10 April 22
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The climate crisis will produce a huge wave of migrants, and we’re not ready.
So far, the most widely noted area of overlap between the Ukrainian tragedy and global warming has had to do with energy. The fact that Russia’s war machine is funded by fossil fuel, and that Putin uses control of gas supplies to intimidate Western Europe, has begun to shake up energy policy: Germany has moved up its target date for a conversion to clean energy, for instance. And, if the Biden Administration has caved to Big Oil’s insistence on increasing the supply of hydrocarbons, at least that stance is being more urgently and broadly questioned. Last week, in the Times, Thomas Friedman insisted that, instead of doubling down on fossil fuels, we should “double the pace of our transition” off them, because “nothing would threaten Putin more than that,” and because the temperature in the Antarctic last month was seventy degrees above normal. “Our civilization simply cannot afford this anymore,” he wrote, a point underlined by today’s release of a dire and comprehensive report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
But, even if we seize this moment to dramatically accelerate the transition to solar and wind power—even if we somehow manage to meet the scientific mandate to cut emissions in half by 2030—we’ll still face the huge and unavoidable consequences of the warming that we’ve already unleashed. And chief among these is the fact that we’re steadily shrinking the area of the planet that humans can inhabit, and, in the process, creating refugees and migrants in what will almost certainly turn out to be unprecedented numbers: the United Nations estimates that we could see two billion climate migrants before the century is out. So the fact that Putin has created four million refugees in a matter of weeks is a test of our systems.
Those systems are straining. Volunteers have been showing up at European train stations offering spare rooms to fleeing Ukrainians, but there’s probably a limit to that kind of generosity. A resident of Vienna named Tanja Maier provides a daily account on Twitter of her efforts to help people arriving in that city, and recently she wrote that some of them are heading back home, “as the disenchantment sets in and the reality of the refugee experience in Europe without funds takes its toll. So much is luck and money. You need both.” The sheer scale of the exodus is overwhelming: Moldova, for instance, has seen four hundred thousand people come across its border; most have moved on to other countries, such as Romania, but a hundred thousand have been absorbed there—in a country of 2.6 million people.
The United States is a country of three hundred and thirty million people, with a per-capita income more than four times that of Moldova, which makes the Biden Administration’s offer, issued last month, to take in a hundred thousand Ukrainians, seem slightly less generous. Nevertheless, Biden’s move is a politically brave one, considering how, in recent elections, Republicans have demagogued anything to do with immigration. He’s got away with it so far, though—partly because the daily pictures from Ukraine make it clear just how necessary it is, and partly because, as refugees from other war-torn territories have pointed out, Ukrainians are white. As an Afghan refugee in an Italian camp told a reporter, “People who used to give spare clothes and food to us are now giving them to Ukrainians.”
Even Biden’s offer, however, demonstrates how broken our immigration and refugee systems are: a group of Ukrainian refugees told the Washington Post that visits to U.S. embassies in European capitals had proved useless. “They told us, ‘Sorry, we don’t have any options for you yet,’ ” one man said. So they flew to Mexico City and on to Tijuana, where some fifteen hundred are now camped a few yards from the U.S. border. The closest thing to a register of the refugees is a numbered list that volunteers keep on a yellow legal pad, the Post reported. “No. 612 was Gleb Prochukhan, 15, the No. 3-ranked junior table tennis player in Kharkiv, whose English was good enough to translate for some of the foreign volunteers who had descended on Tijuana with blankets and protein bars and tacos.”
Of course, the number of Ukrainian refugees on the border is nothing compared with the number of refugees from South and Central America, who have been stuck at the border for years, ever since the Trump Administration, under the guise of COVID protection, stopped taking their applications. The Biden Administration may lift that policy next month, but it hasn’t said how many people it will admit, or under what circumstances. On Friday, the Post reported, “A family of Honduran asylum seekers, turned away at the border, passed by the Ukrainian encampment to ask for small change.”
Hondurans and their Central American neighbors, in fact, have as strong a claim to shelter here as Ukrainians do. By 2019, Honduras was in the fifth year of a devastating drought, linked to climate change, that, in some parts of the country, cut corn yields by more than seventy per cent. An internal report from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency, obtained by NBC News, found that a crop shortage was the “overwhelming factor driving record-setting migration” from Guatemala. The report describes that shortage as leaving citizens “in extreme poverty and starving.” Then, in 2020—at the end of the most active hurricane season ever recorded in the Atlantic—within two weeks, two huge storms crashed into the region, doing damage estimated at forty per cent of Honduras’s G.D.P. By contrast, the costliest U.S. natural disaster ever, Hurricane Katrina, which displaced a million or more Americans, dented the nation’s economy by only one per cent of its G.D.P. (And Hondurans did next to nothing to cause the climate crisis that drove that drought and those storms—the average Honduran emits one-fifteenth as much carbon dioxide as the average American.)
We should obviously care about Ukrainian suffering, but we should also care about the suffering of Central Americans, and of others—such as Somalians, who have been enduring an escalating drought. As Reuters reported last month, “It has not rained on Habiba Maow Iman’s farm in southern Somalia for two years. Her animals are dead; her crops failed. . . . The 61-year-old is one of tens of thousands seeking aid on the outskirts” of a refugee camp that is now in the midst of a measles epidemic. Somalia’s per-capita carbon emissions are about 0.3 per cent of America’s.
