Fwd: The Climate Change Driver Still Hiding in Plain Sight
Ashish Kothari
v. interesting analysis, if not surprising.
ashish
Ashish Kothari Apt 5 Shree Datta Krupa 908 Deccan Gymkhana Pune 411004, India https://ashishkothari.in
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| Subject: | The Climate Change Driver Still Hiding in Plain Sight |
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| Date: | Sat, 1 Aug 2026 14:43:34 +0000 |
| From: | Katie Jagielnicka from The Noösphere <thenoo...@substack.com> |
| Reply-To: | Katie Jagielnicka from The Noösphere <reply+3gntd8&napfm&&e22d367a7641e8735b276fbf65722e1c...@mg1.substack.com> |
| To: | ashish...@riseup.net |
The Climate Change Driver Still Hiding in Plain SightHow social norms help fuel the climate crisis
The Noösphere is an entirely reader-supported publication that applies recent social science research to the cultural, political, and technological issues shaping our world today. If you read it every week and value the labour that goes into it, consider supporting it by liking or sharing this essay, becoming a paid subscriber or buying me a coffee! Thank you! Golf courses use more water than data centres. At least for now.¹ And though this fact has recently become a popular defence of the latter, it also shows that, long before the AI boom, we were already pouring extraordinary amounts of water and other resources into activities that, in turn, have a disproportionate impact on the environment — and, ultimately, on the climate crisis itself. Golf courses. Oversized vehicles. Suburban sprawl. Private lawns. Beef-heavy diets. Fast fashion. The list goes on. Of course, these aren’t universal. You won’t find nearly as many massive sport-utility vehicles and pickup trucks across much of Europe or Asia as you will in the US. You also won’t easily stumble upon a golf course outside the US, Canada, Japan, and parts of Western Europe. The lifestyles and behaviours we come to view as ‘normal’ and desirable are largely shaped by the societies and cultures we live in. But even within the same culture, not everyone participates in them equally. Sometimes, that’s because they simply can’t afford to. Other times, because engaging in these activities doesn’t bring the same fulfilment or social rewards, or avoiding them the same penalties as they do for other groups. Yet while the physical aspects of climate change— emissions, fossil fuels, resource extraction, etc. — receive plenty of attention, and understandably so, the relationship between these physical changes and social norms and structures that sustain them receives far less. But they matter, too. If you were to guess which demographic contributes disproportionately to the worsening of the climate crisis through its consumption patterns and overall influence, you wouldn’t be far off by answering wealthy, white men in the Western world. That’s also the conclusion of a 2025 paper published in Norma: International Journal for Masculinity Studies, which pulls together research from 13 countries and 22 scientists and introduces the term (m)Anthropocene. Compared with women, men tend to have a higher carbon footprint and environmental impact, particularly through travel, tourism, transportation, and meat consumption.² One French study cited in the paper found that men produce 26% more emissions than women from transport and food alone. Men are also less likely to be concerned about climate change, less willing to change their behaviours to reduce its impact, and less supportive of climate policies. In fact, as another study reviewed by the authors found, the wealthier the country, the less concerned men become about climate change, in part because it comes to be perceived as a ‘women’s issue.’ The paper emphasises, however, that these patterns are most pronounced among affluent white men in developed nations, especially those with conservative political beliefs and rigid views of gender roles. That very same group of men also continue to overwhelmingly control and profit from the world’s most extractive and polluting industries, including industrial agriculture, automobiles, and AI. In the oil and gas sector, for example, men occupy nearly 100% of top executive roles globally. As the authors note when introducing the term (m)Anthropocene:
Hegemonic masculinity, a concept developed by sociologist R.W. Connell, describes a form of masculinity that prioritises traits such as aggression, strength, dominance, and authority as a means of maintaining power over women and other marginalised groups. In the context of the environment, the same logic arguably extends to nature itself, too. In a 2018 paper, political scientist Cara Daggett built on this idea to introduce another form of masculinity — ‘petromasculinity.’ She argues that fossil fuels have become deeply entangled with both authoritarian politics and masculine identity, offering some men who feel left behind in society a sense of power through their extraction and consumption. As she writes:
One example Daggett discusses is the ‘rollin’ coal’ trend, the practice of modifying a diesel engine to deliberately emit large amounts of thick black smoke. Although it emerged as a conservative protest against environmentalism, the noise, the stench, the smoke, the pollution, and the spectacle itself also give those engaging in it — mostly men — what Daggett describes as ‘the sensation of power.’ But that performance then comes at someone else’s expense: usually unsuspecting female pedestrians, cyclists, and drivers of hybrid or Asian-made cars (‘rice-burners’). The consequences of the climate crisis aren’t distributed evenly along lines of gender, race, or class either. Climate change has been called a threat multiplier for a reason. Every time a heatwave, flood, drought, or another extreme weather event strikes — events increasingly intensified by a warming planet — it deepens the cracks already running through society. And there’s plenty of evidence that it’s women around the world, especially Black, Brown, Indigenous, and working-class women, who experience climate change impacts the hardest. Women, after all, are already more likely to live in poverty than men, with one in ten women worldwide living in extreme poverty right now, according to 2024 UN estimates. Women also tend to spend more overall time working once unpaid domestic and care labour is taken into account, including tasks such as walking long distances for water and food, or caring for children, older people, and sick and disabled relatives. And, increasingly, much of that work takes place in overheated homes, under-resourced cities, or under extreme weather conditions, and sometimes during pregnancy, when exposure to heat can pose serious risks. As a result, women make up the majority — by some estimates, as many as 80% — of people displaced by climate change, and they are more likely — up to 14 times — to die in climate-linked disasters and to experience climate-driven food insecurity. According to the same UN projections, climate change is expected to leave an additional 236 million women and girls facing hunger by 2030, nearly twice as many as men (131 million). Most disturbingly, studies from around the world have also found that the climate crisis fuels both gender-based violence and child marriage. Fiona Doherty, a social work researcher and author of a recent systematic review examining the relationship between extreme weather and child marriage, explains that, following disasters, marrying off daughters is often seen as a way of reducing a household’s economic and food burden, while in communities that practice a ‘bride price’, it also brings in extra income.