Tesla makes a battery-powered product called a Powerwall that pairs with solar panels to meet your home energy needs. This “must-have item for any truly green home” goes for over five thousand dollars. Most people can’t afford that up front, so even though solar may save money and help the planet in the long run, use of the Powerwall is restricted to people with cash to burn.

If your understanding of sustainable consumption were limited to just this example, you’d come away thinking that rich people must be a much more eco-friendly bunch than poor people. But you’d be missing the forest for the trees. While the wealthy have an ever more dazzling array of green consumer products at their fingertips, the impact of those gadgets is nothing compared to the overall ecological destruction wrought by luxury consumption habits.

A new paper called “Measuring the Ecological Impact of the Wealthy: Excessive Consumption, Ecological Disorganization, Green Crime, and Justice,” published by researchers Michael J. Lynch, Michael A. Long, Paul B. Stretesky, and Kimberly L. Barrett, takes a long hard look at the role of the rich’s consumption habits in destabilizing the climate.