On Tuesday, November 7, 2023 at 2:19:06 PM UTC, ltlee1 wrote:
"Forget, for a moment, your national identity. Consider inequality from an astronaut’s perspective. Imagine the earth and all the suffering on it. Think globally, as if there were no countries or borders, but only one great planetary pool of humans,
which can be partitioned into nations, or races, or genders, or ethnic and religious communities. Or into classes—like “the global one percent”—defined by wealth, income, and emissions.
...
In this global inequality approach, one doesn’t compare the wealth of an average American to that of an average Chinese, or the emissions of an average Colombian to those of an average Russian. One ignores countries, at least initially, to reveal the
bigger picture.
...
Because income and emissions are highly correlated, this approach allows us to better answer the question of why humanity’s cumulative emissions have doubled since the early years of the U.N. climate treaty. The Stockholm Environment Institute’s
Carbon Inequality Era paper shows that, in the period since 1990, as emissions almost doubled, the rising consumption of the world’s top 10 percent was responsible for almost half of that increase—almost as much as the entire remaining 90 percent of
the world’s population. The emissions of the richest 5 percent (37 percent of all post-1990 emissions) were particularly notable, and the emissions of the top 1 percent (who contributed 21 percent of all post-1990 emissions) were far greater still.
Many of us will live to see the consequences of this emissions growth, as the temperature begins a true overshoot (and not just a transient spike) above 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). To have a 50/50 chance of holding the 1.5-degree line,
we have to limit emissions from the beginning of 2023 onward to about 250 metric gigatons of carbon dioxide. At current global emissions levels, that budget will be exhausted in 2029. But the world’s richest 10 percent would exhaust it on their own by
about 2035, even if the rest of us were to cease emitting anything at all.
The problem isn’t just that wealthy people generate more carbon emissions than poor people. It’s that the sheer overwhelming extent to which they do so belies the endlessly repeated claim that rising fossil fuel consumption and even the
destabilization of the climate system are justified by the need to lift the world’s poor from poverty.
The truth is that the poorer, energy-deprived half of the human population has barely contributed to, and barely benefited from, these past three decades’ rise in emissions, during which the earth’s temperature has risen perilously. Rather, they
continue to struggle, even as they’re pummeled by the devastations of an ever more inhospitable climate system. "
https://newrepublic.com/article/176558/emissions-rich-people-problem
" THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN INCOME AND EMISSIONS
To allocate emissions across national populations, we used the following procedure.
First, we assume that emissions per capita would not fall below a minimal level, regardless of
income. We assumed that even if income were zero, there would still be consumption and thus
emissions. For the minimal emissions level, which varied by country, we chose emissions at an
income equal to 30% of median income. This level corresponds to one-half the level defined for
the European Union’s risk-of-poverty threshold, which is 60% of median income after taxes and
transfers.5 This can be contrasted with the approach taken by Oxfam (2015), who assumed a
threshold income of one-half the mean. While acknowledging that the median has better
properties than the mean for highly skewed distributions,6 and that the factor of one-half is
arbitrary, they note that their estimates are consistent with the emissions figures for the US
estimated by Ummel (2014). Ummel’s study is indeed careful and interesting. However, his
estimated emissions inequality is much farther below income inequality than is typically found.7
Our approach also includes an arbitrary factor of one-half. We reason this way: our threshold is
related to the median, rather than the mean; if 0.6 of the median indicates a risk of poverty in a
high-income region, then it is a plausible relative benchmark; actual minimal emissions should
be well below that of a household at risk of poverty. Until better (or at least less ambiguous)
data become available, we assume a factor of one-half of that threshold, or 0.3 of the median.
Second, we assume that above a certain level, emissions do not continue to rise with income.
Rather we make the extremely conservative assumption that emissions are limited at a hard
upper bound, regardless of income, as opposed to continuing to rise with income at a perhaps
diminished rate. We set that ceiling at a conservative value of 300 tCO2/cap, notwithstanding
clear empirical evidence that this is below the emissions associated with high-income, high
consumption lifestyles. For example, Gössling (2019) estimated the emissions associated with
air travel in 2017 for a set of ten public personalities who regularly broadcast their travels on
social media. Of the ten, six had emissions exceeding 300 tCO2, including three with emissions
exceeding 1,000 tCO2. The analysis by Chancel and Piketty (2015) estimated average
emissions of the richest 1% of particularly wealthy countries, such as the US, Luxembourg,
Singapore and Saudi Arabia, to be in the 200–300 tCO2e/capita range. They demonstrated the
plausibility of an emissions rate of 300 tCO2e/capita by outlining a plausible lifestyle with
elements that would generate this level of emissions: travel by commercial airline and private
vehicle, heating and cooling of a large home, upstream production of food and other
consumables, etc. Ummel (2014) also provides evidence that 100 tCO2/capita is not
unreasonable, by deriving an emissions level of 55 tCO2e/capita for the top 2% United States
income group based on expenditure data. This seems consistent with our threshold of 300
tCO2/capita, which in our analysis lies at the threshold to the much wealthier top 0.1% United
States income group.8 Consistency with national inventories is maintained with a proportional
upward scaling of emissions at lower incomes.
Third, we assume that between the upper and lower bounds discussed above, emissions rise
monotonically with income, and that the relationship can be expessed as an elasticity of
emissions with respect to income. Depending on income-dependent consumption behaviour in
a given country, emissions may grow faster than income (elasticity >1), in proportion to income
(e=1), or more slowly than income (elasticity <1). The same approach was taken by by Baer et
al. (2008), Chakravarty et al. (2009), Chancel and Piketty (2015) and Gore (2015).
This assumption is grounded in the findings of numerous studies relating income, consumption,
energy use and/or emissions, which draw upon a variety of methodologies (see for example
Wiedenhofer et al. 2013; Ummel 2014; Hubacek et al. 2017; Wiedenhofer et al. 2017; Dorband
et al. 2019; Song et al. 2019; Li et al. 2020; Oswald et al. 2020; Ivanova and Wood 2020).
Some studies are based on consumption surveys of a set of households that span a range of
incomes, coupled with national input-output matrices and emissions coefficients, or sometimes
coupled with estimates from lifecycle analysis. Others are done through either partial or whole
economy general equilibrium modelling, and some assessing carbon tax incidence also purport
to calculate indirect market-mediated effects, which is extraneous to an analysis of current
consumption-based carbon emissions. Some additionally account for any of various
mechanisms for revenue recycling (e.g., per capita dividend), which can also be neglected for
our purposes."
https://www.sei.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/research-report-carbon-inequality-era.pdf
Very complicated issue. As people are becoming wealthier they are also emitting more carbon
certainly makes sense in general. However, the lower, upper bound, as well as assumed
linearity appear to be arbitrary. In particular, However, the lower bound of 30% of median income
seems high. This would skew increase carbon emission over time toward higher income groups
including groups getting wealthy more recently.
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