Consumption-Emissions Aren’t Just Our Own

A reasonable person might ask, ‘Okay, but so what?’ If a rich person owns a business and lots of wealth, this allows them even higher levels of consumption than their income can explain. Famously, Jeff Bezos—despite being the richest person alive—pays himself an income of $81,840 per year. It is his wealth that allowed him to purchase the largest mansion in the Washington, DC area that reportedly has twenty-four bathrooms. And imagine the carbon footprint of heating it.

A pervasive assumption among these studies is that the rich are themselves ‘polluters’ or ‘high emitters’. This assumes the emissions associated with consumption are solely their own. The studies focus on the behaviour of the rich – frequent flying, SUV-driving, and meat-eating as all emission-intensive consumer behaviour. This makes intuitive sense within the lens of carbon footprint accounting. Who else is polluting but us when we press the gas pedal in our cars and emissions come out the tailpipe?

Yet what about the oil company that sold us the gasoline that is burned to create those emissions? Placing 100% of the responsibility for emissions on consumers is an ideological trick of market exchange under capitalism. As consumers, we only confront commodities and their prices. We feel free and make choices in this market. Yet what Karl Marx called the fetishism of market relations obscures the social relations of production and exploitation underlying commodities like cars, air flights, and beef. Behind every act of individual consumption are massive corporations seeking and gaining profit from our ‘choices’.

When we take a flight, why aren’t the airlines held responsible for the emissions? Are they not also ‘high emitters’ and part of the ‘polluter elite’? They are the ones profiting off this transaction and choosing what to do or not do in order to reduce pollution from air travel. The consumer buying a flight is only trying to get somewhere. Rich air travellers may fly more often than an average working-class air traveller, but even the rich consumer isn’t 100% responsible for their flight’s emissions.

The bulk of responsibility should be on the owners of the capital who profit off the high-emitting activity in the first place. Yet at the core of their methodology (and perhaps ideology), these studies foreclose such an understanding of carbon responsibility, inequality, and class power.

Why do we ignore the owners and producers who profit from our consumption emissions? I think it’s mostly because we don’t see them – as Marx quipped, the private control of capital and production hangs a sign on its door: ‘No admittance, except on business.’

And I’d guess the writers of these studies themselves—professional-class academics and scientists—are trying very hard to reduce their own carbon footprints and implement ‘far reaching changes in their lifestyles.’ For the virtuously low-carbon professional class academic, it is seductive to think that the only solution for climate change is getting the rich to do the same.

If Someone Is Rich and Consumes a Lot, Ask Them How

The other major problem with a narrow focus on consumption or lifestyle choices is that this represents a small minority of the terrible things the rich do every day to the climate and environment. To understand how they really wreck the climate, we need to understand not what their ‘lifestyle’ is, but what they do for work.

Here’s a hypothetical example: take a CEO of an airline company. This person spends eight to twelve hours per day helping to organise a fleet of thousands of planes that emit millions of tons of carbon dioxide per year. As CEO, their income and stock options are primarily derived from this activity, planning and expanding air travel as a commodity for sale.

Now imagine our CEO goes home in their SUV and eats a steak for dinner. Why is this activity the only one we focus on when talking about ‘carbon inequality’? Surely the SUV and steak are drops in the bucket compared to their everyday role as a titan of aviation capital.

Once again, capitalist ideology is an obscuring force. We tend to only see freedom and politics in the realm of the market and consumption. It is here where, as Milton Friedman famously put it, we are ‘free to choose’.

In what Marx called the ‘hidden abode of production’, there is no choice, and politics is off-limits. Not only is production organised despotically, like a private dictatorship – it is single-mindedly directed toward one goal: profit, or ‘accumulation for accumulation’s sake‘. Our consumption choices have much different goals in mind – fulfilling human needs (however inflated).

Here again, if we subject this activity of production for profit to ‘carbon accounting’, we find the main culprits in the climate crisis aren’t simply affluent rich consumers. It is the class of people who own, control, and profit from the production of aviation, automobiles, steel, chemicals, and other carbon-intensive sectors of capital. If we look at IPCC global emissions data by sector, it is the industrial sector of production that dwarfs all others (the largest sector by far, at 32% of global emissions and more than the transportation and buildings sectors combined!).

If we really want to understand a rich person’s contribution to climate change, we shouldn’t just look at their consumption – we should ask how they became rich in the first place. A Marxist analysis will always point to their ownership of property, their control over investment, and, most crucially, their exploitation of labour as creating the conditions for their wealth and income. Not to mention, their exploitation of nature—and, in particular, their propensity to emit carbon for free in the feverish pursuit of profit—is also at the core of what created their consumptive lifestyles in the first place.

Put simply, what rich people do at home or in their car or on their private jet pales in comparison to the exploitation of labour and the wrecking of the earth that generates the money they enjoy.

The rich do, indeed, cause climate change – but not primarily for the reasons we often think. While their consumption and lifestyle choices can indeed be egregious, it is honestly the least of our worries. Marxists should go to the root of their contribution to the climate crisis: ownership, investment, and production.

This also clarifies our political task. It’s not so much that we need to ask nicely for the rich to consume less or implement ‘far-reaching changes in their lifestyle’; we have to build political movements with the power to win higher taxes on the rich to fund a Green New Deal, and to de-commodify and expropriate the carbon-intensive sectors they control, like energy, food, and housing. In other words, we need to confront their property, wealth, and control over investment.