Which brings us back to the present moment, and the opportunity that President Biden now has to dramatically shift the tenor of this debate in favor of making immigration and asylum easier. To do so, he’ll need to argue on practicalities as well as on principles. Most Americans agree that immigrants are hardworking and improve the country. Meanwhile, unemployment is approaching record lows, and many people sense that we need more bodies in the workforce. To look at the health-care industry, for example, if you’re a rural American, you know that we’re running desperately short of doctors; if you’re an aging American, you know that there’s already a dire shortage of home health-care workers, which is going to get worse in the years ahead. And so on. America’s population is barely growing now; as Derek Thompson pointed out in The Atlantic last month, 2021 saw the slowest growth in the nation’s history, in part because so many people died of COVID, in part because fewer people had babies, and—in the largest part—because immigration has collapsed, from more than a million people annually, before Donald Trump entered office, to less than a quarter of a million last year.
Shifting to a more welcoming set of immigration policies will require figuring out systems to take migrants in and resettle them, but lots of people are ready to assist. Krish Vignarajah, the president of the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (I serve on the advisory board), told NPR that, during the past year, a hundred thousand Americans have volunteered to help, as they watched first Afghans and then Ukrainians be forced from their homes. Refugees, she said, “need everything from organizations like ours picking them up at the airport, you know, helping them find affordable housing—obviously not an easy thing to do at this moment given the housing crisis. It’s about helping them find new jobs, integrate into their communities, navigate public transportation . . . taking them to doctor’s appointments, helping them enroll kids in public school.”
This task won’t be easy, not logistically and not politically, but every tenth-of-a-degree rise in temperature shrinks the habitable world by some fraction, forcing more people from their homes. Just as Putin’s war gives Biden a new opportunity to make the case for renewable energy, so it gives him an opening to address this intractable problem. In both cases, it may be a last chance before climate change overtakes us.
Vladimir Putin. (photo: Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Getty Images)
The stakes in Ukraine are too high to skimp on any aspect of the truth.
When I was recently on the Ukrainian border, I spent what little free time I had reading Western coverage and trying to keep a bird’s-eye view of events. But the problem is, a bird’s-eye view is low-resolution, and I noticed a lot of reporting that did not match what I was seeing on the ground, hearing from experts or what Ukrainians and Poles were telling me. So much of this coverage over-simplified aspects of the war to fit certain narratives.
For instance, there’s Vladimir Putin’s claim that he wants to de-nationalize and de-nazify Ukraine. This makes it sound as if the country is infested with SS troops keeping Ukrainians hostage from reuniting with Russia. Or perhaps Putin believes the public is part of the problem too, a nation of Hitler’s true believers. Meanwhile, many of Putin’s opponents say there is no Nazi problem in Ukraine and that this is a cynical lie to justify his imperialist land-grab. The truth is, they’re both wrong.
Ukraine does, in fact, have a Nazi problem. Not only do antisemitic attacks remain an issue, but there are alarming levels of violence against Romani, Asians, Blacks, Muslims, Tartars, and the LGBT community. The U.S. State Department once referred to Ukraine’s Interregional Academy of Personnel Management (MAUP) as “one of the most... antisemitic institutions in Eastern Europe.” In 2005, MAUP hosted David Duke as a guest speaker.
On the other hand, while attacks do happen, they are not all too common. In 2020, police recorded 203 hate crimes. While neo-Nazi political parties do exist, they wield little power. In 2012, the ethnic ultranationalist party Svoboda gained over 10 percent of the vote in parliament, but their vote share has since shriveled to less than 2 percent in 2019. And of course, President Volodymyr Zelensky is Jewish. Not to mention the victims of Russia’s invasion and the bodies currently filling mass graves in Bucha are innocent civilians, not Wehrmacht infantry.
Then there’s the argument that Western nations care more about Ukraine because the victims are white. Often, the comparison is made to the Syrian refugee crisis. To be sure, racism is certainly at play here. New York Times Magazine reporter Nicole Hannah-Jones retweeted a thread of examples of reporters describing the invasion of this “relatively civilized” nation, relative to other parts of the world, and lamenting that “Europeans with blond hair and blue eyes are being killed.” But there’s more to it than this.
For one thing, it is understandable for European nations, especially Eastern European nations, to pay more attention to a war in Eastern Europe. It also makes sense for nations everywhere to be more invested in a war that may lead to global economic ruin, nuclear conflict or World War III, compared to other recent wars that did not appear to pose these risks.
When it comes to sympathy for refugees, there is no doubt people are more inclined to feel sorry for women and children fleeing war, and while 71 percent of Syrian refugees were men, virtually no Ukrainian refugees are men, and those that are men are predominantly over the age of 60 or disabled. Ukrainian refugees are overwhelmingly women and children, and about half of them are kids. They are therefore seen as less threatening, which partly explains why other communities have been more welcoming.
Finally, we have the idea that Ukrainians hate Russians, or are pro-Russia, or actually are Russian. Almost every Ukrainian I have met or spoken to readily discerns Putin and the Russian government from the Russian people. This is because Ukrainians are, in fact, part Russian. But this is partly the result of decades of deliberate population engineering by Russia as well as Russification by imperialism and conquest.
As for actually being Russian, the truth is: It’s complicated. Many Ukrainians, such as Mila Kunis, have long identified as Russian because it’s easier that way. Many others do so because there’s truth to it.
