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World's Richest 1% Emit As Much Carbon As Bottom Two-Thirds, Report Finds (phys.org) 214

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: The richest one percent of the global population are responsible for the same amount of carbon emissions as the world's poorest two-thirds, or five billion people, according to an analysis published Sunday by the nonprofit Oxfam International. [...] Among the key findings of this study are that the richest one percent globally -- 77 million people -- were responsible for 16 percent of global emissions related to their consumption. That is the same share as the bottom 66 percent of the global population by income, or 5.11 billion people. The income threshold for being among the global top one percent was adjusted by country using purchasing power parity -- for example in the United States the threshold would be $140,000, whereas the Kenyan equivalent would be about $40,000. Within country analyses also painted very stark pictures.

For example, in France, the richest one percent emit as much carbon in one year as the poorest 50 percent in 10 years. Excluding the carbon associated with his investments, Bernard Arnault, the billionaire founder of Louis Vuitton and richest man in France, has a footprint 1,270 times greater than that of the average Frenchman. The key message, according to Lawson, was that policy actions must be progressive. These measures could include, for example, a tax on flying more than ten times a year, or a tax on non-green investments that is much higher than the tax on green investments.

While the current report focused on carbon linked only to individual consumption, "the personal consumption of the super-rich is dwarfed by emissions resulting from their investments in companies," the report found. Nor are the wealthy invested in polluting industries at a similar ratio to any given investor -- billionaires are twice as likely to be invested in polluting industries than the average for the Standard & Poor 500, previous Oxfam research has shown.

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World's Richest 1% Emit As Much Carbon As Bottom Two-Thirds, Report Finds

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  • Well (Score:4, Funny)

    by Waffle Iron ( 339739 ) on Tuesday November 21, 2023 @10:42PM (#64023085)

    This story is certainly going to trigger all the temporarily embarrassed billionaires that frequent this site.

    Excuse me while I grab some popcorn.

    • Re:Well (Score:4, Insightful)

      by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Tuesday November 21, 2023 @10:58PM (#64023113)
      No need to identify with billionaires. Any American who owns a car and flies occasionally is way closer to the billionaires than to the bottom 50% or so that live in a hovel and travel by foot. Being destitute is very nonpolluting.
      • Don't confuse car dependence for wealth. If the billionaires didn't have to worry about being able to transport scabs to the factory, we'd all be traveling by foot.

        • So you're saying that Ford started a car company so his workers could get to his car factory... so he could uh ... sell cars to his workers...?
          mmm hmmmm....

      • by N1AK ( 864906 )
        This is the point that a lot of these blame the mega-wealthy articles intentionally ignore. Firstly the top 1% globally really isn't mega-wealthy, I think the threshold currently is around $1m networth, and 20,000,000 Americans would be considered to be in the top 1% globally (about 6% of Americans); at that level it's fairly likely you're still flying coach rather than private jet. Secondly, the main driver of the disconnect is that a fuckload of people are really poor and have an impact that is trivial co
      • by dbialac ( 320955 )
        The whole idea of this civilization thing is to make our lives better and bring the rest of the world up to what we have. We've done something similar already: world hunger is more or less a thing of the past outside of areas dealing with political issues or war. We used to talk about the starving kids in China. Now China is a wealthy country. Things have changed.
      • by Hodr ( 219920 )

        Being destitute is very nonpolluting.

        Really? Burning coal and wood in a fire for heat and cooking both reduces the amount of plant mass that converts CO2 and directly releases CO2. Did anyone check the study to see if they took this into account, or If they only looked at fossil fuel use and electricity generation?

      • No need to identify with billionaires. Any American who owns a car and flies occasionally is way closer to the billionaires than to the bottom 50% or so that live in a hovel and travel by foot. Being destitute is very nonpolluting.

        That doesn't seem likely.
        A study examining the lifestyle emissions of 20 billionaires (18 of them men, and all of them white) found that each produced an average of over 8,000 tonnes of CO2 in oneyear [openrepository.com]
        The top 0.1% averaged around 220t/year
        Top 1 % around 75t/year
        Top 10% around 25t/year
        Top 1% and 10% are closer to zero than they are the billionaires at the top.

      • by quall ( 1441799 )

        The study adjusted for income by country. So......based on ratio differences still apply even for Americans who own a car.

    • by Entrope ( 68843 )

      ... and by "temporarily embarrassed billionaires" you mean (checks TFS) Americans who earn $140,000/year.

      I hope you brought enough popcorn to share with all of them.

      • $140k is for a household with two adults and kids.

        For an individual, you are in the world's top 1% if you make half that amount.

        • by Entrope ( 68843 )

          On what do you base that assertion? Their methodology note is couched in terms of individuals, not notional family groups.

