Despite their progressive bona fides, many California leaders are increasingly comfortable acknowledging that the state’s climate policies will harm the poor and benefit the wealthy. In 2023, Golden State bureaucrats belatedly disclosed that achieving carbon neutrality by 2045 would cumulatively reduce the incomes of families making less than $100,000 per year by $5.3 billion, while enriching higher-income households by the same amount. Earlier this year, some concerned lawmakers asked the nonpartisan state Legislative Analyst’s Office to evaluate how to lessen the “regressive effects” of California’s climate initiatives. Though the request focused on just two items—clean-vehicle and household-energy programs—the LAO compiled a 16-page response detailing the myriad ways the state’s climate policy hurts the disadvantaged, including through high energy costs, limited access to clean technology, and poorer residents subsidizing wealthier “green” households.
It might seem unthinkable that deep-blue California legislators would deliberately plan to impoverish poor and minority communities. But climate activists rely on two dogmas to downplay social-equity concerns. First, they claim that human-caused climate change will hurt low-income people the most. Second, they argue that cutting greenhouse-gas emissions in California will limit climate risks for everyone, especially the poor. Neither belief withstands scrutiny.
At first glance, the claim that climate change will disproportionately harm lower-income communities makes some sense. After all, the poor have fewer resources than the wealthy. Whether the future is hotter or colder, poorer people will be less able to afford air conditioning or heating. But the same is true today of lower-income families’ ability to secure medical services, education, and housing. California, like other states and nations, already offers taxpayer-funded and charitable services in these areas for the less fortunate; presumably, it would continue to do so in a warmer (or cooler) future.
While California seeks to mitigate hypothetical temperature changes, however, its green-energy policies impose real and immediate harms on the poor—such as skyrocketing energy prices. Those costs plague the less fortunate residents of a state that already has the nation’s worst cost-adjusted poverty rate.
It’s worth noting that human emissions, to whatever extent they are causing a climate “emergency” or “crisis,” have coincided with one of history’s greatest reductions in global poverty. According to the World Bank, between 1990 and 2019, as emissions surged, the proportion of the world’s population in extreme poverty fell from 38 percent to 8.4 percent. Food production similarly soared from 2000 to 2020, with global primary-crop production rising by 52 percent, meat production by 45 percent, and vegetable oil production by 125 percent. Those figures well outstripped population growth and resulted in the daily caloric intake rising in every region of the globe. At the same time, the real global economy nearly doubled in value.
The Covid lockdowns curtailed these gains, cratering the global economy in 2020. The resulting economic disruption “dealt a historic blow to poverty reduction,” the World Bank found. Nearly 70 million more people globally were in extreme poverty at the end of 2020—the first rise in decades. Yet the lockdowns also slashed emissions in 2020 by 7 percent. A senior United Nations official hailed these results as a “fire drill” for climate action; other activists insist that pandemic-level emissions cuts must be duplicated every two years to meet UN temperature goals by 2100.
If climate activists support the emissions-cutting results of pandemic-era lockdowns, then they will have to live with the corresponding effects on the poorest among us. It’s a trade-off they’d rather not talk about.
Climate policymakers’ second argument—that California’s efforts will make the world more habitable for all, including the poor—runs into a stubborn reality: it’s practically impossible for the state to ease global emissions meaningfully on its own. As former governor Jerry Brown recognized, emissions cuts without complementary reductions in China, India, Russia, and the Middle East would “prove ineffective.” Though state climate bureaucrats claim to have “decoupled” economic growth from emissions-intensive activity, nothing of the sort has occurred on a global scale.
Is it possible to sustain economic growth without carbon emissions? Studies by the United Kingdom and the European Union show that low-emissions growth has occurred mainly in wealthier regions, where service-intensive sectors supplanted high-energy goods production. But even these areas require and import huge quantities of items like steel, cement, chemicals, industrial and household equipment, glass, and food. When the “outsourced” emissions caused by these imports get counted, the U.K. or, say, Denmark has a much larger carbon footprint and, in Denmark’s case, “an undeservedly green reputation,” according to scientist Vaclav Smil. In part to account honestly for these hidden emissions, the EU and the U.K. are imposing a carbon-content import tax. California refuses to count any nonterritorial emissions.
The displacement—but not elimination—of goods production from supposedly green areas and the desire for better living standards have supercharged energy consumption and emissions everywhere else. Careful studies of emissions and growth show that in some areas, such as the United Kingdom, growth and per-capita emissions are increasingly uncorrelated; but they also show, globally, “a strong coupling between carbon dioxide emissions and real GDP per head.” As global economic growth soared, average per-capita emissions expanded from 3.76 metric tonnes (MT) per year in the 1990s to 4.35 MT per year between 2012 and 2021. Last year, global carbon dioxide emissions hit 37.4 billion MT, the highest in history, according to the International Energy Agency.
Since at least the 1990s, when the U.S. Senate rejected the Kyoto climate treaty by a 95–0 vote because it failed to include emissions targets for developing countries, Western activists have understood that developed and developing nations alike would need to cut emissions to achieve UN climate goals. But climate policymakers have never honestly explained exactly how their proposed emissions cuts would allow economic growth in both poor and rich nations to persist over time.
In 2018, an international group of scholars created new potential “pathways” for meeting 2100 emissions goals, including both a “[g]reen” and a fossil fuel–use approach. Some of these, according to the researchers, would yield more equitable growth between rich and poor countries. But a recent study of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s “model scenarios” demonstrates that climate policymakers’ plans would further disadvantage the world’s poor while enriching already wealthy areas. The IPCC’s pathways, the analysts concluded, would put the burden of “climate change mitigation . . . squarely on developing countries,” even as they allowed “developed countries . . . to increase their energy consumption unhindered by constraints on the use of fossil fuels.”
California’s willingness to harm its most vulnerable citizens in its doomed emissions-cut crusade is symptomatic of the West’s climate-policy failures. The transition to a service-sector economy in places like California, the U.K., and Germany has concentrated wealth in households and enterprises least affected by electricity, motor-fuel, and natural-gas costs. Political leaders and activists may be able, for a time, to blunt the aspirations of blue-collar and middle-class communities while claiming to decouple growth from carbon emissions. But as the green-obsessed West squanders its momentum, economic growth, fossil-fuel demand, and political vitality are shifting to China (the world’s largest emitter) and more rapidly developing nations like Guyana, the Philippines, Vietnam, India, and Tanzania. Meantime, developed countries seeking to remake the world’s energy infrastructure have angered major exporters like China and Mexico. Many non-Western nations are reportedly attempting to bypass the dollar-dominated economy entirely to escape American and European influence.
California and Western climate activists need to change course. Regional decoupling strategies almost certainly will fail to moderate global temperatures, even as they impose prohibitive burdens on the global poor. Instead, policymakers should strive to balance social and economic advancement with reasonable emissions reductions. Otherwise, activists risk creating a less dynamic future—built on the backs of the poor.
Photo by ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty Images
