Elite consumption and half of all emissions ever
How much do the very rich contribute to climate change?
The thirties were zombie years. Civilization had been killed but it kept walking the Earth, staggering toward some fate even worse than death. Everyone felt it. The culture of the time was rife with fear and anger, denial and guilt, shame and regret, repression and the return of the repressed. And yet still they burned carbon. They drove cars, ate meat, flew in jets, did all the things that had caused the [Indian] heat wave [that had killed millions] and would cause the next one. Everyone alive knew that not enough was being done, and everyone kept doing too little. So it was not really a surprise when a day came that sixty passenger jets crashed in a matter of hours. All over the world, flights of all kinds, although when the analyses were done it became clear that a disproportionate number of these flights had been private or business jets, and the commercial flights that had gone down had been mostly occupied by business travelers. But people, innocent people, flying for all kinds of reasons: all dead. About seven thousand people died that day, ordinary civilians going about their lives. One message was fairly obvious: stop flying. And indeed many people stopped. Before that day, there had been half a million people in the air at any given moment. Afterward that number plummeted. Especially after a second round of crashes occurred a month later, this time bringing down twenty planes. After that commercial flights often flew empty, then were cancelled. Private jets had stopped flying. Military planes and helicopters had also been attacked, so they too curtailed their activities, and flew only if needed, as if in a war. As indeed they were. (Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry of the Future, chapter 51)
In The Ministry of the Future, Robinson imagines how our world could take decisive action about climate change. As you can see, he imagines it will require disaster, indignation and violence (besides creative ideas, some of which I might explore in this newsletter - give me shout if you’re curious about one in particular). That he would have picked flying as a prime target is not surprising, as you will see in this newsletter.
Last issue, I mentioned that consumption looked like it was central to the 1990-2020 epoch that has produced at most modest social progress yet caused wild overshoots of our ecological constraints.
Not all consumption is equal, however, and today I want to explore one aspect of consumption: elite consumption. Like flying.
Flying is elite: some 90% of the world population has never flown. But as a sector, it’s even more elite than that: 50% of aviation emissions is on account of the top 1% (Gössling and Humpe 2020), and 75% of all aviation energy use comes from global top 10% (Oswald et al 2020).
Sars-CoV-19 may have changed this though. The aviation sector is struggling with the loss of its cash cow: the business traveller.
Now, of course, as it so happens, flying is one of the most polluting, carbon-intensive things you can do as an individual. That means that the top 1% are overwhelmingly responsible for one of the most polluting activities. The intersection of those two things - wealth and emissions - is what I’ll explore today.
A little intermezzo about ‘elite’. It is likely that you are - as am I - part of the global elite. Oxfam/SEI calculate that a $38,000 income is enough to put one in the global top 10%. That’s where you get fun statistics like Californians using more energy in 2011 for gaming alone than the whole country of Ghana. Basically anyone living in a rich country is ‘responsible’ for more than their fair share of emissions. That’s why I mentioned that whole dawn of a new civilization thing last time, because we’re all part of the problem, which at the same time, transcends us all. We get into systemic territory. And I will go there. For now though, I want to see if there are some targeted measures that would have a big impact and, in theory, could be implemented relatively soon. Could (super) elite consumption be a candidate?
There have been several studies over the last few years that tried to quantify the link between (extreme) wealth and emissions. Spoiler alert: all found a positive link. It’s not linear, but least up to a point, the more you make, the more you emit.
Filthy rich?
Oxfam UK and Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) came out with a study in 2020 that offers the clearest formulation of how much of a dent elite consumption makes in our emissions budget: the richest 1% (63m people) consume 9% of the remaining carbon budget (over double the amount of the poorest 50%). The richest 3% were responsible for a third of growth in emissions since 1990. The richest 10% would eat up the entire global carbon budget by themselves in the early 2030s.
Oxfam/SEI can attribute these emissions to consumption. For the EU, they single out frequent business class flying and private jets for the richest 1%, and those SU bloody Vs for the richest 10%. (Passenger transport is about 1/10 of global energy use, about half of that is on account to the top 10%.) Manufactured goods come in 4th for both groups, after housing.
The UN Environment Program (UNEP) summed up findings from Oxfam/SEI and other studies and presented the implications for a world in which everyone has a carbon footprint of 2 to 2.5 tonnes by 2030. Right now, US per capita emissions are about 17.6 tons, India 1.7, UK/EU 7.9 and the super-rich: 217t.
The higher they climb...? Please let this bar chart sink in. All studies kind of come out with the same ballpark numbers. In 2016, for instance, Teixido-Figueras and colleagues attempted to link the ‘inequality-indicator’ Gini-coefficient to emissions, consumption and productivity. Different methodology, similar results: “The world’s top 10% of income earners are responsible for between 25 and 43% of environmental impact. In contrast, the world’s bottom 10% income earners exert only around 3–5% of environmental impact” (as summarized here).
Finally, I would like to applaud two anthropologists for also giving counting a try. Beatriz Barros and Richard Wilk sampled 20 of the 2,095 billionaires on the Forbes list to “visualize and concretize the impact of consumption on the environment and the huge imbalance between different groups of people.” Combing through public data (only a “tip of the iceberg”), they found their emissions came primarily from transportation (meaning: them private jets) but even more from... yachting (transportation?).
Wealth, consumption and emissions
In the academic equivalent of an opinion piece, Thomas Wiedmann and three colleagues reflect on what these numbers mean. First of all, it’s the economy, stupid. Or rather, it’s consumption. For all the scientists’ warning about how we’re destroying our planetary ecosystems, they have fallen short of actually pointing to the main culprit: “the underlying forces of overconsumption”.
“Consumption is by far the strongest determinant of global impacts, dwarfing other socio-economic–demographic factors such as age, household size, qualification or dwelling structure”.
Moreover, “since income is strongly linked with consumption, and consumption is in turn linked with impact,” we basically have a story about inequality and climate change. “We can expect existing income inequalities to translate into equally significant impact inequalities.”
The authors suppose that it’s more than a question of mere correlation - that big earners just spend big. Summarizing from other studies, they reason that since a) relative inequality drives (un)happiness, b) our consumption of non-necessary goods and services is linked to our desired place in the world (our happy place, so to say), and c) people at the socio-economic top determine the most desirable non-necessary goods, so d) inequality drives further consumption, and overconsumption in particular.
Inequality, 2.1 CO2t, and quality of life
So, we’re back to the transformation of the global economy, in which inequality has grown globally and within countries: while the globalized economy has increased the purchasing power of many (bringing historically stupendous material wealth), the purchasing power of the very rich has grown even more stupendously.
Other authors have surmised that more equality is crucial to an environmentally sustainable world. It comes up in all the scenario modelling and a reckoning with inequality is at the transformation of the mainstream environmental movement right now.
That should tell us something about possible solutions too. Now that we have some sense of how elite consumption is fostering fossil fuel plants, soaking up renewable energy, and gobbling up our global carbon budget, what could be done?
Central to addressing consumption inequities is reframing the meaning of ‘progress’ and ‘affluence’ away from the accumulation of income or energy-intensive resources to the achievement of well-being and quality of life. (UNEP 2020)
Well. All right, then. More on that next issue!
Best for now,
Marten