If You're A Man Who Likes Cars and Meat, You Must Be More Like A Single Woman If You Want Save the Planet

Junk science in the service of climate ideology and virtue signaling knows no bounds. And, no better example of this rule is provided by a study titled “The Gender Gap in Carbon Footprints: Determinants and Implications," from the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment. The Institute was founded by one of the gods of asset management, one who apparently favored timberland, renewables, and precious metals. Therefore, this study predictably supports radical policy initiatives related to climate change.

How radical? Consider the following excerpts (emphasis added):

Understanding the distribution of carbon footprints across population groups is crucial for designing fair and acceptable climate policies.

Using granular consumption data from France, we quantify the gender gap in carbon footprints related to food and transport and investigate its underlying drivers.

We show that women emit 26% less carbon than men in these two sectors, which together account for half of the average individual carbon footprint. Socioeconomic factors, biological differences and gender differences in distances traveled explain part of the gap, but up to 38% remains unexplained.

Red meat and car — high-emission goods often associated with male identity — account for most of the residual, highlighting the role of gender differences in preferences in shaping disparities in carbon footprints…

Although our analysis only considers food and transport, back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that the gender gap in carbon footprints would not disappear if we considered the entire consumption basket instead. Given limited evidence of a significant gender gap in housing emissions, which makes up another 23% of households’ emissions, emissions from other goods and services would need to be at least 80% lower for men to fully cancel out the gender gap in food and transport emissions.

Overall, our results shed light on how men and women could be differently impacted by climate policy and on these policies’ distributional impacts, particularly in terms of horizontal equity. That women may face a lower mitigation cost could also explain why men are found to be less concerned about climate change than women in high-income countries, including conditional on political ideology: if reducing emissions is more costly for men than for women in these countries, loss aversion and motivated reasoning may make them less concerned with the reality of climate change…

Moreover, our results have implications for the political economy of climate policy-making, as citizens who are more affected by environmental policy costs and less concerned with climate change are less likely to support mitigation measures. Finally, policies affecting societal norms around gendered consumption patterns, such as associating eating meat with being masculine, could also influence carbon footprints…

Our findings have several implications for climate policy. First, they suggest that the burden of carbon taxation in the food and transport sector could be greater for men than for women, assuming that both genders have the same tax elasticity…

While our cross-sectional data do not allow us to determine the direction of causality, the evidence suggests the gap is not solely driven by differences in climate concerns. The disparity in footprints between single and non-single women, as well as between those with and without children, suggests that part of the observed gender gap in carbon footprints could be driven by gendered social roles. Furthermore, the differences observed in the consumption of high-emission goods tied to traditional masculinity, such as red meat and cars, but not for gender-neutral polluting goods like plane trips, suggest that gendered preferences pre-dating climate concerns may contribute to the gap.

Within households, the dynamics of decision-making may also play a role in shaping carbon footprints. For instance, we observe higher red meat consumption among women in couples compared to single women, and cars owned by single women are 0.13SD less carbon-intensive than those owned by single men. Given evidence that infrequently adjusted consumption goods, such as cars, account for a large share of household carbon footprints (Kuhn and Schlattmann, 2024), involving women more actively in these key decisions may help reduce overall carbon footprints…

In the case of food, single women emit less than women in couples, indicating that greater equality in decision-making could encourage convergence towards lower-carbon choices. By contrast, single women’s transport carbon footprints exceed those of women in multi-adult households, hinting at a specialisation dynamic, where the partner with higher income may choose more carbon-intensive travel options. While policies that directly enhance women’s bargaining power are limited, these findings highlight the need for further research into how intra-household decision-making dynamics influence carbon footprints.

Finally, our results suggest that information policies challenging traditional gender norms, particularly those tied to ’dominance masculinity’ (De Haas et al., 2024), could indirectly reduce household carbon footprints. Campaigns that deconstruct the association of red meat consumption and car ownership with masculinity may lower male demand for these carbon-intensive goods.

Similarly, addressing stereo-types that portray green consumption and vegetarianism as feminine (Brough et al., 2016; MacInnis and Hodson, 2015; Rosenfeld, 2020) could increase men’s willingness to adopt pro-environmental behaviors. Conversely, recent cultural trends promoting raw meat consumption or ’all-meat diets,’ often accompanied by rhetoric against plant-based diets, may inadvertently increase carbon footprints by reinforcing traditional masculine norms. While these trends are rooted in conservative gender ideologies rather than climate concerns, they underscore the importance of addressing gendered perceptions in climate-related behavior.

So, it seems:

• That CO2 is bad for us is an unquestionable premise

• Men are the big problem

• Masculine men who like cars and red meat are the biggest problem

• Married women are better, but still a problem

• Single women are closest to acceptable, if they don’t drive

• We must force men to do as they’re told and eat like women

• We must reject healthy lifestyles that include meat

• Humans have carbon footprints and, therefore, are net negatives

• We must accept all this as “science”

This is all pure junk science designed to reinforce a political narrative, of course, and more of it appears every day as the climate cult desperately seeks to avoid oblivion and resorts to “jumping the shark" in hundreds of different ways.

#Food #Transport #Gender #JunkScience #CarbonFootprints #Science