With a specific focus on the United States and the United Kingdom, Carbon Inequality studies the role of the richest people in contributing to climate change via their luxury consumption and their investments. In an innovative contribution, it attempts to quantify personal responsibility for shareholdings in large fossil fuel companies. This book explores the implications of the richest people’s historic responsibility for global warming, the impacts of which affect them less than most others in global society. Kenner analyses how the richest people running large oil and gas companies have successfully used their political influence to lobby the US and UK government. This assessment of their growing political power is particularly pertinent at a time of increasing inequality and growing public awareness of the impact of climate change. The book also highlights the crucial role of the richest in blocking the low-carbon transition in the US and the UK, exploring how this could be countered to ensure fossil fuels are fully replaced by renewable energy. This book will be of great relevance to scholars and policy makers with an interest in inequality, climate change and sustainability transitions.

World Inequality Report 2022 is the most authoritative and comprehensive account of global trends in inequality, providing cutting-edge information about income and wealth inequality and also pioneering data about the history of inequality, gender inequality, environmental inequalities, and trends in international tax reform and redistribution.

Ending poverty and stabilizing climate change will be two unprecedented global achievements and two major steps toward sustainable development. But the two objectives cannot be considered in isolation: they need to be jointly tackled through an integrated strategy. This report brings together those two objectives and explores how they can more easily be achieved if considered together. It examines the potential impact of climate change and climate policies on poverty reduction. It also provides guidance on how to create a “win-win†? situation so that climate change policies contribute to poverty reduction and poverty-reduction policies contribute to climate change mitigation and resilience building. The key finding of the report is that climate change represents a significant obstacle to the sustained eradication of poverty, but future impacts on poverty are determined by policy choices: rapid, inclusive, and climate-informed development can prevent most short-term impacts whereas immediate pro-poor, emissions-reduction policies can drastically limit long-term ones.

The supreme challenge of our time is tackling climate change. We urgently need to curtail our use of fossil fuels – but how can we do so in a just and feasible way? In this compelling book, leading economist James Boyce shows that the key to solving this conundrum is to put a limit on carbon emissions, thereby raising the price of fossil fuels and generating strong incentives for clean energy. But there is a formidable hurdle: how do we secure broad public support for a policy that increases fuel costs for consumers? Boyce powerfully argues that carbon pricing can be made just and politically durable only if linked to returning the revenue to the public as carbon dividends. Founded on the principle that the gifts of nature belong to us all, not to corporations or governments, this bold reform could spark a twenty-first-century clean energy revolution. Essential reading for all concerned citizens, policy-makers, and students of public policy and environmental economics, this book will be a transformative contribution to one of the most important policy debates of our era.

Economics for People and the Planet, a collection of essays by James K. Boyce on the environment, inequality and the economy, argues that there is not an inexorable trade-off between advancing human well-being and having a clean and safe environment. The goal of economic policy should be to grow the good things that improve our well-being and environmental quality and reduce the bad things that harm humans and nature. To reorient the economy for these ends, we will need to achieve a more egalitarian distribution of wealth and power. Global climate change – the most pressing environmental challenge of our time – adds urgency to this task and creates historic opportunities for moving towards a greener future.

The Siena Summer School hosts lectures by distinguished scholars and offers a clear account of alternative research paths. This latest addition to the series identifies and addresses key issues surrounding the inequality-environment relationship.

This open access book evaluates, from an economic perspective, various measures introduced in Japan to prevent climate change. Although various countries have implemented such policies in response to the pressing issue of climate change, the effectiveness of those programs has not been sufficiently compared. In particular, policy evaluations in the Asian region are far behind those in North America and Europe due to data limitations and political reasons. The first part of the book summarizes measures in different sectors in Japan to prevent climate change, such as emissions trading and carbon tax, and assesses their impact. The second part shows how those policies have changed the behavior of firms and households. In addition, it presents macro-economic simulations that consider the potential of renewable energy. Lastly, based on these comprehensive assessments, it compares the effectiveness of measures to prevent climate change in Japan and Western countries. Providing valuable insights, this book will appeal to both academic researchers and policymakers seeking cost-effective measures against climate change.