Climate Injustice: CO2 from Domestic Electricity Consumption and Private Car Use by Income Decile

Environmental justice is primarily concerned with uneven distribution of environmental harms and with the consequences such inequality often has for individual and community well-being, development, and growth. Recent expansion in quantity and improvement in quality of data on current and historic greenhouse gas (GHG) emission levels by country has drawn attention to differentiated national responsibilities for the intensification of the atmosphere’s greenhouse effect and, concomitantly, for global warming. This shift is pertinent for environmental justice, a field that tended in the past to focus more on the uneven distribution of environmental harms than on responsibility for initially causing them. Building on the new sensitivity to differentiated responsibility for climate change, this article focuses on a hitherto understudied field: differences in GHG emissions between populations within countries. Using Israel as a case study, and focusing on GHG from domestic electricity consumption (DEC) and private vehicle use (PVU), it looks at emissions by income decile. Results suggest that individuals belonging to the top income decile are responsible for per-capita emissions that are approximately 25 times higher than those of individuals belonging to the bottom decile, and that carbon inequality between the top and bottom deciles can sometimes amount to over four times the monetized consumer inequality between them. Recognition of GHG emission as multiplier of socio-economic inequalities is essential for the design and implementation of ambitious, workable, and fair corrective climate policies.