My own family is Russian. My grandmother was born in the Siberian city of Vladivostok. But my grandfather and his family came from the region that is now Belarus and Ukraine, and like many Ukrainians today, they were culturally Russian because they were Russified. My father grew up speaking Russian, just as Zelenskyy’s first language is Russian. My favorite food is pelmeni, and every Easter my babushka makes kulich. And yet almost every time I meet a native Russian, they notice the classic suffix -ko in my name and say, “Ukrainian, da?”
The truth is cumbersome and wordy and doesn’t fit into headlines. We have a digital media environment that is stunningly adept, not at spreading nuanced discourse, but simply at spreading whatever spreads. And that makes nuanced discourse more valuable than ever. Especially when the stakes are as high as they are now.
The letter Z, a symbol of Russian support for the country's invasion of Ukraine, is prominent on a billboard over a World War II museum in St. Petersburg. (photo: Anatoly Maltsev/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
The cases are part of a Soviet-style hunt for “traitors” who oppose the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine.
“So long as Russia doesn’t behave itself in a civilized way, this will go on forever,” she fumed, adding that she endorsed the European ban. Russia “wanted to get to Kyiv, to overthrow Zelensky and the government. This is a sovereign state,” she said. “There’s a sovereign government there.”
Little did she know that her students were recording her outburst and that a copy would make its way to law enforcement authorities, who opened a criminal investigation under a new national law banning false information about the military.
Gen is one of at least four teachers recently turned in by students or parents for antiwar speech, in some of the starkest examples of the government’s quest to identify and punish individuals who criticize the invasion.
It’s a campaign with dark Soviet echoes, inspired last month by President Vladimir Putin, who praised Russians for their ability to identify “scum and traitors” and “spit them out like a fly.”
“I am convinced that this natural and necessary self-cleansing of society will only strengthen our country,” Putin said March 16 in a televised speech, accusing the West of wanting to use a “fifth column” to destroy Russia.
In the last several weeks, a list of “traitors and enemies” has cropped up online, published by the Committee for the Protection of National Interests, a shadowy group claiming a duty to expose public figures who support “anti-Russian” sanctions and political pressure.
The regional government of Kaliningrad sent text messages to local residents urging them to report “provocateurs and scammers” who were undermining the “special operation in Ukraine,” according to the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta. And a string of activists, journalists and opposition politicians have found the word “traitor” and vile graffiti painted on their front doors.
“After a rather significant period of freedom … fear has returned to Russian society, and informants have become more active against those who express disagreement with the authorities,” said Nikita Petrov, a longtime historian at the human-rights group Memorial, which a Moscow court abolished in December after years of government pressure on the group.
War opponents can easily run afoul of the law given the new censorship rules. Recent additions to the criminal code make it illegal to discredit the armed forces or to spread “fake” information about the military — which in practice means anything contradicting official government reports.
The cases of children informing on teachers recall the young Soviet folk hero Pavlik Morozov, who, legend had it, betrayed his father to the authorities for anti-Soviet activity. Generations of Soviet children were encouraged to be like Pavlik, to show loyalty to the state above all else.
Russian propaganda today stresses similar themes. “To be a human, to be a good citizen, to be moral, is to identify with the state and to identify in particular with the state’s language,” said Ian Garner, a historian of Russian propaganda. “That is especially the case when it comes to young people,” whom the Kremlin hopes to mold into obedient citizens, he said.
In the weeks since the invasion began, Russian social media have been flooded with photos of schoolchildren attending special patriotic lessons or posing for pictures as they formed the letter Z — a symbol signifying support for the war.
Education Minister Sergey Kravtsov said in early March that more than 5 million children across Russia had watched a lesson called “Defenders of Peace.” It was part of a government-produced series reviewed by The Washington Post that promotes many of the Kremlin’s arguments and justifications for the attack on Ukraine.
Until her resignation under pressure this month, Gen taught English to eighth-grade students in the city of Penza, 400 miles southeast of Moscow, according to Pavel Chikov, the head of an association of human rights lawyers now representing Gen. She did not respond to requests for comment.
Gen’s answer to the students’ questions about why they couldn’t compete in the sports event was “emotional,” Chikov said. “Somebody recorded this conversation and then reported it to the police.” The recording was passed to federal authorities, who on March 30 opened a criminal investigation under the new censorship law.
A copy of the recording spread quickly online. In it, Gen can be heard sparring with her students. One girl seems to object to the teacher’s criticism of the invasion, saying “we don’t know all the details.”
“Exactly, you don’t know anything. You don’t know anything at all,” Gen replies. “I look at 100, 200 different independent sources … We have a totalitarian regime. Any dissent is considered a crime of thought.”
“We’re a rogue country! We’re North Korea,” she adds. “We’re not accepted anywhere now.”
Informants have turned in a variety of war critics, including a church deacon who shared his views with parishioners and colleagues, according to a Russian media report.
A 17-year-old in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk is being investigated for a news report about the war that he shared in a chat group on the social media platform Telegram, according to his lawyer, Stanislav Seleznev. He said it was possible that law enforcement was monitoring the group or that one of the 400 participants reported his client.
Several other teachers have also been targeted, including a university lecturer in the Siberian region of Amur, who was fined for disseminating “false information” to her students about Russian military actions in Ukraine, according to a local court. Witnesses to the offending lecture gave testimony that helped establish the teacher’s guilt, the court added.
