I was reading in Monthly Review today that the bottom 50% of the US already lives underneath the emissions targets required to meet the goals laid out and it’s really the top half (and really, really the top 10%) who need to make massive sacrifices. Made it seem way more do-able when looked at this way.

International attempts to mitigate climate change began with the establishment of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, followed by the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, forming the basis of all subsequent climate negotiations. This led to the 2015 Paris Agreement, in which countries pledged to reduce their emissions by certain stipulated amounts, with the object of reducing global carbon emissions by 45 percent by 2030 and reaching net-zero emissions by 2050. Central to the entire UNFCCC process has been differences in emissions between rich and poor nations. However, this emphasis on the nation in relation to international climate negotiations led to a corresponding deemphasis on the class basis of emissions. In recent years, the disparities in carbon emissions on a class basis have proven ever more crucial in addressing the climate problem. Inequality in greenhouse gas emissions within nations now exceeds the inequality between nations—although the two remain intrinsically related due to imperialism. Consequently, a combined class and nation approach that more directly challenges capitalism in all of its aspects is now required if there is to be any hope of solving the planetary climate crisis.

Over the last few decades, there has been a dramatic reversal in the relative role of class and nation in the structuring of carbon emissions, due to enormous increases in class disparities under global monopoly-finance capital. (Note: the data in the studies referred to below add carbon emissions associated with net imports to domestic carbon emissions, with the result that total carbon emissions of Europe, for example, are 25 percent higher than if only domestic emissions were counted.) According to the 2022 World Inequality Report:

In 1990, most global carbon inequality (63%) was due to differences between countries: then, the average citizen of a rich country polluted unequivocally more than the rest of the world’s citizens, and social inequalities within countries were on average lower across the globe than today. The situation has almost entirely reversed in 30 years. Within-country emissions inequalities now account for nearly two-thirds of global emissions inequality. This does not mean that there do not remain significant (often huge) inequalities in emissions between countries and world regions, on the contrary. In fact, it means that on top of the great between-countries inequality in carbon emissions, there also exist even greater inequalities in emissions between individuals [economic classes]. (World Inequality Report 2022, “Chapter 6: Global Carbon Inequality,” World Inequality Lab, wir2022.wid.world)

The implications of this can be seen by looking at the United States. If we examine U.S. emissions reduction targets under the Paris Agreement (prior to the Donald Trump administration’s withdrawal from the agreement), the United States needed (based on 2019 data) to reduce its per capita emissions by 11.1 tonnes per year to reach its 2030 target. (One metric tonne [1,000 kilograms] is about 10 percent more than a U.S. ton, weighing 2,000 pounds.) Here it is significant that the bottom 50 percent of the U.S. population is already below the target level of annual emissions aimed at for 2030, which means that workers in the bottom half—assuming these targets still applied—would not need to reduce their emissions at all, and indeed would need to increase them by .3 tonnes on average, or 3 percent, to match the targeted per capita emissions. In contrast, those in the middle 40 percent would need to reduce their emissions by 12 tonnes on average, or 54 percent annually, to come into line with the national per capita emissions, while those in the top 10 percent would need to cut their average annual emissions by 64.7 tonnes per year, or 87 percent. A similar situation applies to France and other European countries. It follows that the emissions reduction efforts, particularly in the wealthy countries, need to be directed at the top half of the income distribution, making greenhouse gas emissions fundamentally a class problem. This is, indeed, the conclusion of World Inequality Lab researcher Lucas Chancel, who writes that “policy efforts should be focused mainly on reducing the emissions of the top half of the population, and particularly the top 10 percent” (Lucas Chancel, “Climate Change and the Global Inequality of Carbon Emissions, 1990–2020,” October 21, 2021, World Inequality Lab, wid.world/news-article/climate-change-the-global-inequality-of-carbon-emissions; Jomo Kwame Sundaram, “Inequality Worsens Planetary Heating,” Substack, August 12, 2025, jomodevplus.substack.com).

https://monthlyreview.org/articles/mr-077-05-2025-09_0/