much fanfare. If we were paying more attention to such evidence, we would be sprinting toward a clean energy future. Instead, we have been sauntering. As people have discovered there’s money to be made, it’s picked up to a jog. As Parker says, “We’re learning. But the problem is that the situation is deteriorating faster than we’re learning.” Despite rhetoric to the contrary, the economics favour action. “The longer we delay,” says Stone, “the graver the threat, and the more expensive it will be to address.”

There are lessons to be learned from the desert, and they are familiar ones. We’ve mustered political will for important things before. “Other prime ministers have said we will have railroads that will connect the country from coast to coast,” says Etcheverry. “We will have public health care, we will have a Canadian broadcasting corporation, and so on. The big 21st century Canadian project is making our country a generator of clean power, truly clean power. And it could make us rich in the process.”

Naomi Klein giving the opening keynote at KlimaForum09, the alternative climate change conference underway in Copenhagen. Photo courtesy KlimaForum.

COPENHAGEN, DENMARK — The thread is being pulled on the climate talks here in Copenhagen, and the whole show is beginning to unravel. There are really several different conferences happening, and the cracks are showing.

The developing world has been so outraged by the proceedings in Copenhagen that the G77 leader, Lumumba Stanislaus Di-Aping, walked out of the conference last Friday in protest. “Things are not going well,” he said in the Politiken newspaper. “This conference will probably be wrecked by the bad intentions of some people.”

The eruption and divisions began last Tuesday when the Guardian leaked a document, called the “Danish Text,” that virtually back-rooms the climate summit to the rich and powerful. The document, that is perceived to have been a draft floated strictly to G8 countries by the Danish government, takes two steps backwards on the industrialized nations’ obligations to the developing world, and sidelines the entire UN climate negotiation process.

In response to this, The Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) also on Friday protested inside the conference demanding their own draft treaty—a survival pact instead of what they called a “suicide pact.” They say that the 2°C being agreed upon by the Industrialized world would submerge many of the world’s Small Island States this century, and that instead 1.5°C needs to be the target.

“We are facing an emergency, a planetary emergency that affects everyone but first and foremost affects AOSIS,” said Dessima Williams, Chair of the AOSIS from Grenada.

Even if the Danish Text were ignored, there is an underlining sense in the conference halls that the summit is behaving more like a G8 meeting than an international negotiation.

Reasonability is the core of this issue: Responsibility to include the marginalized, responsibility to lower our emissions, responsibility to the people who will be most affected and who have contributed the least, the responsibility of politicians to recognize scientific realities.

But lack of responsibility is hindering this Copenhagen deal, potentially sabotaging the entire negotiation. Naomi Klein says that we are facing is a “climate debt,” a debt the Industrialized world needs to pay up to the developing world, as the Western World has created most of the problem with our climate and needs to take responsibility for it.

“It is after all Industrialized countries that have emitted 75% of the world’s greenhouse gases, yet 75% of the affects will be faced by the developing world,” said Klein in her opening statement at the alternative people’s conference in Copenhagen, KlimaForum09.

Some argue that the West is beginning to take responsibility. The announcement just before the climate conference began by the Obama administration gave some life to this debate, as the States offered a $10 billion dollar annual aid fund between the rich nations to the ones in need as of 2012. But is this really enough?

The World Bank says that developing states are facing costs of US$100 billion a year just to adapt to the current climate change situation we have created, while Climate Action Network US argues for $600 billion.

Somehow we found the money to bail banks out of a crisis they created, with the US mustering $700 billion and Canada $75 billion. So the question must be asked: where are our priorities? Averting the greatest man-made crisis? Or propping up the elites in a “disaster-capitalist” system?

No, the Developing world is not blameless. Many, like China and India, do not want to be restricted in the climate treaty with absolute reduction targets nor to curb emissions by 2020, which is part of the hindrance to these negotiations. But you cannot have your cake and eat it too.

Though the west must be accountable to the countries that will face the brunt of the pains of climate change, it is now all of our problem so we all need to take responsibility for it. Until we do, we will not be ready to make a real climate treaty.

