Wealth inequality and climate change are intertwined consequences of unchecked capitalist growth and the monopolization resources.
These two issues create a compounding effect: as the wealthy accumulate more wealth, their investments and purchases tend to generate more greenhouse gas emissions, which accelerates climate change and further exacerbates inequality.
Disproportionate Emissions
Greenhouse gas emissions from both consumption and investments among the wealthiest groups have a vastly disproportionate impact on the climate crisis.
At the individual level, the ultra wealthy lead high emitting lifestyles through energy intensive consumption patterns that include things like travel, luxury goods, and ownership of large homes—often owning multiple properties which contributes to higher emissions.
For example, Jeff Bezos’ two private jets spent nearly 25 days in the air over a 12-month period and emitted as much carbon as the average US Amazon employee would in 207 years according to a 2024 OXFAM report.
Affluent groups not only consume more and purchase emissions intensive goods but their assets and investments are also funneled into emission-intensive sectors such as fossil fuels, mining, real estate and construction. Industries such as real estate and costruction are especially emissions-intensive because they rely on concrete and steel—materials with enormous quantities of embodied carbon. These investments generate considerable returns, widening the wealth gap, while also producing massive carbon footprints.
A 2025 study analyzing emissions inequality from1990-2020 found that two-thirds of warming can be attributed to the wealthiest 10%, with average emissions 6.5 times higher than the average per capita rate. To further put this disparity into perspective, a 2024 OXFAM report found that the world’s fifty richest billionaires produce more carbon through their investments, private jets, and yachts in just 90 minutes than the average person emits in an entire lifetime.
How Does Capitalism Influence Wealth Inequality?
A foundational critique of capitalism is its ability to concentrate economic gains among owners while workers receive only a fraction of the value they create. This surplus extraction has intensified with globalization and automation, leading to stagnant wages and declining worker power— trends widely documented by economists at the Economic Policy Institute and the OECD.
Under this model, wealth breeds more wealth: those with capital can invest and earn higher returns than those relying on wages, compounding inequality over time. This self-reinforcing dynamic is now supported by econometric evidence showing that every increase in wealth concentration significantly exacerbates carbon inequality—meaning the environmental footprint of the richest grows much faster than the average individual.
Research from the World Inequality Lab reveals that public policies often serve to perpetuate these divides, especially when they favor interest of wealth holders through tax breaks, deregulation, and subsidies that disproportionately benefit capital owners.
At its foundation, capitalism prioritizes endless economic growth while disregarding planetary boundaries. Corporate interests drive extraction, pollution, and emissions as structural features of the system.
Why Capitalism and Climate Justice Can’t Coexist
Capitalism perpetuates climate change by embedding exploitation of people, land, and resources into its design. The wealth gaps created by this system ensure those least responsible for the climate crisis bear the greatest impacts, both nationally and globally.
Within the United States, capitalist production has created stark patterns of environmental injustice. Many of the most polluted areas are home to low-income communities who face the externalized costs of corporate profit. In Bakersfield, CA —one of three California metro areas with the largest increases in concentrated poverty from 2010-2018 —is surrounded by oil fields, intensive agriculture, and industrial zones. Weak enforcement of pollution controls enables business owners to cut costs and increase profits, while residents experience higher rates of asthma, contaminated water, and degraded air quality.
On a global scale, capitalism’s colonial and imperial roots continue to shape climate injustice. Wealthy nations such as the United States and members of the European Union account for the majority of historical greenhouse gas emissions, shaping climate impacts felt by countries who have significantly lower GHG footprints and GDP’s. The wealth that fueled industrialization in the Global North was extracted through centuries of resource theft, forced labor, and ecological destruction in colonized regions.
This legacy persists today through global trade structures, debt systems, and extractive industries that keep poorer nations dependent and vulnerable. Countries with the smallest carbon footprints now face the greatest exposure to extreme heat, sea-level rise, and food insecurity—while former colonial powers maintain economic dominance built on ecological harm and human exploitation.
Calls for climate reparations and responsibility recognize the disproportionate contribution of wealthy, historically colonial nations to the climate crisis. Addressing the climate crisis requires not only reducing emissions but confronting the capitalist structures that have normalized extraction, inequality, and ecological violence in pursuit of endless growth.
Solutions: Anti-Capitalist Degrowth Models
The interconnected crises of inequality and climate change cannot be solved within the same economic system that created them. Incremental reforms through green growth models or corporate sustainability pledges merely tinker at the margins of a structure built on exploitation. As thinkers like Kohei Saito and Jason Hickel argue, confronting climate breakdown requires a radical reorientation of our economies away from endless accumulation and toward collective well-being.
Degrowth provides a vision for reorganizing society around equity, and care. Under degrowth frameworks, economic success is measured not by GDP, but by metrics such as community health, ecological restoration, access to essential services, and time for leisure and creativity. The goal is to downscale unnecessary production—particularly luxury consumption and resource-intensive industries—while ensuring that everyone’s fundamental needs are met within planetary boundaries.
Ownership and control are central. If the wealthiest individuals and corporations dominate the financing of renewable energy and climate adaptation, their share of global wealth will continue to grow, deepening inequality even in a decarbonized world. Conversely, public, cooperative, and community-owned models demonstrate how climate action can redistribute both power and resources.
Degrowth also challenges the colonial logic of extraction that still shapes global trade. It calls for ecological reparations, debt cancellation, and the end of exploitative resource flows from the Global South to the Global North. In practice, this means investing in ecosystem restoration, housing cooperatives, and localized supply chains rather than fossil-fuel expansion and militarized borders.
The climate crisis is not an unintended consequence of capitalism—it is the inevitable outcome. Addressing it means redistributing wealth and transforming how we define prosperity, progress, and justice. Dismantling capitalist growth imperatives is not merely an economic task, but a moral and ecological one: a necessary step toward a livable planet for all.
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