Who Loses in the Carbon Class Struggle?

2. 1. 2026

I try to live lightly on this planet. In Frankfurt, Germany, to be more precise, the city that has become my home. I don’t own a car, I don’t eat meat, and I travel by train. I bike around the city, often to my urban vegetable garden. I avoid food waste, recycle, and often buy second-hand. Not driving and eating mostly plant-based lowers my footprint. But my old, poorly insulated building is heated by gas, and I also fly for work a few times per year, which pushes my carbon footprint upward.

According to the calculator of the Federal Environmental Agency, my annual carbon footprint—the sum of emissions from energy use, heating, transport, food, and other consumption expressed in tons of carbon dioxide equivalents (tCO₂e)—is 10.23 tons. This mirrors the average footprint of the middle 40 percent (by income) in the EU. It is higher than the average 5-6 tCO₂e emitted by the bottom 10 percent of Europeans, and vastly above the 0.2–1.0 tCO₂e typical for people living in rural Africa.

My middle-class carbon footprint is lower than that of the American middle class, which can reach 40–50 tCO₂e per year. My footprint also falls below the 23 tCO₂e average of Europe’s richest 10 percent—people who own one or more large homes, drive large SUVs daily, fly frequently for work and leisure, buy new goods at high rates, and hold investment portfolios linked to fossil-fuel or energy-intensive industries. And of course, it is only a fraction of the emissions of the ultra-rich—billionaire entrepreneurs and celebrities with multiple sprawling mansions, pools, private jets, and superyachts. Emissions of people like Kim Kardashian, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk can reach 800–1000 tCO₂e per year, an estimated footprint of the global top 0.1 percent. This extraordinarily high footprint dwarfs global averages and could power hundreds of average homes for a year.

Not All Emissions Are Created Equal

My own footprint, that of average European high and low earners, rural communities in Africa, and celebrities like Kim Kardashian, illustrate the stark reality of carbon inequality. This term is now used to describe differences in greenhouse-gas emissions between income groups within countries and across regions and complements the traditional focus of global climate politics on inequalities between the total emissions of countries.

The idea that wealth and consumption patterns influence environmental impact has long been part of research in ecological economics, environmental sociology, and environmental justice. However, income-based emissions inequality has only started to appear in climate research and debate. In 2020, Oxfam, in collaboration with the Stockholm Environment Institute, published the influential report The Carbon Inequality Era. The report analyzed consumption-based emissions across income groups in 117 countries and found that the richest 10 percent accounted for about 52 percent of all carbon emissions added between 1990 and 2015. The richest 1 percent alone contributed roughly 15 percent—more than twice the emissions of the poorest half of humanity.

Oxfam popularized the term carbon inequality, which is now used as a key analytical and moral lens on climate change. Its findings were confirmed and extended in their recent reports, Climate Equality: A Planet for the 99 percent and Carbon Inequality Kills . The latter showed that the ultra-rich 0.1 percent can emit up to 8,000 tCO₂ annually through private jets, superyachts, and space flights—as much as a poor migrant farm worker in America would emit in 50-70 years or a rural farmer in sub-Saharan Africa would emit in 800–1000 years.

Many subsequent studies (e.g., World Inequality Report from 2022 and others) converge on the conclusion, namely that the top income group produces a disproportionate amount of emissions and that these differences matter in most national contexts. In Germany, according to the Deutsches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung, the top 10 percent emit roughly twice as much as the bottom 10 percent. In the United States, according to this research, the poorest 50 percent emit around 10–15 tCO₂e per year; the middle 40 percent emit 40–50 tCO₂e; the top 10 percent, 75–90 tCO₂e; and the top 1 percent, a staggering 500–600 tCO₂e annually. In the Czech Republic, a relatively egalitarian country, the two most affluent social classes emit about one ton of CO₂e more than lower-income groups.

The inequality of emissions based on income and wealth—especially the excessive carbon released by the richest—is highly problematic from a moral point of view. Imagine the atmosphere as a shared sewage pit with limited capacity. Most people discharge small, unavoidable amounts of everyday waste, while a wealthy minority flushes enormous volumes of filth from hyper-consumption into this one common hole. The sink starts overflowing, contaminating the air and water and creating health hazards for everyone. A small minority has overused it, discharging more than their fair share.

Today’s accelerating climate change is a version of this problem: since the Industrial Revolution, industrialized nations have been filling the atmospheric sink with man-made greenhouse gases. The remaining space for CO₂ that would keep global warming below 2°C is now being used up by a minority of the wealthiest. They overuse an ecological capacity of the atmosphere to absorb greenhouse gases and regulate climate, the stability of which is key to the basic needs of all, and must therefore be shared fairly and used sustainably to preserve it for future generations. By filling the sink, the richest accelerate global warming and intensify climate risks for everyone else—especially for those less well-off economically and for whom climate change and its impacts bring greater costs, disadvantages, risks, and harms.

