Earth Notes: General Bibliography (starr2023outsized)

• [starr2023outsized] Jared Starr and Craig Nicolson and Michael Ash and Ezra M. Markowitz and Daniel Moran Assessing U.S. consumers' carbon footprints reveals outsized impact of the top 1%, 2023, Ecological Economics, volume 205, ISSN 0921-8009, doi:10.1016/j.ecolecon.2022.107698, article/pages 107698 (article) (BibTeX).
  keywords

  Carbon footprint, Input-output analysis, Consumption-based accounting, Environmental justice, Economic inequality
  abstract

  Unsustainable environmental degradation and extreme economic inequality are two of humanity's most pressing challenges. They are intimately linked. Climate-altering greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are disproportionately driven by consumption among wealthy and socially privileged groups, yet poorer and socially marginalized peoples face disproportionate climate harms. Here we use the Eora MRIO database and Consumer Expenditure Surveys to quantify GHG emissions related to goods and services consumed by United States households between 1996 and 2019 — including construction of a synthetic dataset to estimate top 1% and top 0.1% household emissions. Top 1% households are of particular interest because their emissions have been largely missed or simplistically and inaccurately estimated in past analysis, yet they exert disproportionate political power in shaping U.S. climate policy. Results suggest significant GHG inequality across economic class and racial lines. In 2019, we estimate the U.S. top 0.1% had emissions (95
  5~nbsp;
  t~nbsp;CO2e) 57x higher than bottom decile U.S. households and 597x higher than an average low-income country household. White non-Hispanic household emissions were 1.3x higher than Black households. If climate policy does not account for such extreme emissions disparities, it will limit effectiveness, erode public support, and disproportionately harm economic and socially marginalized groups.