Eating The Rich Won’t Fix Climate Change

The world’s richest 1% have more purchasing power, and hence more command over what the economy produces than ordinary people. They can afford a more extravagant lifestyle - at the extreme including multiple yachts, mansions, and private jets. 

One may reasonably quibble with the way activists like Oxfam produce their numbers (e.g. in their enthusiasm to generate the most outrageously large numbers, they include the emissions of companies rich people hold shares in). But it is obviously true that the average 1 percenter has a far greater climate impact than the median person in a rich country, let alone the world. What a waste! What a crime against the planet! How can it be allowed to continue?

Oxfam, Guardian readers, an unfortunate number of my academic colleagues, and many others are confusing questions of fairness (whether huge economic inequality can be justified) with questions of harm (whether inequality speeds up climate change). Specifically, it can be true that

1. Per person, rich people do enormously more harm to the climate than ordinary people, and

2. It is unfair that the rich consume such a high share of the world’s economic output

Without it being true that

Redistributing rich people’s wealth would result in less harm to the climate