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Hi everyone, I'm really really happy about this @BBC Future piece "Who is to blame for climate change?" which came out yesterday. It does a great job at explaining that allocating emissions is not the same as allocating responsibility. Short thread. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200618-climate-change-who-is-to-blame-and-why-does-it-matter
I think this is a discussion we need to have: too often we see studies saying "A few producers are to blame for X% of emissions." & "A small faction of consumers are to blame for Y% of emissions." Both of these are true and worth knowing about - and they are not contradictory. 2/
To quote myself: “You’re just slicing through the system at one end of the supply chain versus the other. That alone is not enough to allocate blame.”
When we allocate emissions to producers, we're slicing through the start of the supply chain, & for consumers it's at the end. 3/
When we allocate emissions to producers, we're slicing through the start of the supply chain, & for consumers it's at the end. 3/
These are the same emissions, viewed from different lenses. Both types of studies tell us something really important about the structure and distribution of how and why we have such large climate changing emissions. Both tell us about necessary change. 4/
Because here's the thing: both consumption, production, AND the economic systems in the middle will have to change if we want to avert climate disaster. As we explain here, affluent people in particular will have to change their lifestyles. 5/ https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-16941-y
There are huge inequalities in energy & resource use which are tied to inequalities in income, which is something I & many others have been exploring, such as in this recent study. Rich households use a disproportionate amount of energy-intensive goods. 6/ https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-020-0579-8
But at the same time, producers are highly concentrated, very powerful, & depend on consumption for their profits to continue. As we showed in this paper, one of the main products of our age is car dependence. It's baked into our governance & economies.7/ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214629620300633
So when want to allocate blame, there is plenty to go around: both producers and consumers will have to change. Fossil fuel industries (and large parts of automotive, aviation etc) will have to disappear. But our consumption and lifestyles will also have to be transformed. 8/
We all need to move away from energy and emissions-intensive consumption, in transport, food (towards plant-based diets), in housing and leisure. This requires private effort AND public policy. 9/
And so it remains true that one of the most effective location of action is activism to demand change in this economic system which rewards damaging production and over-consumption. We wrote about this economic system here, a very readable article 
. 10/ https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/7/2001/htm
. 10/ https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/7/2001/htm
The economic system we have to change has a name. It's called capitalism, and it works against both human and planetary well-being. I wrote about this in the context of covid here. 11/ https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/pandenomics-story-life-versus-growth/
Anyway, sorry for the long thread. If you want to read more things I wrote (ha!) you can find most here.
https://profjuliasteinberger.wordpress.com/
Shoutout to my amazing co-authors & colleagues, @t_wiedmann Manfed Lenzen @LorenzClimate Yannick Oswald @dr_anneowen @giulio_mattioli @bikeademic
https://profjuliasteinberger.wordpress.com/
Shoutout to my amazing co-authors & colleagues, @t_wiedmann Manfed Lenzen @LorenzClimate Yannick Oswald @dr_anneowen @giulio_mattioli @bikeademic
Andrew Brown @elkepirgmaier & so many others. Thanks also to @LeverhulmeTrust who funded my "Living Well Within Limits" project after years of failing to get any support for this interdisciplinary topic from UK research councils. I am SO grateful. Cheers.