On Sakhalin Island, off Russia’s Pacific Coast, another teacher of English was secretly recorded by a student last month. She was fired from her job and fined 30,000 rubles, about $375, by a court that said she had discredited Russian troops.
The teacher, Marina Dubrova, told a Siberian news site affiliated with the U.S.-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty that she had called the war a mistake during after-class discussions. The student’s tape of her comments ended up with the police — possibly through the parents, Dubrova said, though she wasn’t certain. She did not respond to The Post’s requests for comment.
“On Monday morning at school I was greeted with the words: ‘Marina Gusmanovna, the police are here for you,’” Dubrova said in the interview, using her formal name with patronymic.
“A protocol was drawn up against me, and the trial took place on the same day. I explained my position that the president of our country is just a person, like everyone else, that he can make mistakes. And I think this decision is wrong,” Dubrova continued.
“I was told that, as a teacher, I cannot say such things to students. But I don’t agree,” she said. “Teaching is a humanistic profession, first and foremost, to teach people to hear different opinions, to form positions based on different points of view. Is that really a bad thing?”
Smalls and Palmer achieved a 'historic victory' on 1 April, when they won the union vote 2,654 to 2,131. (photo: Brendan McDermid/Reuters)
Grassroots methods to woo coworkers to join the ‘revolution’ worked even as the company came for him with all its might
Clad in a black baseball cap and air pods, Smalls spoke with the Guardian less than a week after winning a historic victory over Amazon, the second largest US employer – and establishing the company’s first ever union.
For more than two years, Smalls and his co-organizer Derrick Palmer led a campaign to form Amazon’s first union at a Staten Island warehouse.
Hosting cookouts, bonfires and other small gatherings with Amazon employees, Smalls and Palmer signed up over 4,000 workers for the union vote, with staff voting to establish a union by a wide margin of more than 500 votes.
While the quest to form a union at Amazon formally began in March 2020, when Smalls led a workplace walkout over pandemic working conditions, Smalls told the Guardian that problems with Amazon started earlier, with no resolution in sight.
When staff complained of low pay, unsafe working conditions and short breaks, management at Amazon were complacent.
“Amazon doesn’t really know their own workers,” said Smalls. “They think we’re all stupid, they think we’re kids,” he added, noting that Amazon would sometimes give workers small treats like lollipops or cupcakes rather than meaningfully addressing their complaints.
Things came to a head when Smalls, an assistant manager at the time, staged a walkout over Amazon’s lack of personal protective equipment, social distancing guidelines and other pandemic protections. Amazon fired Smalls the same day as the protest, alleging that he had broken quarantine orders. Smalls asserts that he was fired in retaliation, and figures such as Vermont senator Bernie Sanders and New York attorney general Letitia James criticized his dismissal.
Being fired motivated Smalls to begin campaigning for an official union at Amazon, a chance for workers to fight grueling conditions that remained unresolved.
“Established unions had 28 years to unionize at Amazon and obviously that didn’t work,” said Smalls, adding that many established unions and supposed outside experts didn’t understand how Amazon operated – or what its employees endured.
Traditional tactics of organizing didn’t work at Amazon, Smalls said. Rallying staff in secret was a failing project “because one worker will be here today, gone the next day”, said Smalls.
“You need to be out front and outspoken with this company,” he added.
Bringing in politicians or celebrities to rally union votes, strategies used during an unsuccessful union vote in Alabama, was also not a winning strategy, as many staff “don’t even know who these politicians are”, said Smalls.
Instead, Smalls and Palmer reached out to their coworkers with more grassroots methods, setting up a gathering place at a bus stop workers used to commute home. There, they handed out food to their fellow employees – funded in part by GoFundMe donations – and discussed employee grievances.
“We are Amazon workers. We have the experience. So it just worked for us,” said Smalls.
Whereas Amazon quickly began hounding workers with anti-union messages, a move that Smalls said backfired as staff felt their independent vote was being targeted, Smalls and fellow co-organizers remained patient, waiting for workers to have their own moments of realization and sign up to vote.
“Once they got out of the honeymoon phase, they would come right to the tent, sign on up,” said Smalls, adding, “This is a marathon, not a sprint.”
Smalls and Palmer, a six-year veteran with Amazon who Smalls said had substantial influence at the company, also spread their union message via various social groups with demographics that Amazon management ignored.
To expose Amazon’s hired union busters, Smalls and Palmer printed out signs with phrases like “Most Wanted” and “Catch a Union Buster,” publicizing the name, picture, salary, and location of where anti-union hires were from.
Meanwhile, Amazon, which spent over $4m to stop Smalls’ efforts, escalated its own tactics. In addition to calling Smalls “not smart or articulate” and characterizing pro-union organizers as “thugs”, Amazon had Smalls and other co-organizers arrested for trespassing while they were dropping off food and union materials.
Amazon management also tried to appeal to white workers by calling union organizing nothing but Black Lives Matter protests, according to Smalls.
Smalls also said that Amazon worked with other companies, including the warehouse’s land owner and the New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), to block their efforts: putting up scaffolding to stop organizers from building a tent, rerouting the bus stop so workers couldn’t see Smalls’ setup, and even changing the bathroom code.
“Why are you working with Amazon to union bust?” Smalls said of Amazon’s anti-union collaborators.
