"…consumption cannot happen without production and cannot happen without extraction from the environment. On the other side, there’s pollution, emissions waste, and, obviously, greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, carbon emissions are the—fun fact—largest waste, largest pollutant, by weight of industrial societies… so much larger than solid waste, for instance. When we consider the whole system, consumption is often viewed as the driver. Sometimes people call production the driver of consumption itself. But consumption is not equally distributed. So almost all environmental impacts can be traced to consumption activities. But those consumption activities themselves can be associated with different income classes around the world. And so one of the things we can see, now that we have much higher resolution data, is that we can really see that high affluence. Income and wealth are always tied to higher levels of consumption, much higher levels of environmental impact. So complete—disproportionately high, in fact—because we see that affluent populations consume more energy-intensive and resource-intensive goods, particularly in the form of transport, than less affluent ones."