Alliances between the rich and financially stretched or anxious parts of the working class and middle class have often sustained the right, ever since the arrival of democracy made a more popular conservatism essential. These coalitions have used the same basic argument against necessary reforms as the anti-green movement is using now. This says that the cost, practical difficulties and general disruptiveness of change are too large. Meanwhile, the status quo is either rosily presented as stable and sustainable, or as the least bad option.
Yet behind such reassurances something important and potentially explosive lurks unmentioned: that the rich will be able to avoid the climate crisis for longer than the rest of us.
When the weather becomes intolerable in one country, they can more easily move to another. Or they can retreat into climate-controlled private spaces. In his 2016 book Vertical, Stephen Graham shows how the growing segregation of cities is creating “apartheid atmospheres”: air-purified towers and below-ground complexes for elite residents. Like latter-day castles, these enclaves shut out an increasingly harsh outside world. Meanwhile, through the heat expelled by their air conditioning systems, they make that world worse for everyone else.
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