Despite Amazon’s efforts, the resolve of Smalls and others paid off. In a win that shocked labor organizers and observers, Amazon workers at the warehouse voted 2,654 to 2,131 to establish a union for the very first time.
“The workers that I organize with are like my family now,” Smalls said. “To bring this victory to them is the best feeling in the world, next to my kids’ birth.”
Smalls and other co-organizers have begun the process of negotiating a contract, demanding that Amazon not hire or fire any employees as talks continue. With a second union vote at a separate warehouse set for 25 April, Smalls is ready to see another victory.
“I know what I sacrificed,” said Smalls. “I know what they sacrificed to get there.”
March 2020. (photo: Marc Bruxelle/Alamy)
We want cheap stuff fast and don’t care who it hurts.
The long and short of it is that the fancier the credit card rewards, the higher the swipe fees for merchants. Those merchants often pass along the costs of those swipe fees to all customers, whatever the payment mechanism. People who pay with rewards cards tend to be more well-off, financially, and their hotel points or flight miles are being, in part, subsidized by people paying in cash or debit who tend to be poorer. A 2010 paper found that households that use cash pay about $149 on average to households that use credit cards, and each of the credit card households gets $1,133 from cash users every year.
Essentially, credit card rewards have to come from somewhere, and they’re partly coming from people who aren’t reaping the benefits. Some readers were very angry to discover this information. “Maybe it’s time for people who don’t want to work to know how it feels to foot the bill for other people?” one person wrote to me, apparently equating having a rewards card with having a job. “If people want a better life I suggest education and getting a degree or a certificate in a trade,” wrote another person. “Boohoohoo. Who cares?” wrote another.
Some people seemed to feel that they had a serious right to accumulate credit card rewards, regardless of who or what those rewards were coming from. It’s a sentiment that bears out in the data: A 2019 LendingTree survey found that people were likelier to support a rate cap on credit cards if it reduced access for people with imperfect credit than they were if it meant it would significantly lower their rewards.
“What that essentially says is that more people [were] okay with fewer folks having access to credit than they were with having their own credit card rewards shrink,” explained Matt Schulz, chief credit analyst at LendingTree, in an email.
That consumers can be selfish isn’t a new phenomenon. Remember when everyone was hoarding toilet paper and masks at the start of the pandemic? But it is worth pausing and reflecting on how angry people feel when confronted with the idea.
“In our culture, we have excessively high expectations,” said Robin Kowalski, a psychology professor at Clemson University who studies complaining. Not just high expectations, but specific ones, about how the economy should run and what we should get out of it. We want things to be cheap, we want things to be fast, we want things to be efficient. For decades, American customers have been told they’re always right. Naturally, they’ve come to believe it.
People aren’t accustomed to having to really think about the trade-offs they make for the economy to run how it does, and when they do have to think about it, they don’t like it. Consumer-centric culture has made it easier for us to be destructive in ways big and small — to workers, to the environment, and to each other. Corporations have manufactured our high expectations, and it’s hard to reverse course.
“We expect everything to work just like clockwork,” Kowalski explains. “Heaven forbid the internet goes out or we get stuck in a traffic jam and can’t go as fast as we want to, and that’s immediately going to trigger dissatisfaction.”
Credit card rewards are nice for those who have them. They’re also not special gifts from the sky you’re entitled to because you’re modestly decent with personal finance or follow the Points Guy.
Why we’re like this
Consumer culture hasn’t always been this way, with expectations as high as they are, but we’ve gotten here over about the last century and a half. As Amanda Mull outlined last year in the Atlantic, merchants drew in buyers and trained them in a certain way — to believe that they’re guests, to get reassurance, to be told that they’re always right. Tipping culture emerged, tying a server’s pay to the whims of a consumer instead of a living wage. People’s identities became increasingly intertwined with consumerism and buying, with people comparing themselves to peers and consuming more in order to keep up. Mass manufacturing and mail-order delivery and merchandising and transportation have made it easier for people to get more and more stuff.
As companies have competed for our business, and technology has made the consumer experience feel even more efficient, expectations have risen. Customers are constantly updating their expectations based on prior experiences, advertising, competition, or the economy in general, explained Jihoon Cho, an assistant professor of marketing at Kansas State University’s college of business administration. And how they evaluate a service is whether it’s better or worse than expected rather than the objective measure of the actual service.
“The way we evaluate things is a function of expectations,” said Deborah Small, a marketing professor of psychology at Wharton. “If we’re used to a level of customer service, which Americans are, and then things change, like prices go up or things slow down, the violation of that expectation is what causes disappointment, anger, all of these sorts of things.”
Thirty years ago, people were generally fine with whatever they ordered off of the television arriving in five to seven business days, because it was the status quo. Now, thanks to Amazon, even two days can feel like an eternity.
David Mick, a professor of commerce at the University of Virginia, describes the situation as the “er” phenomenon, where people are led to believe that there is always something better ahead. “If you think about packaging or advertising, products across the spectrum are constantly positioning themselves as softer, sweeter, easier, smoother, quieter, longer-lasting, or just the big word, better,” he said. “We’re always being set up that whatever we’re looking at or considering to buy is better.”
Once expectations rise, consumers have a hard time going back. We’re averse to loss.