Emily Hunter is an environmental journalist and This Magazine’s resident eco-blogger. She is currently working on a book about young environmental activism, The Next Eco-Warriors, and is the eco-correspondent to MTV News Canada.

A member of an environmentalist group pretends to be dead during a protest demanding a real climate deal during the first day of United Nations Climate Change Conference on December 7, 2009 in Copenhagen, Denmark. (Photo by Miguel Villagran/Getty Images)

COPENHAGEN, DENMARK — The negotiations have begun over our climate future here in Copenhagen. Global leaders may decide in the next two weeks the most important choice to be made in our lifetime—even, arguably, in the history of the human race: will we change course?

“This is an extremely important moment in history,” said May Boeve from 350.org. For the first time in history all the major world leaders are trying to tackle the issue of climate change. Each of them is offering targets to cutting their greenhouse gas emissions and planning to finance developing nations who will be the most impacted.

Even more importantly in some ways, never before in history has the world paid so much attention to our climate crisis. Here in Copenhagen, thousands have descended on the Danish capital this week to attempt to make change from inside the conference halls—and outside on the streets.

Yet with so many people affected by the decisions made here—all of us in fact—why is it that so few get a say? Despite it being everyone’s issue (nearly seven billion of us) it is essentially eight men and a woman (the G8 and China) who get to deicide. That seems rather risky, especially when it’s questionable whether they truly have our best interests at heart.

There are so many that are voiceless here in the conference and so many that these decisions affect beyond the G8 and China. Like the Maldives, which is losing land to sea level rises every year: at the current rate, the country is in serious danger of disappearing altogether. The Maldives’ President, Mohammad Nasheed, said himself this week that the decision in Copenhagen will either be heroism or suicide: “The choice is that stark.”

In Copenhagen myself, there is an uneasy feeling of powerlessness in the most terrifying and important challenge we face. As a young person, it is my future that is being decided here and now, and I feel muted, despite all my best efforts at trying to make my voice heard.

The reason I care is because by the time I am in my 60s, in the year 2050, I will be living in a vastly reshaped world due to our lack of response to climate change. If nothing happens in Copenhagen, it will be a new geo-political world I will be living in with 150 million climate refugees. The arctic sea ice at the North Pole and much of Greenland will be gone. And we will be well on our way to passing the crucial 2ºC warming threshold.

Even if the deal does happen during the next two weeks, the world will still never be the same as we know it, as a deal in Copenhagen doesn’t mean success. The deal that is likely amounts to a suicide pact for many countries, since the targets aren’t ambitious enough and the funding for mitigation is well below what we need. The U.S. is only offering a 3 percent reduction by 2020 relative to 1990 levels, when scientists now argue that it should be well over 40 percent. The Obama administration said last week that nations will likely offer US$10 billion for a climate aid fund. Meanwhile, the World Bank (hardly a radical source of information), says that Industralized nations need to offer US$75 to US$100 billion annually.

So is this summit Hopenhagen or Flopenhagen? I’m not sure if I see much hope other than greeenwashed hope here on the conference grounds. But I do see hope from the movement that is trying despertly to make the voiceless—young people, Indigenous people, the Global South—heard.

For example, the students that organized the 350 event last October are here in big numbers, working on the inside to get the voiceless heard and holding a global vigil for survival that all of us can take part of. KlimaForum09, the Danish anti-conference, is writing an alternative climate declaration, made by the people, to let the public be heard. They’ve called the COP15 negotiations a “fraud” and are planning civil disobedience actions in the city and around the world to let their displeasure be known.

This deal may be settled in two weeks time, but the battle for a choice that needs to be all of ours is just beginning.

Emily Hunter is an environmental journalist and This Magazine’s resident eco-blogger. She is currently working on a book about young environmental activism, The Next Eco-Warriors, and is the eco-correspondent to MTV News Canada.

There’s nothing like an all-purpose label to bring comfort and order to an otherwise overwhelming world. But what’s comforting to one person can be downright offensive to another. When it comes to the language used to label the “non-Western” world, quotation marks just won’t cut it anymore. What’s really behind the terms we use and which ones should we be avoiding?

