Yes, you heard that right. As Think Progress points out, in a new post by Marlene Cimons, countries with the widest economic inequality make climate change and its consequences worse.

“What’s missing from the conversation is what our inequality crisis is doing to our planet,” said Susan Holmberg, a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and author of a new report that shows how unequal societies inflict more environmental damage than more economically even societies. “One key topic that is still overlooked is how environmental degradation and climate change are themselves the toxic byproducts of our inequality problem,” Holmberg said.

The greater the wealth gap, the less lower and middle class people can do to conserve energy, lower their carbon footprint, etc., and the less the incentive among the wealthy to take steps to lessen climate disruption. As we know, the wealthy and mega-corporations control our government, and their only motive is to increase their profits, even if that results in greater environmental degradation, either through less government regulation of environmental laws, or greater tax relief for themselves, which results in lower budgets for government agencies tasked with protecting our environment that are already underfunded.

“People assume that raising incomes will increase personal consumption and, as a result, also increase carbon emissions, which would do little to alleviate climate change,” Holmberg said. “But there are so many more mechanisms at play, including how power disparities hobble communities from protecting, for example, their air or their water.” [...]

“Since the Reagan administration, the left has been hobbled by a supposed environment versus jobs/economy dichotomy,” Holmberg added. She cited economist James Boyce — her dissertation advisor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst — as the first to propose that lopsided income distribution can imperil the environment. Boyce theorized that the rich have the power to pollute the environments of poorer people.

Income inequality is not only killing people or making their lives miserable, it is also killing the planet. It's a major driver of climate change, or so so say a number of prominent economists, including ...

Rachel Cleetus, lead economist and climate policy manager for the climate and energy program of the Union of Concerned Scientists, who was not involved in the study, said that the report reiterates what many environmental justice advocates have been saying for years, that financial regulation, progressive tax policy and social insurance programs should be regarded as integral to climate change policy.

“They will not directly pull carbon out of the atmosphere, which we need to do so urgently, but these kinds of progressive economic policies may be a necessary foundation for a sustainable society,” she said.

Saving the planet doesn't mean killing jobs. On the contrary, progressive economic policies are necessary if we are going to mitigate the damage climate change is already caused and will continue to cause going forward. The rich have no incentive to help the poor or save the planet. They are obsessed with what I call the "Short Term Thinking Disorder" but others call "Short Termism." Our big transnational corporations and the wealthy oligarchs who control them are focused solely on profits and wealth accumulation for their bottom line is as short a time as possible. They, as a class, have little of any concern for the long term consequences of their actions. We've seen this pattern repeated over and over again.

Environmentalists, climate scientists and the working class are all in the same boat when it comes to what are wealthy corporations and elites are doing. The neo-liberal ideologists that control the world economy are dead wrong on this point. Saving the planet is not at odds with saving and creating good jobs and providing financial security to the 99 percent. Indeed, only progressive polices that reduce wealth inequality while also focusing on the greatest threat to our species have any hope of delivering a sustainable and stable future for ourselves, our children and the generations to come.