We’re seeing this clearly during the pandemic. Supply chain woes, staffing shortages, and other pandemic-induced uncertainties have translated to all sorts of shortcomings when it comes to what consumers expect, and there are all sorts of examples of people reacting terribly in turn. Passengers are attacking flight attendants on airlines. Customers are throwing fits in restaurants and grocery stores and retailers. They’re mad about wait times and inflation and thinly stretched staff. They’re also mad they’re not in the right when they refuse to wear a mask or show a vaccine card or, simply, wait.
Workers, in turn, are suffering. According to a June 2021 survey from Snagajob and Black Box Intelligence, 62 percent of restaurant workers report experiencing emotional abuse and disrespect from customers. The Association of Flight Attendants said in July 2021 that 85 percent of flight attendants dealt with unruly passengers in the first part of 2021, and 17 percent had experienced a physical incident. Consumers have been told they’re always right for decades, and for some, when that’s not the case, their reactions are extreme.
“Other countries have a more balanced view on ‘the customer is always right,’ and that’s somewhere that we can dig in as a society,” said Melissa Swift, US transformation leader at Mercer, a work consultancy firm. “Why do we believe that? That doesn’t have to be a baseline assumption.”
In a world where the consumer wins, there are often losers, whether that be workers, the environment, or the other consumers they’re competing with to get a piece of some limited socioeconomic pie. Inequality drives all sorts of anxieties and a class of what Richard Reeves, author of Dream Hoarders, describes as “opportunity hoarding” among the upper-middle class to try to maintain their place in society and keep others down.
The design of our consumer economy means we’ve made a collective set of moral and ethical calculations that some trade-offs are worth it. It’s a choice that servers in the United States are still paid a wage of $2.13 an hour and left to hope that generous consumers — who enjoy lower prices for their meals — tip them. It’s a choice that the gig economy of companies like Uber and DoorDash provide people with low-priced convenience without thinking too hard about the economic and personal consequences for workers. It’s true that Amazon and Walmart keep prices low — including for low-income consumers. It’s also true that the way they do it is by paying its employees very little and squeezing every ounce of work out of them that they can.
“For the past few decades, we basically built large sectors of the economy around cheap and easily available pools of labor, and we organized parts of our legal system to ensure companies had access to large pools of low-wage labor,” said Brishen Rogers, a Georgetown law professor focused on labor.
Part of what’s causing consumers such frustration right now is that cheap pools of labor are not so easily available. There are worker shortages across the economy, and the labor market is so tight that workers are able to change jobs quite easily — and say no to some of the most grueling jobs altogether.
There’s a limit to how “customer-centric” businesses can be. “You can start to do things to be so overly focused on your customer that you cause systemic breakdowns,” Swift, from Mercer, said. There are some jobs that have become so intensified that basically there’s no amount of money that makes the work worth it for some workers. It’s no longer a question of how much any business or customer can pay. Some people just don’t want to be teachers or child care workers or work in hospitality or food service — the demands of the job, including from customers (or, in the case of teachers, from parents) are just too much.
When Walmart workers quit, they often make the same joke: “I promoted myself to customer.”
Blame corporations
It’s not super fun to be a consumer right now. Prices are rising, plenty of products take a long time to get or are unavailable, and many businesses are really short-staffed. Corporations are asking for patience from frustrated consumers as they try to make up for lost ground, but it’s important to note that corporations have a big role in how consumerism got here in the first place.
Susan Strasser, a historian of American consumer culture, stressed that consumer expectations in the US are a corporate creation. She pointed to the example of the mail-order business in the late 19th and early 20th century, brought about by companies such as Sears and Montgomery Ward. Previously, most people relied a lot on things that were locally produced, often by people they knew. When they were able to order by mail from catalogs sent to their homes, the whole system changed. “What it meant was everything American manufacturing was producing was available to people,” she said. “That kind of consumption, that kind of distribution, that kind of merchandising coincided with an avalanche of stuff.”
Yesterday’s Sears is today’s Amazon — you can get anything and you can get it fast, and you often don’t see the inner workings behind making what you’re getting possible. “As automated as it may be at Amazon, and we know it’s highly automated by the way that we can just click and it comes, there are people,” Strasser said.
Through advertising, marketing, merchandising, and other practices, corporations are ultimately the ones managing expectations. On credit card rewards, for example, credit card companies spent years competing with each other to make rewards bigger and better. It’s a good deal for the consumers who reap those rewards, but it’s making things harder for those who don’t.
Still, in the current moment, consumers are being met with a reality that for years a lot of people could conveniently ignore. “We have become an entitled society,” said Mark Cohen, director of retail studies at Columbia Business School. “We have been blessed, up until the last two and a half years, with relatively little, if any, inflation, in fact, deflation in many categories. We’ve been blessed, for those involved, with very low interest rates and pretty much open-ended availability of money. People have been able to buy houses and cars and use their credit cards.”
The distorted reality we’ve been living in over the past two years, he said, has made everybody “grumpy,” and that often boils over in our consumer experiences and in retail. “The supermarket, the gas station, the department store, the mall, it’s kind of where it all comes to a head.”
Right now, consumers are having to lower some of their expectations by force — and many, understandably, don’t like it. But it may also be a moment to reflect on how we got here and whether we want to stay here. Consumerism means we often make things worse for each other, whether it be hoarding toilet paper, yelling at a service worker, or replacing an item that’s perfectly fine.
