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In a previous part of my life, to reduce my environmental footprint, I consciously kept my salary low. My thinking was, even saving the money wouldn't help, as banks would invest them in energy demanding projects.

I am under the assumption that businesses should report salary levels as part of their GHG reporting. Whilst that would be at an aggregate level, for the individual, what's the connection between salary level and environmental footprint?

Simply put: If I get a significant pay rise (e.g. 30K USD), will I realistically be able to avoid this affecting my carbon impact? If yes, how?

bjornte
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One argument would be that the more money you have control of the more you can direct it towards less carbon-intensive aims. (Of course this is also an argument the effective altruists make, but they all turned out to be much less than altruistic.)

You assume that if you put your higher salary into savings banks will use it for evil, but not all banks/building societies are equal. At one end of the spectrum is HSBC/Barclays, but at the other end of the spectrum there are cooperatively owned building societies with the explicit aim of funding projects for the social good.

The other alternative is to use your higher salary in a different way. Maybe you can trade it off for time. I.e. if you take a salary increase but decrease your working hours so your pro-rata income remains the same, you have then freed up time you can spend on volunteering/sustainability projects/growing your own food/etc.

One of the drivers behind the correlation between wealth and carbon impact is that they will be using their investments to seek the highest returns without regard for social consequences, which as you rightly point out, will be carbon/energy-intensive.

But the other driver is more direct - high levels of consumption. Richer people use more energy at home (swimming pools, higher heating levels, more demand for cooling), more for transport (cars, multiple cars, flights), conspicuous consumption (lobsters flown in from Maine) and so on.

You're in control of what you spend your money on so if you feel you can live the same lifestyle as you do now despite getting richer at least the consumption part of your emissions won't increase.

thosphor
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Simply put: If I get a significant pay rise (e.g. 30K USD), will I realistically be able to avoid this affecting my carbon impact? If yes, how?

If you live in a house you own, you can invest this money in energy efficiency. For example, you could improve home insulation, replace fossil-fuel based central heating by renewable central heating (heat pump), good quality solar photovoltaic arrays, and/or sodium batteries. It's not difficult to invest 6-digit amounts of €/£/$ into energetic home improvements. If you live too far from the equator to be self-sufficient with solar energy in winter and you really have some money you can and want to invest, you can consider seasonal energy storage where you produce hydrogen using surplus solar energy in summer, and generate electricity from that in winter. In Germany such systems are on the market, but expect to pay at least €100k.

If you drive a car a lot and you really, really cannot avoid doing so, replacing an ICE-based car by an electric car pays off environmentally. Of course, avoiding driving a car is much better. You could get an electric freight bike. The high-end ones have 5-digit price tags.

Beyond direct personal use, you can invest in (local) energy cooperatives that build citizen-owned wind turbines, solar energy plants, and electricity storage. This you can do even if the investments mentioned in the previous paragraphs are too expensive.

gerrit
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  • Indeed. If I was earning a little less, I wouldn't dare raid my savings to pay for solar panels because I wouldn't be able to build them back up again in a reasonable timeframe even with their effect on reducing my outgoings. – Chris H Feb 12 '24 at 16:12
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I believe you would - and there are a number of ways you can do this -

You may be able to use the additional funds to reduce your carbon footprint (Putting solar power on your roof, converting appliances to greener technologies, switching to an EV if its not a step backward for you) - and even if you can't, you can invest/spend the money in ways that will reduce others footprint. This varies from supporting projects that reduce CO2 emissions to financing green initiatives.

Making some reasonable (but maybe wrong) assumptions that you have a typical job - I could go so far as to argue that you SHOULD take a raise to reduce the worlds carbon footprint. If you don't take the raise, the money will still be invested/spent - only in ways you don't control - and are more likely to increase the carbon footprint

davidgo
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