Access to household decarbonization: inequality of opportunity in mitigation policy design in China and the United States

This paper examines how access to household decarbonization is institutionally structured in China and the United States. Using an inequality of opportunity perspective, we focus on the design of household-facing mitigation instruments and shift attention away from mitigation outcomes and individual preferences. We construct a cross-national registry of nationally salient, national-level policies across four household mitigation pathways and evaluate their design features using a twelve-item Access Friction Index that captures eligibility rules, administrative requirements, financial conditions, and delivery and infrastructure constraints. The comparative study indicates that, despite contrasting governance systems, mitigation opportunities in both countries are shaped by dense, policy-embedded access frictions. In China, access is most visibly conditioned by housing tenure, local infrastructure, and place-based implementation capacity. In the United States, it is more strongly gated by income, tax liability, and liquidity, reflecting reliance on tax-based incentives. These institutional patterns are consistent with early mitigation being concentrated among higher-income home-owning households, while renters, migrants, and infrastructure-constrained communities face systematically narrower low-carbon choice sets. Overall, the analysis underscores that household decarbonization operates as an access-structured process and clarifies how institutional design shapes the distribution of feasible low-carbon opportunities across social groups.