“It really comes down to the trade-offs and what, as a society, we value,” Small said. All else equal, efficiency is good, quality is good, lower prices are good. But all else isn’t equal. “Nobody argues that they’re not valuable, but it comes down to how we as a society think about trade-offs.”
Companies and capitalism and society have trained us to be bad consumers. It’s behavior that can be untrained, too.
Imran Khan becomes the first Pakistani prime minister to be ousted by a no-confidence vote. (photo: Getty Images)
Pakistan's Prime Minister Imran Khan has been ousted from power after losing a no-confidence vote in his leadership.
The motion was first brought last week, but the former cricket star blocked it by dissolving parliament.
Sunday's vote took place after the country's Supreme Court ruled in favour of opposition parties and said that Mr Khan had acted unconstitutionally.
Opposition leader Shehbaz Sharif - who is expected to be chosen as the new prime minister on Monday - said Pakistan and its parliament were "finally freed from a serious crisis", adding in a tweet: "Congratulations to the Pakistani nation on a new dawn."
If voted in by parliament, Mr Sharif - a long-time rival of Mr Khan and brother of former three-time Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif - would be able to hold power until October 2023, when the next election is due to be held.
The vote makes Mr Khan the first Pakistani prime minister to be ousted by a no-confidence motion, with opposition parties securing 174 votes in the 342-member house in support of the no-confidence motion.
His supporters are expected to take to the streets on Sunday evening.
'International conspiracy'
Mr Khan has previously said he would not recognise an opposition government, claiming - without evidence - that there was a US-led conspiracy to remove him because of his refusal to stand with Washington on issues against Russia and China.
He has repeatedly said that Pakistan's opposition parties are working with foreign powers. Members of his party (PTI) left the building just ahead of the vote, also insisting he was the victim of an international conspiracy.
The US has said there is "no truth" in these allegations, and Mr Khan has never provided any evidence.
When Imran Khan was elected prime minister in 2018, he seemed to have almost everything in his favour.
A national hero from his cricketing days, he had transformed into a charismatic politician and, after years of struggle, managed to supplant the two rival established political dynasties that had dominated Pakistan for decades.
He emerged as a fresh force, with vibrant rallies full of catchy songs which, along with his huge social media presence, amplified his staunch anti-corruption message. Mr Khan promised to bring "change" to the country, creating a "new Pakistan".
No prime minister has ever completed a full five-year parliamentary tenure in Pakistan, and Imran Khan looked as though he could well be the first.
The reason his position appeared so secure, however, also helps explain his downfall. Both sides deny it, but it's widely acknowledged he came to power with the help of Pakistan's powerful army and intelligence services - and now he has fallen out with them.
The vote was initially due to take place in parliament last Sunday, but deputy speaker Qasim Suri - a member of Mr Khan's political party - swiftly blocked the motion, saying it showed "foreign interference". Mr Suri also said that it went against the constitution, which calls for loyalty to the state.
Mr Khan's government went on to dissolve parliament and called for a snap election to be held. This angered several opposition members, with some accusing the prime minister of treason for blocking the vote.
Opposition figures submitted a petition to the Supreme Court to assess the situation.
On Thursday, Pakistan's top court ruled that Mr Khan's decision to stop the vote from going ahead was unconstitutional. It ordered that the no-confidence vote should go ahead again.
However an impasse over the vote continued well into Saturday evening, prompting the speaker of the lower house of parliament - Asad Qaiser, an ally of Mr Khan - to resign.
Pakistan: The basics
Who is the ruling party in Pakistan? Pakistan's current ruling party is Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), which is one of the three major political parties of Pakistan. It is now headed by former cricketer-turned-politician and PTI head Imran Khan, who took power as Prime Minister in 2018 after PTI emerged as the dominant party in government following the 2013 general elections.
Who are the opposition? The opposition is headed by the Pakistan Muslim League-N (PML-N) and the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) -- two usually feuding dynastic groups that dominated national politics for decades until prime minister Imran Khan forged a coalition against them.
How long does the prime minister serve for? The prime minister of Pakistan serves for a five-year term. However no elected or appointed prime ministers have served the entirety of their term to date.
Demonstrators hold a 'Listen to the Science' banner during a climate protest in London. (photo: Vuk Valcic/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images)
The IPCC's latest report finally recognizes the social barriers to climate action.
Despite reassurances from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, vaccine disinformation spread. Influencers such as Fox News pundits, right-wing podcasters, and anti-vax parent groups slowed the response to the pandemic. At the end of last year, 15 percent of the American population remained unvaccinated.
A similar story is playing out, albeit on a much longer time scale, with humanity’s response to the climate crisis. This week, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, released a report that emphasized that the barriers to accomplishing progress on climate change are largely political, not scientific.
The report, dedicated to analyzing the solutions to climate change, found that, thanks to decades of work by researchers, the world has the science, the technologies, and much of the engineering prowess needed to scale down emissions and ensure a livable planet. The missing ingredient is the political will to make those adjustments. Actions taken by a powerful minority — led by lawmakers and lobbyists for the fossil fuel industry — have prevented the world from confronting this existential threat. Now, scientists warn that the window to take effective action is rapidly closing.
“For some time, there was this assumption among many in the science community that, if only decision-makers had the right information and the public had the right information, then of course everyone would work to do what is necessary to mitigate the climate threat,” Matto Mildenberger, an assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told Grist. “But that’s not how we work.”
