Inequality is driving the climate crisis: A longitudinal analysis of province-level carbon emissions in Canada, 1997–2020

The authors conduct a comprehensive analysis of the relationship between carbon emissions and income inequality for the Canadian provinces for the 1997 to 2020 period. The results indicate that the short-run and long-run effects of the income share of the top 10 % and the top 5 % on province-level emissions are positive, robust to various model specifications, net of multiple demographic and economic factors, not sensitive to exogenous shocks or outlier cases, symmetrical, statistically equivalent for emissions from different sectors, and their short-term effects do not vary in magnitude through time. The findings also consistently show that the estimated effect of the Gini coefficient on province-level emissions is not statistically significant. Overall, the results underscore the importance in modeling the effects of income inequality measures that quantify different characteristics of income distributions, and they are very consistent with analytical approaches regarding power concentration, overconsumption, and status competition that suggest that a higher concentration of income leads to growth in anthropogenic carbon emissions.