Third World

ORIGINS: Attributed to French economist Alfred Sauvy in the 1950s, it originally referred to countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia that were not aligned with either the capitalist (First World) or Communist (Second World) blocs.
STATUS: It’s dated—avoid using it. According to Shahidul Alam (see below), who coined the term “Majority World,” when used by the so-called West this phrase is hierarchical and reinforces “the stereotypes about poor communities and represents them as icons of poverty. It hides their histories of oppression and continued exploitation.”

Developing World

ORIGINS: The notion of “areas needing development” was introduced by U.S. President Harry Truman in his 1949 inaugural address. Originally a measure of income and wealth, the World Bank now defines developing in terms of quality of life, which includes economic growth and basic social services.
STATUS: Use with caution—the term has built-in problems. “Developing opens up a huge can of worms,” points out New Internationalist co-editor Dinyar Godrej. “Are we talking purely economic development or cultural development, and if the latter, isn’t such terminology blatantly prejudicial?”

Global South

ORIGINS: Credited to West German chancellor Willy Brandt, whose 1980 report, North-South: A Programme for Survival, divided the world into economic hemispheres: North and South, with exceptions like Australia and New Zealand. The term was taken up in academia in the 90s.
STATUS: The UN and other NGOs love this term and so can you. It “refers to those poorer nations that are not left out of development, but whose labor and lives pay for the affluence of the North,” writes Vijay Prashad, author of The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World. However, use it carefully. Matthew J.O. Scott, former head of World Vision International’s UN Office in New York, prefers it, but cautions, “It doesn’t describe the global poor who technically live north of the equator.” And, points out Sumita Dixit, a senior advisor with Canada’s department of foreign affairs, “While Global South has some resonance, this term ignores the incredible diversity among countries.”

Majority World

ORIGINS: Coined by writer and photographer Shahidul Alam in the early ’90s.
STATUS: While it’s a lesser-known phrase, feel free to get ahead of the trend and use it, because, says Alam, the term “highlights the fact that we are indeed the majority of humankind. It also brings to sharp attention the anomaly that the G8 countries—whose decisions affect the majority of the world’s peoples—represent a tiny fraction of humankind.”

Martha Stewart was searching for the perfect word.

She was trying to describe her disastrous year to Jeffrey Toobin from the New Yorker. It began last summer, when Stewart was accused of insider trading, and her good friend, ImClone CEO Samuel Waksal, was hauled off to jail. While the government investigated Stewart herself, the media piled on—mercilessly mocking her, questioning her ethics, and making the obligatory “Martha Stewart Living in Jail” jokes. Investors dumped her stock, shaving $400 million off her net worth. As she told Toobin her story, she wandered through her sprawling mansion, showed off her collection of china, had her personal cook serve a five-course meal, described the in-flight caviar she’d served some friends on her personal jet, and fretted over why everyone seemed to have it in for her. “My business is about homemaking. And that I have been turned into or vilified openly as something other than what I really am has been really confusing,” she said. “I mean, we’ve produced a lot of good stuff for a lot of good people.”

Is it schadenfreude? Toobin asked. “That’s the word,” she replied. “I hear that, like, every day.”

Stewart isn’t alone. In the past year, the wealthy—and their political friends—have been enduring regular blasts of ill-will from an increasingly testy public. It’s not hard to see why. While the recession has blindsided most of the working world, the rich have continued to joyfully grind their good fortune in everyone’s faces. When Enron collapsed, senior executives cashed out big; one top earner, Lou Pai, pocketed a stratospheric $994 million. Even as Dennis Kozlowski was approving Tyco’s voodoo accounting, his handlers were buying him $10,000 shower curtains and a $2,500 trash bin. And in December, just as the U.S. labour board announced grimly that over 50,000 jobs had vanished from the economy that month alone, George W. Bush was heatedly defending a tax cut that would hand $80 billion over to the richest one percent of the population.

Rarely has the P.R. for the rich been so bleak. And the heat isn’t coming just from bitter proles. Even federal bank honcho—and former Ayn Rand acolyte—Alan Greenspan delivered a speech bemoaning the “infectious greed” of America’s rich. Meanwhile, writers at Fortune magazine, hardly the sort you’d expect to find storming the Bastille, devoted an entire issue last fall to keelhauling the titans of industry. “The public,” they fulminated, “has been treated to an ever-lengthening parade of corporate villains, each seemingly more rapacious than the last.” Ouch. Where’s the love?