For the first time in IPCC history, the report includes a chapter on the social science barriers to solving the climate threat. Chapter 5 of the report, titled “Demand, Services and Social Aspects of Mitigation,” makes an effort to parse the conditions under which humans will take action to slow the climate crisis. The intergovernmental panel has included social science in its global assessments before, but this is the first report that has dedicated an entire chapter to understanding and analyzing human behavior. “I think in some ways, this chapter is sort of the IPCC catching up with an understanding that many of our political leaders already have that this is a challenging political issue,” Mildenberger said.
The chapter shows that lifestyle sector changes, when adopted en masse, have significant power to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Taking fewer flights and more public transportation, switching to plant-based diets, and living in more energy-efficient buildings, among other strategies, could reduce greenhouse gas emissions across all economic sectors between 40 and 70 percent by 2050.
So what’s standing in the way of more people making those lifestyle decisions? In short, it’s policy.
“Individuals can’t just up and make a different decision, necessarily, to emit fewer greenhouse gas emissions,” Sarah Burch, an associate professor at the University of Waterloo, Canada and a coauthor of the IPCC report, told Grist. In order to make choices that result in fewer emissions, people need policymakers to shift the status quo. They need public transit options that allow them to easily leave their cars at home or ditch them altogether, access to affordable housing stock that runs efficiently on clean energy, and the ability to buy fresh vegetables and other plant-based foods.
Those policies are entirely feasible, at least in theory. In the United States, lawmakers in several states have introduced (and sometimes passed) bills aimed at retrofitting existing buildings to make them more energy efficient and transitioning power grids to green energy. The IPCC report shows that those types of policies not only result in reduced greenhouse gas emissions, but can also address issues of income inequality and economic insecurity, and vice versa.
“There is high confidence in the literature that addressing inequities in income, wealth, and decent living standards not only raises overall well-being,” the report reads, “but also improves the effectiveness of climate change mitigation policies.” Passing policies that improve people’s lives can also improve the planet’s outlook.
Despite gains at the state level, the United States and many other developed countries still lack federal climate policies that reduce emissions at the scale scientists say is necessary. The report’s new emphasis on the entrenched barriers to the myriad solutions it outlines in its report signals a shift for the intergovernmental panel. The IPCC is coming to the belated realization that just laying out the science and hoping policymakers use it to take action isn’t enough to move the needle.
Granted, government apathy and delay is in no small part due to political meddling by the fossil fuel industry, which has been waging concerted disinformation campaigns against climate science and lobbying lawmakers to reject climate policy since before the first IPCC report was published in 1990. Companies have successfully claimed that ditching coal, oil, and gas isn’t economically feasible and that passing climate policy would shift a massive economic burden onto consumers.
The new social science section of the latest IPCC report asserts that the opposite is true: Failing to act on climate change will incur enormous economic costs, and passing climate policy has the potential to lift people out of poverty.
But transitioning off of oil and gas will hurt the fossil fuel industry’s bottom line. “Climate policy threatens a particular set of concentrated interests who have made a lot of money from releasing carbon pollution into the atmosphere without paying the true cost of that,” Mildenberger, who contributed to the IPCC report but was not involved in the chapter on social barriers to action, said. “We’re facing a really significant economic and political conflict between the winners and losers from climate change.”
In the U.S., the political barriers to achieving climate action have been on full display over the past six months. President Joe Biden took office in January with plans to pass a climate plan that would have begun to match the scale of the crisis. But his efforts were foiled by a member of his own party: Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia. Manchin, who has deep ties to the fossil fuel industry, negotiated with his fellow Democrats and the Biden administration for months, and ultimately succeeded in watering down Biden’s initial climate plan, which would have slashed emissions from the power sector 82 percent by 2030. Eventually, Manchin pulled his support from the weakened plan, too. Manchin’s reticence is a microcosm of what the IPCC has identified as a global issue and what pro-climate politicians, activists, and parts of the general public have long understood: politics and power are getting in the way of progress.
The full scope of chapter 5’s findings, particularly the parts about vested interests working to slow and stop climate policy, didn’t make it into the report’s Summary for Policymakers — the most important piece of the assessment that must be approved by government representatives before the report can be released to the world. An earlier draft of the report, leaked to the Guardian, included information about those vested interests (AKA, the fossil fuel industry). But it was cut in the final draft.
“The scientists clearly did their job and provided ample material on climate obstruction activities in the report,” Robert Brulle, an environmental sociologist at Brown University, told The Guardian. “The political process of creating the Summary for Policymakers ended up editing all of this information out.” Politics is still getting in the way of climate science, even in a report that discusses the ways politics are getting in the way of climate science.
Mildenberger said the fact that the sharper conclusions in chapter 5 didn’t make it into the Summary for Policymakers means that the chapter’s full insights weren’t fully elevated to the forefront of the messaging around this latest IPCC report. He still sees chapter 5 as an important downpayment on a more thorough understanding of how to get decision-makers to stand up to the fossil fuel industry and pass climate policy. But in his view, the Summary for Policymakers and the larger report leaves a lot of important questions unanswered.
“How do we disrupt the political power of the fossil fuel industry? How do we help depolarize an issue like climate change that has become politicized?” he asked. “We don’t have clear cut answers on how to deal with some of these thorny political issues.”
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