Better-off Britons are well placed to accelerate the transition towards low-carbon technologies, but only if they are prepared to curb their excessive consumption to lower their outsized carbon footprints, a study has found.
Researchers found people from the richest 10% in the UK were more likely to invest in electric vehicles, heat pumps and other clean energy alternatives, and were more likely to support green policies.
But they also found wealthier people used far more energy at home, were more likely to fly for leisure, were more reluctant to sacrifice luxuries, and were likely to underestimate the carbon impact of their own behaviour.
As a result, many wealthy people were caught in a contradiction: vocally supporting climate action and, in many cases, making climate-conscious consumer choices, while at the same time materially exacerbating climate breakdown.
Previous studies have shown that, globally, the wealthiest are disproportionately responsible for the carbon emissions causing the climate crisis. Research by the anti-poverty charity Oxfam found that in the 25 years between 1990 and 2015, the richest 10% accounted for more than half the carbon dioxide emitted.
Even within the UK, where the wealth disparity is comparatively smaller, research shows the household emissions of the richest 10% are three times that of the poorest 10%, and wealthier sections of society are hugely overrepresented in consumption of air travel and other luxuries.
But this disproportionate impact also means changes among the wealthiest sections of society can also have outsized positive effects, and so researchers from the University of Bath investigated wealthier individuals’ relationship to carbon emissions-related behaviours to investigate their capacity for change.
“What we found was that although wealthy people do have higher carbon emissions than the general population, they also are in a particularly powerful position to reduce not only their own but other people’s,” Hettie Moorcroft, lead author of the study, told the Guardian.
Moorcroft and her colleagues surveyed evermore than 1,000 people, including a targeted group of 43 wealthy individuals, defined as those with an income of more than £150,000 a year, putting them in the top 10% income bracket in the UK. They then followed up by conducting in-depth interviews with a subset of wealthier participants.
Wealthier people, they found, not only had greater access to low-carbon technologies with high upfront costs, such as heat pumps and electric vehicles, but they were also more relaxed about making those kinds of greener choices. As one interviewee told the team: “If you invest £10,000 in solar panels, and it goes wrong? Well, it’s only £10,000.”
Wealthier individuals were also more informed and concerned about climate change, with 81% of the wealthy group saying urgent action was needed compared with 68% of others. They were also more likely to support government regulation in this area.
But the team also found a number of barriers to increased uptake of lower carbon behaviours among wealthy people. “The first one is that they are less carbon capable because they tend to have higher carbon emissions as a kind of entry level – clearly that hinders the point to which they’re positively contributing,” Moorcroft said.
“Income and consumption pretty much track for lots of things,” added study co-author Sam Hampton. “They use disproportionately more energy, they travel a lot more. And with travel, carbon footprint is especially extreme because basically flying represents such a big proportion.”
Wealthier people were also more likely to link increased consumption to their wellbeing. “So one example is [an interviewee who told them]: ‘I don’t enjoy buying second hand. It doesn’t give me a dopamine of having made an expensive purchase’,” Moorcroft said.
The research also found that wealthier people were likely to badly underestimate their carbon footprints. One interviewee told the team: “Besides my business travel [estimated 200-300 hours annually], I think our footprint is relatively small … we recycle.” Or, as another put it: “Most people we know will travel abroad at least three times a year … so I wouldn’t be looking to us to reduce our travel because our footprint is relatively small”
Despite these apparent inconsistencies, the researchers resisted descriptions of wealthier people as hypocritical, warning that such pejorative language could be counterproductive – particularly in persuading wealthier people to take the leadership roles their influence could enable.
“I‘m not sure it’s … particularly helpful … when we’re talking about empowering and accelerating positive change because I think lots of us are hypocrites to an extent,” Moorcroft said.
“It’s very hard. And I don’t think that that’s an empowering term. I think it’s a really disengaging one where if we feel like we might be called a hypocrite, we might not take an action, a positive action, because we can’t do 100% of the time.”
The study is published in Plos Climate.