Yet the most curious part of this trend is the reaction of the wealthy. Faced with this blizzard of venom, they have begun to mount a curious counterattack: for the rich and their supporters, “envious” is now the insult of choice. Want to defend that bloated tax handout? Or your interstellar pay package? Or maybe that humungous inheritance from dear old dad? Tell your critics that they’re envious wannabes—jealous of your brilliant, well-merited success.

“Today a religion of hate, of envy and of anti-greed, using an unjust set of antitrust and insider-trading laws, punishes innocents. The innocents are successful American entrepreneurs” raged Mark Da Cunha, editor of Capitalism magazine, in an editorial in the National Post. George W. Bush has wholeheartedly joined the backlash, claiming those fighting his tax cuts are fuelled by “organized envy.” Meanwhile, Jack Kemp mutters darkly in the Washington Post about “liberal class warriors who practice the politics of envy.” Ralph Klein in Alberta castigates the “envious” folks who crave his oil. And as for Martha Stewart—The Wall Street Journal published an entire editorial devoted to “Martha Envy,” explicitly pegging Stewart’s woes on the green-eyed monster. Even the enemies of North America are blasted as vessels of unimaginably huge envy; global conflict is not ideological, but emotional. When the terrorists hit the World Trade Center, it was because they envy our freedom; when Europe refuses to unleash daisy-cutters on Iraq, it’s because—as conservative pundit Josef Joffe sniffed in a recent Foreign Policy article entitled “The Axis of Envy”—they’re jealous of the U.S.’s massive economic might.

Consider this our newest cultural battle—The War On Envy. We have, it seems, become a nation of nasty little playa hatas, and the playas are none too pleased about it.

All of which suggests a rather intriguing political question. What, precisely, are the elites so afraid of? When a continent’s power brokers are so unified in their panic, maybe it’s time we looked more closely at this unsettling emotion. Is it possible that envy is a lot more politically important—and useful—than we think?

In July of 1998, the British economists Daniel John Zizzo and Andrew Oswald conducted an unsual experiment. They took a group of subjects and gave each one 100 units of an imaginary currency. The subjects then played a computer gambling game, in an attempt to increase their virtual wealth. On screen, players were able to see not only their own wealth level, but the wealth of every other player. But soon things changed: after the first round was over, the economists picked a few players at random—and gave them 500 extra pieces of currency. When the gambling resumed, the other players were astonished to observe the sudden, new riches of their opponents.

And here’s where things got interesting. The economists gave the players the option of “burning” each other’s wealth. They could pay their own money to destroy another player’s wealth.

The result? The poorer players all ganged up on the few who’d become suddenly wealthy—and began furiously burning their riches. By the time the dust settled, almost two-thirds of the players had burned someone else’s money, and one-fifth of the overall money pool was destroyed.

“Our subjects gave up large amounts of cash to hurt others in the laboratory,” noted the mildly stunned economists. “The extent of burning was a surprise to us.” One could scarcely imagine a result more likely to horrify the rich. Not only will the envious poor pillage the rich—but hey, scientists can prove it! Marxism may have died in the Soviet Union, but you can bring it back to life in a petri dish.

The experiment is a spectacular illustration of the main reason envy is traditionally so distressing: it is a singularly destructive emotion. It’s not merely about craving someone else’s good fortune; it’s about wrecking it, and bringing others down to your level. Some of the most famous acts of retribution in history have been envy-driven. It’s particularly bad among artists, who are renowned for cherishing minute grievances. In the Renaissance, for example, the Italian painter Baccio concluded that Michaelango was so superior in his skill and fame that he broke into a temple and shredded one of Michaelango’s murals. Another artist, Domenico Veneziano, actually murdered a successful rival by beating him with “leaden weights.” In medieval Germany, wealthy urban residents would tweak the envy of neighbours by constructing enormous buildings that they didn’t even need; it got so bad that they had to pass a regulation about it.

