Volume 109, Issue 5

Article

Taxing Luxury Emissions

Clinton G. Wallace & Shelley Welton

Associate Professor of Law, University of South Carolina School of Law, Presidential Distinguished Professor of Law & Energy Policy, University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School and Kleinman Center for Energy Policy.

23 Sep 2024

Recent economic and sociological studies have documented the rising challenge of carbon inequality—that is, extreme class disparities in carbon emissions both within the United States and globally. These studies show an alarming divide, with the top 10% of emitters producing half of all emissions and the top 1% alone producing 17% of emissions. Meanwhile, the bottom 50% of the world produces only 10% of carbon emissions. These disparities are driven by “luxury emissions” produced by the carbon-intensive lifestyles of the rich, which too often include private jets, yachts, and multiple mansions.

Climate change law has been slow to react to the reality of carbon emissions inequality—even as public and media outrage has mounted. Perhaps discouraged by decades of slow progress on both wealth redistribution and carbon consumption policy, policymakers and legal scholars have yet to put forward any serious proposals for how the law might, or should, account for class-based emissions disparities.

This Article builds the case for embracing efforts to parse luxury and non-luxury emissions in climate policy design. Luxury carbon is, we assert, distinguishable on multiple salient grounds, including morally, socially, and politically. In a world facing a grave need to parsimoniously consume our remaining “carbon budget” to avoid catastrophic warming, carbon-intense luxury consumption is condemnable in ways that the quotidian—and often structurally constrained—consumption choices of the masses are not. Luxury consumption also drives broader consumption patterns through social dynamics that multiply the effects of policies to reduce high-end emissions while also potentially activating class politics to build supportive political coalitions. After drawing out these distinctions, we explore how to design a carbon tax to target luxury emissions, considering potential tax bases, rates, and revenue uses. We thus provide a blueprint to spark debate and discussion around how the law might appropriately account for pernicious class divisions in climate culpability.

To read this Article, please click here: Taxing Luxury Emissions.