Measuring the Ecological Impact of the Wealthy: Excessive Consumption, Ecological Disorganization, Green Crime, and Justice

Abstract

Ecological disorganization stemming from conspicuous consumption practices is understudied in the social sciences. In this analysis, we study conspicuous consumption and its implications for environmental sociology, ecological footprint analysis, and green criminology. We examine the issue of conspicuous consumption through the study of items that increase the ecological footprint considerably, that is, through the consumption of “luxury commodities.” Specifically, we draw attention to assessing aspects of ecological footprints of super yachts, super homes, luxury vehicles, and private jets. Taken together, the construction and use of these items in the United States alone is likely to create a CO2 footprint that exceeds those from entire nations. These results are not necessarily surprising but suggest that excessive consumption practices of the wealthy may need to be reinterpreted as criminal when they disrupt the normal regeneration and reproduction of ecosystems by generating excessive ecological disorganization.

RETRACTED ARTICLE: Does foreign direct investments impair the ecological footprint? New evidence from the panel quantile regression

“…The current scenario is more than three-fourths of the world inhabitants are living in a country with an ecological deficit (Rudolph and Figge 2017). It is an alarming issue for human sustainability (Lynch et al 2019).…”

The hidden injustices of advancing solar geoengineering research

“…Indeed, solar geoengineering may appeal to many wealthy climate philanthropists explicitly because it offers an alternative to the growing recognition that responding to climate change will require transformative measures that directly challenge free-market capitalism (Foster et al , 2011; Klein, 2014; Wainwright & Mann, 2018). The idea that confronting climate change demands a rapid, just and fundamental transformation away from our current fossil fuel-dominated capitalist political economies that are concentrating wealth and power seems to be untenable to many wealthy individuals, corporations and elite technocratic managers that profit from current systems that perpetuate inequities (Kenner, 2019; Lynch et al , 2019). For those that feel threatened by the call for radical, social, political and economic change, technological solutions, market mechanisms and moderate policies are appealing, even though they are inadequate responses to the scale of the emergent climate crisis (Huber, 2019).…”

From “Infant Hercules” to “Ghost Town”: Industrial Collapse and Social Harm in Teesside

“…While harm continues to search for a firm footing, its lens has been trained on a range of contemporary social problems including borders and immigration (Canning 2018), environmental damage (Davies et al 2019;Lynch et al 2019), leisure spaces (Raymen and Smith 2019), and workplaces (Lloyd 2019). More specifically, some harm-based research focuses on the effects of deindustrialization.…”