I'm sceptical, you can assign blame to any social group if you want to. Usually it depends on who funded or approved the research.

As a fairly hard core enviromentalist, and long term dedicated climate/ weather junky, who was born and raised in a socialy aware and progresive family, I cant quite agree with the title, and bunch like it floating around like it tight now. The basic fact is that humans primary extraction of raw materials is now in the,(say it out load, for the thump) hundreds of billions of tons per anum range, this represents everything we do, and the unstopable momentum of our species to get some stuff, the stuff per capita that we are getting, keeps going up, and the population keeps going up, and any attempt to limit the other 8~9 billion people from getting stuff, will make them very very angry....it makes them mad, makes me mad. So this looks like an attemp to use populist anger at the elites, to squeeze the poor.

Greater income causes greater consumption which causes a greater environmental impact.

How is this not a statement of the obvious? Its good analyse the data to check for surprises, but any other result would be a huge surprise.