When Adam Smith was writing Wealth of Nations, he was painfully aware that great wealth would inspire great conflict. “The affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many, who are often both driven by want, and prompted by envy, to invade his possessions,” he wrote. “It is only under the shelter of the civil magistrate that the owner of that valuable property, which is acquired by the labour of many years, or perhaps of many successive generations, can sleep a single night in security.”

Given that the wealth gap in North America is now as howlingly wide as it was during the original Gilded Age, no wonder the affluent are scared witless about envy. They must feel like pinatas. Cooped up in their paramilitary Hummers and hunkered behind the poured-concrete barriers that surrounded the recent Davos World Economic Forum, today’s super-rich behave as if they are constantly holding a global lynch mob at bay.

The powerful have always painted those who covet their wealth as crazed, irrational freaks. But this isn’t quite fair. Envy may be corrosive, but it does have a logic. Consider that British study again: when the economists analyzed the data, they found that the burning was more complex than meets the eye. It concentrated on those who had gotten their riches randomly—those who hadn’t done anything to deserve it. Other players who’d increased their wealth in a “justified” way—by winning at the gambling game—were not as frequently targets of the money-burners. Which is to say, the attackers were concerned not merely with destroying wealth, but with imposing integrity on the game. The burning, the researchers surmised, “appears to be strong evidence for the existence of some kind of envy or concern for fairness…Many people are not burning rich people more because they are rich, but rather because, and to the extent that, they got the money undeservedly.”

When you look at it this way, the burning seems weirdly wholesome. What could be more classically progressive than levelling the playing field—and correcting unearned privilege? Envy may not be a terribly upbeat emotion; you would hardly want to drive all your actions by its bitter fuel. But as philosophers like John Rawls have long noted, there’s a link between envy and a concern for justice. In A Theory of Justice, he argued that envy can function as a sort of canary in a mine-shaft, alerting us to the presence of genuine unfairness—and making us scrutinize the world more carefully. If the richest in society are alarmed about mass envy, it’s possible they’re nervous about the lessons from Enron, Global Crossing, and Tyco; perhaps their fortunes could not stand the scrutiny either.

During the holidays, I was having drinks with a friend who was flipping through the business pages. He hit upon a story about Jack Welch—the outgoing CEO of General Electric. Welch was in the middle of a nasty divorce, and as a result, his entire financial life was being made public. As it turns out, his GE retirement package includes a stunning $10 million annually—and includes the free use of corporate jets, helicopters, and a palatial Manhattan apartment with an infinite supply of wine. My friend snorted. “What in hell did this guy do to earn that?”

This is, of course, the $64,000 question: what precisely constitutes “deserved” wealth? That’s really What We Talk About When We Talk About Envy. Have the super-rich really earned their super-riches? Ask Martha Stewart, and she’ll tell you she worked hard for her corporate success. Ask George W. Bush; he’s argued that he became a millionaire—and president—solely on his own merits. The fact that Bush Sr. held the same office, and got dozens of former cia spook cronies to hurl public funds at his son’s half-cocked business plans and presidential campaign? No impact. All joking aside, though, “merit” is easily the most complex yet unresolved question in Western economics, so forgive me when I tell you I’m not going to resolve it here. Reasonable people can reasonably debate whether a $4-million-a-year CEO has actually earned his way, or gotten it on the backs of others.

Yet this is what’s so striking about the new backlash against envy: there is no such debate. The hue and cry about “the politics of envy” has become a judo move, letting our elites neatly sidestep any questions about the moral dimensions of capitalism. This is particularly odd when you consider how many CEOs lately have been carted away in handcuffs. But it’s true: if you’re rich, the consensus is that you must have done something to deserve it—and if anyone says different, it’s because, dude, they suck.

