How to Blow Up a Pipeline
by
Andreas Malm
Published 4 Jan 2021
A group of American and British criminologists have consequently argued 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 can always shift to safer locations. To 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.
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Someone who drives a superyacht cannot be thus exonerated: he could easily abstain from his boat without foregoing a 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 border between needs and wants is famously porous, but to ignore the distinction in this context ‘is to discard the most fundamental differences in kind that we understand’, Shue argued back in 1993.
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Luckily, this does not condemn the poor to eternal poverty, for what they need is not emissions but energy, and with the renewable kind cheaper across the board, the transition does not require the sacrifice 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 day out on a steam yacht in 1913 was not yet a great offence as such, because relatively little CO2 had been accumulated in the atmosphere, the concentration still hanging below 300 ppm; the addition from the chimney did not supercharge a hurricane or set the match to a dry forest.
Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves From the Tyranny of the Automobile
by
Sarah Goodyear
,
Doug Gordon
and
Aaron Naparstek
Published 21 Oct 2025
And while the action may not be technically victimless, the relative privilege of the vehicle owners affected—and the lack of any real utility in so-called sport utility 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 care about the impact their choices make. So although we shouldn’t focus on individual actions generally, there are some actions, like buying an SUV, that are so egregious they must be stopped,” they said.
The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World
by
Daniel Yergin
Published 14 May 2011
First, it noted that its energy use and CO2 emissions—when measured on a per capita basis—are only a small fraction of that of the United States and Europe. Second, it emphasized that China is still a relatively poor nation making a transition that Europe and North America—and Japan—made decades 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 going up so rapidly is that Europe and North America have in effect outsourced a significant part of their energy-intensive production to China, as their own economies continue to shift to services and consumption.