Ecology and Class Structure : Greenhouse Gas Emissions of Social Classes in the United Kingdom

The article makes an interdisciplinary contribution across environmental research and sociology. By bringing contemporary class theory to ecological analysis of Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions, we provide a new framework to discuss the social underpinnings of climate change. Engaging with the diagnosis of a split middle class in post-industrial societies we demonstrate that the middle-class is not divided in terms of their total GHG emissions. Based on representative expenditure data for UK households, our analysis instead reveals compositional differences: while the ‘new middle-class’ creates more environmental pressures through their mobility, the ‘old middle-class’ has higher housing emissions. Beyond compositional differences in the middle-layers, our analysis also reveals stark divides across the class matrix: While the lower class has the smallest carbon footprint, the upper class plays both econom-