Who emits most? Associations between socio-economic factors and UK households' home energy, transport, indirect and total CO2 emissions

Abstract

Does the association between household characteristics and household CO2 emissions differ for different areas such as home energy, transport and indirect emissions? This question is policy relevant because distributional implications of mitigation policies may vary depending on the area of emissions that is targeted if specific types of households are likely to have higher emissions in some areas than in others. So far, this issue has not been examined in depth in the literature on household CO2 emissions. Using a representative UK expenditure survey, this paper compares how household characteristics like income, household size, education, gender, worklessness and rural and urban location differ in their association with all three areas as well as total emissions. We find that these associations vary considerably across emission domains. In particular, whilst emissions in all areas rise with income, low income, workless and elderly households are more likely to have high emissions from home energy than from other domains, suggesting they may be less affected by carbon taxes on transport or total emissions. This demonstrates that fairness implications related to mitigation policies need to be examined for separate emission domains.

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