³ It isn’t wrong to describe the climate crisis as a women’s issue. In many respects, it is. The problem begins when both the crisis and its solutions become heavily, and pejoratively, gendered, giving some men yet another reason to cling to the patriarchal status quo. Another study reviewed in the (m)Anthropocene paper found that men who felt their masculinity was under threat were significantly more likely to deny climate change ‘to restore a sense of masculinity.’ That’s also the pattern identified by Dagget. The claim that our world is becoming feminised, too soft, too ‘woke,’ too caring; that the ‘traditional,’ supposedly ‘natural’ order is crumbling; that men are being left behind, forgotten and emasculated, all of this can push some to inflate, exaggerate, or otherwise distort their masculinity to get that power back. And if masculinity, of the hegemonic or ‘petro’ kind, is bound up with fossil-soaked lifestyles — driving big cars, eating big steak, pumping big black smoke into the atmosphere — it’s then no wonder that political movements championing those fears and ideals are leading the backlash against climate action and dismantling or scaling back climate regulations across the US and the EU. Any challenge to the fossil-fuel order is perceived as a challenge to the patriarchal order. To certain forms of masculinity and the privileges attached to it. How can we then separate gender from the causes and the consequences of the climate crisis when some of its strongest deniers (or defenders) clearly don’t? As I pointed out recently, what some men engage in is essentially environmental manspreading. The same entitlement to take up and use more space, and to dominate over it, except it’s our ecological space. Not every behaviour may be as deliberate as ‘rollin’ coal,’ sure, but the underlying function is similar. It reassures one’s identity (white, masculine) when it feels precarious, and it gives a sense of power, even if, ultimately, that power amounts to setting fire to the house you’re standing in. Even if every single person reading this became the most environmentally conscious version of themselves, it still wouldn’t be enough to meaningfully shift the trajectory of climate change. It’s a no-brainer, really, that without collective solutions, we’re cooked — figuratively and, increasingly, literally. But two things can be true at once. We need systemic change, yes, but our individual behaviours, especially here, in the West, don’t exist separately from those systems. In fact, whether we move towards a more sustainable future or continue down our current path of intensive fossil fuel consumption, there will, almost certainly, be changes to how we live, what we consume, how (and if) we travel, and so on. In the second scenario, those changes may happen not because we choose them, but because we can no longer afford to avoid them. Take beef, for example. Intensifying heatwaves expose cattle to dangerous levels of heat stress and, as a result, significantly increase their mortality. Fewer cattle equals less beef; less beef on the market likely equals higher prices. Our current resource-intensive consumer culture simply won’t be sustainable for most people for much longer. Tiptoeing around that reality, and around the role social forces play in the climate crisis, only risks creating a self-reinforcing cycle of resentment and anger. Gender alone hardly explains it all, of course. Nevertheless, it’s a crucial lens through which to understand not only the causes and consequences of climate change, but also the solutions needed to address it. You can’t protect those already experiencing the consequences of climate change without understanding who is most vulnerable and why. But also, you can’t address the growing global backlash to climate action without understanding where it comes from and what fuels it. And you can’t easily build support for collective solutions when some see them as inherently inferior. The systematic devaluation of care, compassion, cooperation, and respect for nature — values associated with ‘traditional’ femininity and dismissed as ‘primitive’ when embodied by Indigenous and other non-Western cultures — is one of the key reasons so many people, regardless of gender, continue to tolerate, participate in, or even celebrate the destruction of our planet. Ultimately, though, when a deadly heatwave collides with a power outage that renders many AC units useless, or when a flood cuts off roads and essential services — both scenarios made more likely by climate change — the qualities that help people survive won’t be the ones our societies have long rewarded most. It won’t be dominance, destruction, aggression, endless expansion, or hyper-individualism. It will be care. Some golf courses have already been transformed into extensive public parks, stormwater repositories, and biodiverse sanctuaries as interest in the sport declines. Although most (roughly 80%) of golfers are men, younger men, particularly Millennial men, don’t seem to be so fond of it. One of the reasons they cite is that it’s bad for the environment. The good news is that customs, hierarchies, and social norms, including those around gender, aren’t our biological destiny. They never were. A better future requires not only better policies and technologies (or better use of the ones we already have), but also a willingness to question the social scripts that brought us here in the first place. 1
Considering that water demand from data centres is rising rapidly, and that by 2030 they’re expected to consume twice as much water as they do today, this comparison likely won’t hold for long. Data centres also require a different, higher-quality type of water than golf courses. 2
And yes, this remains true even when studies account for spending on clothes, shoes, and healthcare. 3
Bride price, also known as bridewealth, is a customary transfer of wealth from the groom or his family to the bride’s family upon marriage. It’s still practised in parts of sub-Saharan Africa, Eastern Europe, East Asia, the Middle East, and the Pacific Islands. You're currently a free subscriber to The Noösphere. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
©
2026 Katie Jgln
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