Luxury-focused climate mitigation policies: A comparative ethical analysis

This article focuses on the climate change policies that are needed to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of the ultra-rich, primarily from superyachts, private jets, mega-mansions, and high-emission road vehicles. These are all goods for which demand is inelastic and therefore difficult to curb with Pigouvian policies. The article proposes a comparative analysis of the three main luxury-focused mitigation policies discussed in the literature: bans, luxury carbon taxation and progressive carbon taxation. The analysis is based on six normative and non-normative criteria: emissions justice, expressive justice, social efficiency, the non-frustration of legitimate expectations, administrative feasibility and prevention of carbon leakage. The first part of the article discusses how each of these criteria is relevant to an analysis of mitigation policies targeting the emissions of the ultra-rich. The second part examines each luxury-focused mitigation policy against all six criteria and assigns them a score. The third section briefly discusses the results of this comparative analysis.