Last year, Jennifer Lopez’s handlers became worried that her ballooning wealth—and her increasingly disconnected-from-reality diva behaviour, including her demand that every single item in her backstage rooms be white—were alienating her working-class fan base. So they rushed out “Jenny From the Block,” in which Lopez meticulously catalogues her fame, proclaims her down-to-earth soul…and then lashes out at her critics for being envious. “Everybody mad at the rocks that I wear,” she protests. “Nothin phony, don’t hate on me.” This cynical pose is, of course, by now practically a lizard-brain reflex in bling-bling hip hop. But what’s kind of hilarious is how similar the protestations of the mainstream right-wing sound. Don’t like my rocks? Or my wildly over-the-top pay? Or my million-dollar anti-labour lobbying budget? Hata. “Typical class warfare rhetoric,” Bush sneered when opponents began criticizing his tax handout for the rich. Who’s writing this guy’s speeches? P. Diddy?

But you know what? That name-calling works quite well. Labelling someone an “envious” loser is a uniquely efficient way of shutting them up. Because even if you feel perfectly justified in your resentment, nobody wants to be known as envious. It is one of our most massive social no-nos. People will excuse many ugly emotions: greed, spite and, given the right circumstances, even murderous rage. But envy is the sin no one will defend. When’s the last time you openly admitted you were envious of someone? “Did ever anybody seriously confess to envy?” Herman Melville once wondered. “Something there is in it universally felt to be more shameful than even felonious crime.”

Back in the sixties, George M. Foster, a professor of anthropology at the University of Berkeley, began polling his students about their levels of envy. One half declared themselves to be “virtually without envy,” and another 40% said they were envious only very occasionally. Barely 10% would admit to being “very envious.” “Moreover,” Foster noted, “the 90% who deny major envy tend to be vociferous and argumentative; it is a personal affront to them to suggest that they are much more envious than they care to believe.”

In the late 1980s, the Boston University professor Richard Smith shed even more light on the matter, with a different “burning” experiment. He presented a group of students with a hypothetical unfair situation, in which they got the short end of the stick. They were offered the opportunity to even the odds by hacking away at the winner’s earnings. In one test, they were allowed to retaliate anonymously; in another, they had to do it publicly. When they were allowed to do so anonymously, 30% burned the winner. But when they were required to be public about their envious actions—and have the winner know who was attacking them—only 6.7% did so. Social censure, Smith concluded, is so powerful that it can stop people from acting on their envy, no matter how justified they might fee
l. “Despite a degree of ill will often directed at the person who is envied, social prohibitions prevent the expression of this ill will,” he noted.

There are some very good reasons for this social censure. After all, philosophers have long noted that our economic envy is frequently directed not at powerful, nasty overlords, but at our close friends and family. When we compare ourselves to those most similar to us, even niggling differences in rank and privilege can become nasty grievances. (As Gore Vidal famously wrote, “Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.”) Since wishing ill on our intimates seems awfully creepy, we understandably worry whether envy is not, in all cases, a sort of subhuman emotion. If it can drive us to dislike even our friends, what good could there possibly be in it? In Of Envy, Sir Francis Bacon concluded that envious people were “deformed persons, and eunuchs, and old men, and bastards.” Count me in!

Back in 1891, when Americans were awash in the Gilded Age, and the fabulous clothes and houses of the elites were paraded in endless, fawning articles, Edward Bok, editor of the conservative Ladies’ Home Journal, decided that his readership had become too envious. In an editorial, he proclaimed that it was unhealthy to care so much about what others had. “If you do not possess all the things you would like to have, it is very poor policy to idly wish for them,” he wrote. “A woman is happy just in proportion as she is content…Contentment is a wonderful thing to cultivate.”

Obviously, this sentiment seems pretty naive and Victorian (to say nothing of wildly condescending to women). But throughout the ages, it has been the traditional response to envy: chill out. Practice some zen, man. Don’t worry about what others have; be happy with what you’ve got! This message comes from all political quarters, from conservative churches to crunchy-granola co-ops. Your mother probably told you the same thing over the dinner table. And sure, disavowing envy is probably good for your soul, to say nothing of your blood pressure. But what if it’s bad for you in other ways?

Consider one final envy experiment. Recently, economists at Harvard and the University of Miami asked 257 test subjects for their thoughts on income. They gave subjects two different scenarios, and asked them which they’d prefer. In Scenario A, they would make $50,000 a year, in a society where everyone else makes $25,000. In Scenario B, they would make much more—$100,000 a year—but everyone else in society would make $200,000. When the economists tallied the results, they found 56% of people opted for Scenario A. In other words, a majority of people would prefer to have considerably less money, so long as they were ahead of the pack. It didn’t matter that everyone, on balance, would be poorer. As the authors dryly noted: “Many seemed to see life as an ongoing competition, in which not being ahead means falling behind.”

