ABSTRACT
Piketty takes climate change very seriously, calling it "clearly the world's principal long-term worry". His framework offers some new insights and questions about how the crisis can be approached. Marxist sociologists, and other sociological and cultural analysts, have begun to call attention to what Marx called the "fetishism of commodities", the mystical attributes that capitalism ascribes to consumer products. Thorstein Veblen was the great classic theorist of consumption. His book The Theory of the Leisure Class is still as relevant and fresh today as when he wrote it more than a century ago. In the book, he introduces the famous idea of "conspicuous consumption", which points to the use of wasteful and exorbitant consumption as a major way for people in modern capitalism to display their status. Culture change will be formidably different in the era of patrimonial capitalism, showing how deeply the Piketty analysis needs to be probed and adapted to explore solutions to the climate crisis.
