Who emits most? Associations between socio-economic factors and UK households' home energy, transport, indirect and total CO2 emissions

By M. Büchs, Sylke V. Schnepf. 2013

368 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Does the association between household characteristics and household CO2 emissions differ for areas such as home energy, transport and indirect emissions? This question is policy relevant because distributional implications of mitigation policies may vary depending on the area of emissions that is targeted if specific types of households are likely to have higher emissions in some areas than in others. So far, this issue has not been examined in depth in the literature on household CO2 emissions. Using a representative UK expenditure survey, this paper compares how household characteristics like income, household size, education, gender, worklessness and rural or urban location differ in their association with all three areas as well as total emissions. We find that these associations vary considerably across emission domains. In particular, whilst all types of emissions rise with income, low income, workless and elderly households are more likely to have high emissions from home energy than from other domains, suggesting that they may be less affected by carbon taxes on transport or total emissions. This demonstrates that fairness implications related to mitigation policies need to be examined for separate emission domains.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8393bed8b70bc9aff4921b956e2bfae1f8b504ed

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In Economics and Econometrics

In Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

Citations in the corpus

Mechanisms explaining the impact of economic inequality on environmental deterioration (2015, background): “(2013) and Büchs and Schnepf (2013) identify a concave relationship between household income and consumption behaviour-related GHG emissions.”
The unequal distribution of household carbon footprints in Europe and its link to sustainability (2020, background): “Recent developments address regional and urban sustainability (Di Donato et al., 2015), with existing studies focusing on a single country or region (Büchs & Schnepf, 2013; Gill & Moeller, 2018; Girod & De Haan, 2010) or aggregated units of analysis such as income groups (Steen-Olsen et al., 2016;…”
Household carbon emission research: An analytical review of measurement, influencing factors and mitigation prospects (2015, neutral): “…HCEs include household carbon footprint (e.g. Fan et al., 2012; Shigetomi et al., 2014; Shirley et al., 2012; Weber and Matthews, 2008), household carbon dioxide emissions (e.g. Büchs and Schnepf, 2013; Golley and Meng, 2012; Lee and Lee, 2014) or just HCEs (e.g. Qin and Han, 2013; Revell, 2014).”
Assessing the socio-demographic, technical, economic and behavioral factors of Nordic electric vehicle adoption and the influence of vehicle-to-grid preferences (2020, background): “[24] write that household size has a more substantial effect on transport emissions”
Household time use, carbon footprints, and urban form: a review of the potential contributions of everyday living to the 1.5 °C climate target (2018, background): “This is due to ‘household economies of scale’, for example, sharing appliances and heated/cooled living spaces within the household [40,47,53].”
Residential energy expenditures and the relevance of changes in household circumstances (2015, positive): “Consistent with previous literature (e.g., Buchs and Schnepf, 2013b; Buchs et al., 2011; Tukker et al., 2010), this paper ﬁ nds that household socio-economic characteristics such as income, the presence of people of pensionable age, jobless, or in poor health, and the overall household…”
The global scale, distribution and growth of aviation: Implications for climate change (2020, background): “Various national studies have confirmed that high emitters are found mostly among the highly affluent (Büchs and Schnepf, 2013; Gill and Moeller, 2018; Irfany and Klasen, 2016; Ummel, 2014).”
On the Determinants of Pro-Environmental Behavior: A Literature Review and Guide for the Empirical Economist (2019, background): “, 2014), and other types of emissions (Büchs and Schnepf, 2013; Bruderer-Enzler and Diekmann, 2015), and the energy requirement (Moll et al.”