Sustainability: it does not exist if it does not reduce inequalities

This text is the Introduction to the book The Shattered Myth: How False Sustainability Has Made the World More Unjust (Code Edition)

Sustainability is the most overused word these days. But by slathering it everywhere, we've lost its essential meaning: there's no sustainability that can exist without reducing inequality, a less concentrated distribution of wealth, or the chasm that separates a world where there's chaos in one room and waste in another. What's happening is going in the opposite direction, and a misapplied application of sustainability is substantially worsening the planet's balance. Before sinking into the morass of its own impotence, the poisonous fruit of the crossed vetoes that paralyze its functioning, the UN managed to provide a universal compass with an Agenda for Sustainable Development, carved into 17 goals to be achieved by 2030. None will be achieved by the established deadline. And the first part of the Agenda does not concern environmental factors but the most visible and concrete effects of inequalities: eliminating hunger and poverty, ensuring health and education for all, achieving gender equality.

The true sustainability It is the root of a new development model capable of reviving the social ladder, expanding well-being, and offering growth opportunities to the entire population. False sustainability, however, has made the world more unjust, creating new fractures, new walls, new privileges that benefit small minorities. There is no consumer good, from food to clothing, from household appliances to hygiene products, that doesn't have its own version. greens. A high price is paid for this, because everything labeled as sustainable costs more than the regular version. An elite group of women and men has achieved the status of green consumers, while the majority struggles to maintain their standard of living, with wages and salaries failing to even keep pace with inflation. The effect is devastating and overturns the most basic laws of inclusive societies, where shared consumption represents the first sign of expanding well-being and a strengthening middle class. False sustainability, introduced like a trademark, signifies a radical separation in the consumer universe: luxury, wealth, and well-being on one side; impoverishment and social resentment on the other.

Electric cars undoubtedly represent the future of sustainable mobility. But currently, they can only be afforded by people with high incomes and solid assets, who also benefit from generous public incentives paid by everyone. Those included in the fortunate circle feel a virtuous conscience as citizens committed to reducing pollution; those excluded must contend with constant increases in gasoline prices and can only feel anger and envy towards motorists. green and for those who support them. The Mediterranean diet, as demonstrated by an entire body of scientific literature, is a guarantee of longevity, good health, and physical and mental well-being. Originally a simple diet, it has become, due to the rising prices of quality food labeled as sustainable, a luxury item on the table: green consumers showcase it as an integral part of their lifestyle, while others must settle for cheap junk food, with all the resulting health consequences.

Chronic diseases, which are worsening the health of millions of people—from obesity to insomnia, from diabetes to respiratory problems—have a growth rate inversely proportional to population income levels. In large cities, which compete with each other with sustainability slogans, the most serious diseases increase as one moves from the city center to the outskirts. This is the opposite of what the UN wrote in its Agenda for Sustainable Development, where it outlined the profile of a sustainable city, defining it as "inclusive, safe and lasting".

Every year is hotter than the last, at every latitude on the planet. Yet the climate crisis is not the same for everyone: the price paid for the increase in extreme events (floods, droughts, storms, landslides, earthquakes, etc.) varies greatly across the world, from rich to poor, increasingly separated by incomparable living conditions and prevention systems. Since 1990, high-income countries have recorded minimal levels of deaths following extreme events, always below 0,1 percent per 100,000 inhabitants, with the sole exception of 2011, when the tsunami and earthquake struck Japan. During the same period, low-income countries recorded up to twenty deaths per 100,000 inhabitants following natural disasters linked to the climate crisis. In Italy, summer has now become a five-month-long season, and tropical days (when temperatures never drop below 20 degrees, not even at night) double each year in all regions. But by 2050, due to the same phenomenon of continuously rising temperatures, there will be over 200 million climate migrants, fleeing from three areas of the world: Africa, Asia and South America.

What can substantially change this trend? There are two decisive factors. The first calls into question our lifestyles, our daily gestures, what Benedetto Croce called "the small windows through which we dream of great things." We all complain about the climate crisis, pollution, and the depletion of natural resources, but no one really wants to give up any of their habits. Technology enslaves us, making us prisoners of its function—finding a street address or venting our primitive narcissism on social media—but we fail to fully use it to reduce waste and plastic, eliminate waste, and avoid littering streets, sidewalks, beaches, and mountain trails. To plant trees and not cut them down to make room for yet another illegal building awaiting amnesty.

The second factor concerns the political sphere. No one can deny the benefits of globalization, but reality shows us that everything has become global—currencies, markets, goods, labor—except governments. The raw nerve of globalization lies in this asymmetry between economic changes and political delays. The loss of its primacy, also due to the unstoppable advance of techno-finance, has hollowed out international organizations, precisely when we need them most. And true sustainability cannot fail to rest on decisions that have global, not regional, consequences. In Europe, including Italy, we may always be first in class in the spread of energy from renewable sources, certainly a key component of sustainable development. We may endlessly multiply balcony photovoltaic systems, but all this will serve little purpose in terms of reducing harmful emissions if, meanwhile, China and India, for legitimate national interests, ramp up the construction of new coal-fired power plants. What can we object, from our country terraces illuminated by solar panels, to the Indian government's push for the immediacy of coal to bring energy to the country's countryside where people still cook with sheep dung? Are we so naive as to think that China would give up its energy security to please America, which in the meantime, with the devastating technology of fracking Has it become one of the world's leading oil exporters? The political decisions that matter for true sustainability are made in international forums, where we have now resigned ourselves to holding a series of failed meetings. Like the phantom annual World Climate Conferences, where lobbyists for fossil fuel-based energy sources, primarily gas and oil, whose production is at an all-time high, dominate. And they too present themselves as champions of sustainability.

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• Ferrero is greenwashing: it preaches sustainability, but pays its workers €5 an hour through outsourcing.