Lear Jet, NASA, Public Domain
Unfortunately, any agreement by governments at the end of this week at the climate change conference in Paris will probably not be ambitious enough to keep the rise in global average surface temperature below a ‘safe’ level. That said, it’s reasonable to assume that at some point governments are going to put in place concrete measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from areas such as energy, industry, transport and agriculture. My focus here is on people’s individual carbon footprints.
When governments introduce these policies they need to factor in extreme inequality because people have different sized carbon footprints. Just last month French economists Thomas Piketty and Lucas Chancel highlighted “the unequal contributions to pollution” by individuals within countries and attempted to calculate carbon footprints by a person’s income. They estimate the richest 1% in the United States (around 3.9 million people) emit around 300 tonnes of greenhouse gas emission per person in a year, while in Honduras the poorest 10% (around 800,000 people) each emit just 0.09 tonnes a year. Oxfam published similar findings this week estimating that “the richest 10% of people in the world are responsible for around 50% of global emissions”.