Luxury Emissions versus Subsistence Emissions

As the sink example suggests, the moral problem of carbon inequality extends beyond the unequal volume of emissions. It also concerns the nature of the activities that produce them and their consequences for everyone. The emissions of lower- and middle-income groups stem largely from heating and electricity, work-related mobility, food, and basic leisure. These emissions are hard to reduce and often lie outside individual control. A tenant cannot replace the heating system in an old building, and a rural resident cannot forgo driving to work when no bus exists. The richest households generate excessive emissions mainly through private consumption and lifestyle choices—large homes, multiple cars, frequent flying, luxury goods, and carbon-intensive investment portfolios.

To capture these differences, climate-justice theorists distinguished between subsistence and luxury emissions. In his canonical essay Subsistence Emissions and Luxury Emissions, Henry Shue argued that emissions required to meet basic needs have a fundamentally different moral status from those generated by inessential, high-consumption activities. Across regions, subsistence emissions are integral to daily livelihoods—cooking, heating, earning income, and moving from place to place. Luxury emissions, by contrast, arise from avoidable and status-driven activities that do not serve human needs but rather demonstrate social standing through conspicuous consumption. They are excessive, wasteful, and remain inaccessible to most households worldwide. Unlike subsistence emissions, luxury emissions carry no moral entitlement. Curbing them is a demand of fairness: it prevents a small minority from monopolizing the planet’s limited and diminishing ecological capacity, slows the acceleration of dangerous climate change, and frees space for pollution from activities for essential human needs.

Footing the Bill for the Wealthy

To have a realistic chance of staying below 2 °C of global warming, global CO₂ emissions must fall by roughly one quarter by 2030. The EU has committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by at least 55 percent compared to 1990 levels by 2030 and to reaching net-zero emissions by 2050. These goals require complex and far-reaching transformation. Carbon inequality exposes the moral fault lines of this transition: which emissions are politically targeted and whose emissions remain protected? Who is expected to change their behavior and how much? From an ethical standpoint, isn’t the reduction of luxury emissions one of the most compelling pathways for climate mitigation, ensuring that sufficient ecological space remains for necessary and unavoidable emissions?

So far, political choices about whose emissions are treated as negotiable and whose are accepted do not reflect this ethical imperative. As it is widely documented in climate justice scholarship and policy analyses, including those by Oxfam, current regulatory efforts overwhelmingly focus on standard household and industrial emissions while leaving high-emission luxury lifestyles largely untouched. Core EU Green Deal instruments—binding emissions limits, renewable energy targets, energy efficiency standards, and the emissions trading system—target everyday energy use, mass transport, and industry. These reforms are undeniably necessary. But they raise fuel, electricity, and heating costs, increase rents due to building retrofits, and make mobility and basic goods more expensive. These costs fall disproportionately on middle- and lower-income households whose emissions are tied to work, housing, and other basic needs. In contrast, most excessive and socially unnecessary forms of carbon pollution remain untaxed, weakly regulated, and politically insulated, despite producing emissions in unacceptable magnitudes. Aviation fuel for private jets remains tax-exempt, and the massive emissions tied to multiple properties, yachts, and carbon-intensive investment portfolios fall outside EU sectoral standards altogether.

In Europe, the middle and lower classes have been reducing their emissions steadily over the past few decades, while emissions linked to luxury consumption—particularly among the top 1 percent—continue to rise, fueled by technological innovation and expanding forms of ultra-luxury consumption, from private aviation to space tourism. Political choices about whose emissions are treated as negotiable and whose are normalized turn demands of fairness upside down. Those who emit out of necessity absorb the costs of transition, while those whose excessive lifestyles disproportionately drive the crisis remain politically insulated.

The issue of carbon inequality and the unfair distribution of climate policy costs is not merely academic talk. Carbon inequality leads to political conflict. In 2017, France abolished the wealth tax on financial assets, sharply reducing the fiscal burden on the country’s wealthiest households and shrinking public revenues by an estimated €3–4 billion. A year later, when the government sought to advance its climate agenda by raising fuel taxes, mass, confrontational protests of the yellow vests broke out. For months, everyday life was disrupted by demonstrations, road blockades, and clashes with the police. The protests expressed a justified grievance: the costs of climate policy were being shouldered primarily by low-income households through regressive fuel taxes. Under intense public pressure, Emmanuel Macron’s government was forced to suspend the planned fuel tax increase. The lesson is clear: climate policy that ignores carbon inequality erodes trust and undermines the legitimacy of the transition and is a political no-go.

The author is a political scientist currently based at Friedrich Schiller University in Jena. Her research focuses on international political theory, international law, and global justice.