The really weird thing is, this completely violates traditional economic theory. According to classical economics, we are all supposed to be rational actors—who care only about maximizing our own personal wealth. What our neighbours do is supposedly of no concern to us. By this logic, the vast majority of people ought to pick Scenario B, where they enjoy twice as much cash.

But most people didn’t pick B, and for a very good reason: when we are relatively poorer than others in society, we tend to get screwed. As the economist Robert Frank argued in his 1999 book Luxury Fever, we cannot ignore the existence of higher earners even if we try, because their spending affects us. For example, if you live in a city where everyone else becomes suddenly richer, housing prices go up—and drive you out of the city, consigning you to a one-hour commute from a cheaper suburb. Likewise, if other parents hire expensive private tutors to increase their kid’s chances of getting into a preferred university, they might take your kid’s slot. And if everyone shows up to the job interview wearing expensive clothes, so must you—even if you can’t afford it as easily. Their spending will drive you into debt.

“To the extent that wearing the right watch, driving the right car, wearing the right suit, or living in the right neighbourhood may help someone land the right job or a big contract, these expenditures are more like investments than like true consumption,” Frank argues. “And this suggests yet another reason that people often feel uneasy when in the presence of others who have conspicuously more.” It is a lovely irony of the marketplace: while actual wealth may not trickle down, the pressure to spend like the wealthy does.

Frank is on the cutting edge of what’s called “positional” economics. In the last few decades, he and his colleagues have accomplished something quite remarkable: they have created economic theory that, for the first time, reflects the powerful role of envy in our lives. As positional economists are now finding, envy is sometimes an extremely rational impulse upon which to act. It can indeed be rational to be resentful of, say, the cosmic pay scales of CEOs, or the passing on of massive inherited wealth—even if these don’t appear at first blush to be any of your business. Even The Economist, when it editorialized on the famous British “burning” study, was forced to conclude that while the results didn’t conform to neoclassical economics, they made a hell of a lot of sense.

Let me be clear about one thing: i am not trying to “reclaim” economic envy. I don’t entirely trust envy as a motivation. I certainly don’t like it when I feel it (which is pretty often; writers are among the most bitter, envious people you’ll ever meet).

And of course, personalized envy doesn’t always work in the service of justice. For example, envy has arguably helped wreck several progressive groups—when the leader becomes famous, manages to gain access to power brokers, and is promptly ripped to shreds by footsoldiers who accuse him or her of “hogging the spotlight.” Envy delights in tearing down the prominent, even if the prominent are doing good work. Back when Gloria Steinem was helping to kickstart second-wave feminism, she was pilloried by other feminists who felt her blonde good looks gave her too much power in the media.

Recently, the anti-globalization movement has been hit with this type of rancour—including sniping about the egotism of activists like Jaggi Singh. Back in January, Singh was arrested by Israeli police after refusing to abide by their order to stay out of the occupied territories. Within days, a series of posts appeared on the activist rabble.ca discussion boards, mocking Singh as a narcissist. “A legend in his own mind,” sniped one; “Another pointless performance in the ongoing Jaggi Singh Show,” another chimed in. “Mr. Media Star Singh,” sighed a third. All this because the guy accepted an invitation to visit a social-justice group in the occupied terrorities?

There’s got to be some difference between getting angry at an unfair world, and simply giving vent to the spleen of personal envy. What freaks the elites out, ultimately, is the sense that envy might break out of personal animus and turn into an organized force. Who knows when the great unwashed are going to stop whining and start lighting political fires? Still, as I logged off the rabble boards, I began to sympathize with poor Martha Stewart.

Well, almost. At one point during his visit, the New Yorker’s Toobin commented on the silver chopsticks she’d laid out for their lunch. “You know, in China t
hey say, ‘The thinner the chopsticks, the higher the social status.’ Of course, I got the thinnest I could find,” Stewart said. “That’s why people hate me.”

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