Oswald, Yannick Lorenz ORCID: 0000-0002-8403-8000 (2022) Inequality, (re)distribution and luxury-taxation of international household energy and carbon footprints. PhD thesis, University of Leeds.
Abstract
Climate change is caused predominantly by high-income countries, and by upper economic classes within countries, through high energy demand. After decades of political and economic failure to end fossil fuel dependence and reduce emissions through innovation on the supply-side and in energy efficiency, attention is now shifting towards the reorganization of energy demand. Here we contribute to this paradigm shift by identifying levers to reduce energy inequality, recompose energy demand and ultimately mitigate emissions and the climate crisis. Going beyond established measures of energy inequality, we analyse international household final energy footprints according to consumption purposes and classify consumption in terms of energy intensity and income elasticity of demand. We find that transport-related goods and services are very energy intensive, while also being luxury goods, disproving the long-standing assumption that household consumption automatically becomes greener and less resource-intensive with increasing income. Moreover, we introduce novel scenarios of global income redistribution and its impact on household final energy footprints. We find that the energy costs of greater equity are small. An equal income distribution also recomposes energy demand towards subsistence for a majority, contrasting with an unequal income distribution, which results in luxury energy demand for a wealthy minority. Finally, we integrate information on the distribution and purpose of consumption into an innovative carbon tax design targeting household consumption by differentiated tax rates — setting higher tax rates for luxuries and lower rates for necessities. We find that this differentiated design improves the progressivity of carbon taxes, even before revenue redistribution, and with no detriment to effectiveness when compared to traditional uniform carbon taxation.
Metadata
Supervisors: | Steinberger, Julia K. and Owen, Anne and Ivanova, Diana and Millward-Hopkins, Joel |
---|---|
Related URLs: | |
Keywords: | Inequality, energy footprint, carbon footprint, redistribution, luxury-taxation, carbon taxes |
Awarding institution: | University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Environment (Leeds) > School of Earth and Environment (Leeds) > Sustainability Research Institute (Leeds) |
Identification Number/EthosID: | uk.bl.ethos.861110 |
Depositing User: | Dr Yannick Oswald |
Date Deposited: | 13 Sep 2022 10:18 |
Last Modified: | 11 Sep 2023 09:53 |
Download
Final eThesis - complete (pdf)
Filename: PhD_thesis_full_document_Yannick_Oswald.pdf
Licence:
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 4.0 International License
Export
Statistics
You do not need to contact us to get a copy of this thesis. Please use the 'Download' link(s) above to get a copy.
You can contact us about this thesis. If you need to make a general enquiry, please see the Contact us page.