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Carbon inequality
The (unequal) growth of wealth and the rise of material living standards over the last 200 years came hand in hand with an exponentially increasing use of biocapacity and particularly greenhouse gas emissions (5). Today we are in the midst of a human-made climate crisis and of the sixth great mass extinction. The unequal responsibility for carbon emissions is an important form of resource inequality: the richer a country or an individual, the higher the use of physical resources that lead to carbon emissions. Historically, countries of the Global North are responsible for 92% of all excess carbon emissions emitted worldwide (6). Currently the richest 1% of the world’s population emits more than twice the combined share of the poorest 50%.
5- This trend is described as the great acceleration. Along with growing economic output the pressure that human activities have on our planet rose exponentially in the last decades. Now many so-called planetary boundaries are transgressed, for example when it comes to the loss of biodiversity, the climate crisis and the disturbed nitrogen cycle leading to polluted waterways and coastal zones. Carbon inequality is far from being the only or most dramatic environmental inequality. We use it as an example. 6 – Hickel, 2020.
