The cover photo is a jet plane but remember, US$140,000/year is the threshold they’re quoting in the article so the reality is more like a decent car or two and a house in a nicer area will drop you into that range.
1% of the world’s population is 80,000,000 people.
There is too much variance in a population that large to make any reasonable statements or suggest adjustments.
We already know that people living on pennies per day aren’t the problem.
But shouldn’t it be easier to adjust the lifestyle of 80 million people rather than 8 billion?
And there are a few easy ones almost everyone in the 1% can chip in: reduce meat consumption, don’t fly, buy local and don’t buy single use items
The problem here is that this research works from a Capitalist understanding of responsibility. That is to say that Besos is responsible for the emissions of Amazon, musk for space x, etc. Which means absolutely nothing. It’s a bullshit number.
How else would you account for it? Am I responsible for 0.001% of Amazon’s CO2 emissions because I order sometimes from them?
You think you’re not?
I don’t really have knowledge nor control over how green Amazon’s delivery is. If you shift responsibility to a party that cannot make well-informed decisions, you kind of end up with the mess we currently have, no?
The whole idea of money not having a memory is a huge scheme of capitalists to get out of any kind of responsibility.
You are the person to set in motion the apparatus necessary to accomplish the task that you wanted to be accomplished.
Yes you live in this late stage capitalist hellscape with the rest of us, but that doesn’t absolve you from being critical and making the best decisions in it.
I believe it talk about the 1% wealthy people not the actual 1% of 8 billion.
Is that individually or per household? This article gives 130k per household or 60k per individual.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2023/9/15/23874111/charity-philanthropy-americans-global-rich
Exactly. I wonder what the top 0.5% emit, or the top 0.1% emit. 140k is just a married couple living in a city. But people that live in a city can take public transit or walk to the store, therefore they won’t be contributing that much to these huge emissions.
This is my family’s combined income and my god people need to stop thinking we are wealthy. I’m currently staring at a $1000 car on Facebook marketplace to hopefully save some money because I know how to fix it. I am constantly buying cheap shit to afford to live, we are not rich at all. I have more in common with a homeless person than a wealthy person.
I don’t disagree with you, but relative to the rest of the world we produce a lot more pollution. If anything, there’s probably a local peak at a certain income where, you know, you can afford a car but not a recent model with newer regulations, and you might have to fix it up to get it just within range for emissions testing. Stuff like that.
Anyway, it’s not about quality of life, it’s about pollution. I’m with you on the cost of everything, definitely.
It feels disingenuous at best to lump in people making $60k/year with Jeff Bezos and other billionaires. Just twelve billionaires account for 2,100,000 homes worth of emissions, and that’s only the raw output of their travel and other direct expenses: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/20/twelve-billionaires-climate-emissions-jeff-bezos-bill-gates-elon-musk-carbon-divide
Yes, we can all do our bit to help out, but workers pointing fingers at other workers will only ever benefit the ruling class.
eat the rich! a bearded man once told us
I’m now a Marxist-Cannibalist.
Wouldn’t eating the rich be survival cannibalism at this point?
Some say cannibalism, some say saving the Earth.
All ways of extinguishing the massive concentration of wealth are valid and welcome.
Burn them at the stick !!! 🥵 🤗
Was it perhaps an irishladdie?
The climate chasm between the world’s carbon-guzzling rich and the heat-vulnerable poor forms a symbolic shape when plotted on a graph. Climate-heating greenhouse gas emissions are so heavily concentrated among a rich minority that the image resembles one of those old-fashioned broad-bowled, saucer-shaped glasses beloved of the gilded age: a champagne coupe.
Do normal people know what a champagne coupe is? I had to look it up.
Their description makes it sound like a pump glass so I’m going with that
I thought it sounded like a fancy punch bowl.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The richest 1% of humanity is responsible for more carbon emissions than the poorest 66%, with dire consequences for vulnerable communities and global efforts to tackle the climate emergency, a report says.
For the past six months, the Guardian has worked with Oxfam, the Stockholm Environment Institute and other experts on an exclusive basis to produce a special investigation, The Great Carbon Divide.
Over the period from 1990 to 2019, the accumulated emissions of the 1% were equivalent to wiping out last year’s harvests of EU corn, US wheat, Bangladeshi rice and Chinese soya beans.
