Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves From the Tyranny of the Automobile
by Sarah Goodyear, Doug Gordon and Aaron Naparstek · 21 Oct 2025 · 330pp · 85,349 words
vehicles—is part of why the activists single them out. “SUVs are an attractive target because they are such an appalling example of totally unnecessary luxury emissions,” the rep told us. “Anyone who has bought a gas-guzzling SUV in a climate crisis has made a choice to say they don’t
The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World
by Daniel Yergin · 14 May 2011 · 1,373pp · 300,577 words
ago, and it should not be denied the same opportunities and standards of living as the developed countries. In so doing, it distinguished between the “luxury emissions” of the developed world and the “survival emissions” of developing countries. Third, it pointed out that one reason that its energy use—and emissions—are
How to Blow Up a Pipeline
by Andreas Malm · 4 Jan 2021 · 156pp · 49,653 words
vital need or right, indeed without experiencing any discomfort whatsoever. Subsistence emissions occur in the pursuit of physical reproduction, in the absence of feasible alternatives. Luxury emissions can claim neither excuse. ‘People don’t need yachts – they want yachts’, in the words of a CEO of a top superyacht manufacturer. Now the
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of their material aspirations. But where does this leave the distinction between luxury and subsistence emissions? Has it now lost its relevance? To the contrary. Luxury emissions become more atrocious at the tail-end of carbon budgets, for at least six reasons. First, the harm they inflict is now immediate. Enjoying a
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that conspicuous consumption of fossil fuels ought to be classified as a crime. It is aggravated by the circumstance, secondly, that the main source of luxury emissions – the hypermobility of the rich, their inordinate flying and yachting and driving – is what frees them from having to bother with the consequences, as they
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be super-rich and hypermobile above 400 ppm is to dump lethal hazards on others and get away from them in one master stroke. Third, luxury emissions represent the ideological spear of business-as-usual, not only maintaining but actively championing the most unsustainable kinds of consumption. This is crime sold as
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room left as there is time to postpone that reckoning. From this condition derives the sixth and last reason: the very special strategic status of luxury emissions. They are supremely demoralising for mitigation efforts. Merely catching sight of a superyacht gliding through the estuary, or hearing about the latest record in private
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like a similar degree. Indeed, the more entrenched the fossil economy, the slimmer might be her margin of choice. It follows that states should attack luxury emissions with axes – not because they necessarily make up the bulk of the total, but because of the position they hold. Otto and her colleagues propose
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if other bourgeois governments were to work up Macron’s passion for the climate, they can be expected to start fumbling in the same direction. Luxury emissions, long acknowledged as the lowhanging fruits of mitigation, are left dangling, heavy and rotten, without any state daring to touch them. Time to pick up
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. It would be a convenient mistake, however, to think that consumption is a problem exclusively of the super-richest 0.0027 per cent. Not even luxury emissions are their prerogative. SUVs have conquered car markets, with stunning consequences for the planet: in late 2019, the IEA reported that this was the second
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burn through the forests of Europe, take out a digger. Next time a Caribbean island is battered beyond recognition, burst in upon a banquet of luxury emissions or a Shell board meeting. The weather is already political, but it is political from one side only, blowing off the steam built up by
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to is that ‘I can make no difference because I am unwilling to make a difference’. The same goes, of course, for every perpetrator of luxury emissions. A climate fatalist of the Scranton–Franzen type (the self-sufficient hunter-farmer is a separate case) then projects this weakness of the flesh onto
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(New Delhi: Centre for Science and Environment, 1991), p. 3. Emphasis removed. p. 87. This insight was then picked up … Henry Shue, ‘Subsistence Emissions and Luxury Emissions’, Law and Policy 15 (1993): 39–59; reprinted in Henry Shue, Climate Justice: Vulnerability and Protection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), ch. 2. p. 88