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| Fig. 1: The world's highest earners are its biggest emitters. Data from Gore et al. [18] (Source: G. Alvarez) |
It is impossible to understand and mitigate global climate change without dissecting its context in a world characterized by profound socioeconomic inequality, both between and within countries. In 2019, North America and Europe possessed 55% of total global wealth but made up only 17% of the world adult population, and the top 10% of wealth holders in any part of the world typically owned 55-75% of all wealth in their country. [1] The global top 1% alone experienced twice as much growth as the entire bottom 50% of individuals between 1980 and 2018, and the disparity continues to accelerate. [2]
Although innovations in efficiency have begun to decouple energy consumption and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from economic growth, economic poverty still correlates strongly with energy poverty, largely because people with disparate purchasing power opt for different goods and services with disparate energy footprints. [3-5] Consequently, because the world's poorest people are also its least significant emitters, extreme economic inequality translates broadly to extreme carbon inequality.
A small number of developed countries are responsible for over three quarters of the CO2 emitted globally between 1850 and 2002, with the United States and European Union each contributing over 25%. [6] However, the impacts of the climate change driven by these emissions is expected to derail economic development and disproportionally affect the poorest populations, especially those in developing countries. [7] Well aware of these realities, the international community has continuously affirmed the inextricability of the carbon and development issues. The 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) took a stark approach by dividing the world into two, calling on the developed ("Annex I") countries to "take the lead in combating climate change and the adverse effects thereof" and establishing no time frame for developing countries to follow suit. [8] The Kyoto Protocol operationalized those tiered principles in 1997. [9]
The UNFCC's landmark 2015 Paris Agreement enshrined similar principles, seeking to "strengthen the global response to the threat of climate change, in the context of sustainable development and efforts to eradicate poverty, including by holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C." Unlike the Kyoto Protocol, the Paris Agreement did not establish any binding emissions reductions. Nonetheless, its impact was broadened by requiring all of its 197 signatories, Annex I or otherwise, to set and report their own emission reduction targets in accordance with "equity and the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities, in the light of different national circumstances." [10]
Each of these international climate agreements reflect an understanding that their responsible parties are not individuals but states. Thus, it is unsurprising that their provisions for equity on the international scale hinge primarily on efforts to mitigate inequalities between countries. As India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi said during the 2015 Paris talks, "Climate justice demands that, with the little carbon space we still have, developing countries should have enough room to grow." [11]
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| Fig. 2: The percent growth of cumulative emissions by income group seems to implicate mid-level earners. Data from Gore et al. [18] (Source: G. Alvarez) |
Signs are emerging that the international framework in its current form may be insufficient to address the intersecting crises of the world. Chief among the complaints lobbied against present structures is the concern that effective climate mitigation is fundamentally inconsistent with poverty alleviation, the first of the UN Sustainable Development Goals and a key national priority for most developing states. [12] Some studies suggest that increasing the living standards of the poor would increase greenhouse gas emissions beyond what would be allowed by the global carbon budget outlined in Paris. [13-15] Others sound the alarm that low stabilization targets cannot be met without mitigation efforts from non-Annex I countries, which now account for about half the world's annual CO2 emissions. [16]
However, using only national data and projections provides a distorted understanding of the distribution and characteristics of energy use and emissions. [17] So, recalling that inequality not only exists between states but also within them, it is important to disaggregate the numbers within countries and inspect disparities among individuals before making claims about what is and what is not possible on the global scale.
To this end, Fig. 1 analyzes the total historical emissions of CO2 not by country, but by income group. A ventile corresponds to one twentieth of the global population, such that the first ventile contains the world's poorest 5% of individuals and the twentieth ventile contains its richest 5%. At all three snapshots in time, an exponential increase is evident in cumulative emissions as a function of income. Providing a clearer idea of how the emissions plotted in Fig. 1 changed from 1990 to 2015, Fig. 2 shows the growth rate of total emissions by ventile over the period. The middle class more than doubled their cumulative emissions in these 25 years, while the top 5% grew their emission total by about 50%. [18] The apparent decrease in the historical emissions of the lowest ventile is likely due to improved estimates of non-metered energy use, which is small by all accounts.
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| Fig. 3: Rich individuals dominate shares of total emissions growth. Data from Gore et al. [18] (Source: G. Alvarez) |
The data as plotted in Fig. 2 support the notion that the rising energy use of a so-called "global middle class" has been a limiting factor to efforts to limit global warming to 1.5°C. Importantly, however, these percentages do not convey any information about the magnitude of the growth by ventile. Fig. 3 fixes this issue by calculating the percentage of total carbon emissions between 1990 and 2015 that each ventile is responsible for, normalizing the increases in historical emissions by ventile to the total global emissions over the same period. So, although Fig. 2 indicates that middle-class individuals have experienced the highest relative growth in their cumulative carbon emissions in recent decades, Fig. 3 reveals that the absolute growth of middle-class emissions is dwarfed by the rise of emissions from the richest 10%, who accounted for nearly half of all carbon emitted between 1990 and 2015, with the richest 5% alone contributing over a third. [18]
Those with more wealth do not simply buy more of the things bought by those with less wealth. Rather, they pay for elastic luxury goods and services which tend to be energy- and emissions-intensive, e.g. air travel and vehicle purchases. These luxury goods and services are generally unaffordable for the bottom half of the population by income, who use less than 20% of final energy footprints, which in turn is less than what is consumed by the top 5%. [19] So, there is significant potential for carbon mitigation through the demand management of the highest-emitting rich individuals, who are present in all countries.
It has been shown that reducing the emissions of one billion high emitters around the globe would be more than enough to safely allow the poorest 2.7 billion a basic level of emissions that enables decent standards of living. [20] Another study suggested a progressive tax in the UK to curb the emissions of the highest earners and raise the incomes of the poorest households to a level that supported their ability to decide how to best meet their energy needs. It found that such a tax would dramatically reduce total carbon emissions, because the increase in emissions due to the greater spending ability of poor households would be approximately 23 times smaller than the reduction in emissions from the wealthiest 10% having less disposable income to spend on carbon-intensive luxuries. [21] So, although equity in energy may or may not be achievable through international policy which regulates the behavior of states, it could be possible through domestic and collaborative efforts to mitigate inequality between people.
Carbon inequality exists both between and within nations. Furthermore, although the rise of many individuals out of poverty around the world has led to increased CO2 emissions, these additional emissions are small compared to the ever-expanding carbon footprint of the world's wealthiest individuals. Therefore, to resolve the apparent paradox of sustainable development, it is important to acknowledge not only the "differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities" of developed and developing nations, but also those of wealthy and poor individuals everywhere.
© Gabe Alvarez. The author warrants that the work is the author's own and that Stanford University provided no input other than typesetting and referencing guidelines. The author grants permission to copy, distribute and display this work in unaltered form, with attribution to the author, for noncommercial purposes only. All other rights, including commercial rights, are reserved to the author.
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[18] T. Gore et al., "The Carbon Inequality Era," Oxfam International, September 2020.
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[21] R. Galvin, ed., Inequality and Energy (Academic Press, 2019).