“The super-rich are plundering and polluting the planet to the point of destruction and it is those who can least afford it who are paying the highest price,” said Chiara Liguori, Oxfam’s senior climate justice policy adviser.
The extravagant carbon footprint of the 0.1% – from superyachts, private jets and mansions to space flights and doomsday bunkers – is 77 times higher than the upper level needed for global warming to peak at 1.5C.
Oxfam International’s interim executive director, Amitabh Behar, said: “Not taxing wealth allows the richest to rob from us, ruin our planet and renege on democracy.
The original article contains 853 words, the summary contains 194 words. Saved 77%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
That’s bullshit of a report. If you read it, you will quickly learn how they calculate emissions from the rich. They include things like owning company shares and having influence over the media. So if Bezos owns a major stake in Amazon, he is automatically responsible for all Amazon emissions. And if his PR team publishes some stuff to FB, he’s now responsoble for emissions of Facebook servers. That’s utter bullshit.
If you buy from Amazon, it’s YOU who are responsoble for all associated emissions like delivery, manufacturing, etc, not Bezos. This report also doesn’t take into account that better off people usually live in well-insulated homes, drive more efficient cars and eat better organic food, thus reducing their footprint further.
This report also mentions yachts and private jets a lot, but don’t forget that ALL airtraffic accounts only for 2% of all emissions and private jets are a drop in the ocean.
eat better organic food
A slight nit-pick here, but when it comes to greenhouse gas impact, organic food may be worse. It’s certainly not clearly better.
Almost definitely worse lol. We have the option to modify the genome of the plants we eat in order to make then better in every way and still some people are like “no that’s icky because science”.
GMO != organic as far as I know?
In the US organic means no GMOs as well according to usda
Yeah I’ve overheard that before too. If they would just change their words to “eat less meat” they’re be right, but to only say “organic” implies standard agriculture is worse, and it is not clearly so.
We should eat less meat though.
better off people usually live in well-insulated homes…
Remember Al Gore’s house that he was touting back around 2007 as super energy efficient? Then some news outlets reported it used 25x as much energy as a normal single family home.
Snopes looked into it and said false, it only uses 10x as much electricity as a normal house, but that’s okay because it’s 4 times the size of a normal house.
If you buy from Amazon, it’s YOU who are responsoble for all associated emissions like delivery, manufacturing, etc, not Bezos.
That would only be true if Amazon had real competition and would not be acting like a monopoly, as many other companies do.
And if they would offer a envoirementfriendly alternative, that nobody uses.
But let me tell you a non secret, they dont give a shit
Amazon is very much not a monopoly. There are thousands of online retailers. There are also a lot of delivery services, no idea if there are thousands, but there’s a lot.
If you buy from Amazon, it’s YOU who are responsoble for all associated emissions like delivery, manufacturing, etc, not Bezos.
no, i’m not.
so we cut cut emissions by 60% with a guillotine
Temporary solution
No shit
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Aren’t you now glad we aren’t all ultra rich mofos ? Noone would be able to breathe that out.
In other news, water is wet
You don’t say…
This is why I don’t believe people when they say “we don’t have an overpopulation problem, we have a distribution problem”
Because if everyone in the world had my lifestyle, we would be emitting an insane amount of carbon. And I don’t want my standard of living to go down, and in fact I want everyone to live as nicely as I do. So clearly we need fewer people.
How much of your carbon emissions are due to your quality of life and how much is due to inefficiencies/waste?
The vast bulk are from travel and meat consumption
Assuming you live in North America, travel is highly inefficient with personal cars and high airplane usage.
Meat consumption on the other hand is a lifestyle choice. Personally, if be willing to reduce mine if we stopped subsidizing the industry and therefore stopped incentivizing such high consumption.
Why are you waiting until the meat industry is no longer subsidised to reduce your meat consumption?
I’m on a budget. I eat less meat than the average North American, but I still need protein and meat is a lot less expensive than many of the alternatives, partially because we subsidize the meat industry so much.
The overpopulation isn’t happening in the 1%.
It makes jack shit of a difference to the environment if there is one billion or two billion starving people. They’re not the ones burning carbon or eating steak.
Are you flying around the world on PJs constantly?
All air travel is only 2% of carbon emissions.
I want everyone to have my lifestyle
Its the thought that counts, but no thanks
On the other hand, if everyone in the world had your lifestyle the world would be much more wealthy and could make a lot of positive changes.