    • by AvitarX ( 172628 )

      Without reading the article, it should embarrass most of the readers.

      World's richest 1% is a huge person of the EU and North America.

    • by tsqr ( 808554 )

      This story is certainly going to trigger all the temporarily embarrassed billionaires that frequent this site.

      From TFS: The income threshold for being among the global top one percent was adjusted by country using purchasing power parity -- for example in the United States the threshold would be $140,000. That's not "billionaire" income. Anyone in the US who's been working in the tech sector for more than a few years is likely to qualify.

  • by XXongo ( 3986865 ) on Tuesday November 21, 2023 @10:47PM (#64023093) Homepage
    I'm surprised it's that little.

    The top 1% are emitting 16% of the CO2... so, they're only 16 times worse than the average? I'd expect that their carbon emissions would track with their wealth, and they'd emit a lot more than just 16 times the average

    • The top 1% are emitting 16% of the CO2... so, they're only 16 times worse than the average?

      The average includes billions of rice farmers in Asia and subsistence maize farmers in Africa.

      The top 1% are only slightly above the average American or European.

      For a single person, an income of $60k puts you in the world's top 1%.

      If you live in the West, you have way more in common with the 1% than you do with the average human.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        Look I dislike wealth disparity and conceited billionaires as much as (or frankly more than) the next person... but let's stop making all westerners feel bad. There's what, 8B people on Earth? The top 1% is 80M people. That's a quarter of the US. 10% of Europe. And then there's Canada, Australia, etc., or the tons of actually rich people in the Middle East and Asia (you think China, HK, Japan, UAE, etc. don't have rich people?).

        By my count, there's a minimum of 800M people in the "West". Even if 100% of t
    • by iAmWaySmarterThanYou ( 10095012 ) on Wednesday November 22, 2023 @01:53AM (#64023323)

      Why would co2 track wealth?

      I live a less carbon intensive life now than when I was a working slob like most people. I am an evil 1%er.

      Before I retired I drove 2 hours a day, filled my tank twice a week, had to buy new clothes shoes etc regularly as things wore out, had to keep my computer up to date and on n on and on.

      Now I'm fucking rich. My shoes will last forever because I'm barefoot most days. Don't go through razors anymore, no one cares if I'm not shaved. I drive a Tesla I power through my roof solar which covers all my electricity. I don't fly every month for business anymore. And so on.

      My money doesn't generate co2. I ran out of places to put money so last week I put a million in a few CDs. How much co2 does a CD make? If I had put 10 million into CDs would they make 10x more co2?

      No. It's all just bits in a computer. They make no co2 at all. I'll bet anything my carbon footprint is a small fraction of yours or anyone else with a job.

      • by spth ( 5126797 )

        Where is your wealth?

        Do you own shares of any company, directly or indirectly?

        That Oxfam report will assign you a share of that companies emissions.

        • It's in a lot of things. They can assign me anything they want. They can assign me a new gander, too, but that doesn't make it true.

          If my money was in all cash sitting under my bed in stacks of $1000 bills would they assign me the co2 of printing the bills? *eye roll*

          I have a few million sitting in a cash account earning 5%. How is that a co2 generator?

          I have a few gold bars sitting in a safe deposit box. How are they generating co2?

          Am I getting charged co2 for the tree in my backyard that died last ye

          • You have some good points, but your flamewar-boner is clouding your mind a tad. A gold bar doesnt generate co2, very true. Except it did require a fair chunk of co2 to make originally. If you own stocks, you effectively own a share of the company emissions. Even money in the bank works like that. The bank doesnt sit on a pile of physical bills. They loaned your money out to other businesses which use it and generate co2. Thatâ(TM)s on your ledger as well. The solar cells on your roof are great, althou
      • by XXongo ( 3986865 )

        Why would co2 track wealth?

        Wealth is the ability to buy things. Producing things and using things requires energy. Energy production, by current methods, produces carbon dioxide. Whatever you do with your money, it produces carbon dioxide.

        Even if you keep you money and don't spend it, it eventually goes to your heirs who spend it and produce carbon dioxide.

      • They're playing with numbers. The summary said "the personal consumption of the super-rich is dwarfed by emissions resulting from their investments in companies". They're attributing the pollution of companies to the stockholders of those companies. The actual personal co2 footprint of those stockholders is small enough to be almost irrelevant.

    • Why would they? Do you think Elon Musk's house is 241000 times larger than yours? Require 241000 times the number of AC units?

      The relationship between wealth and energy consumption is not linear. That and you also forget how many poor people you are. The average includes people whose kids die of starvation in Africa, who don't have access to basic sanitation or safe drinking water. The world is full of those people. Being a homeless person in the west makes you wealthier than average.

      This 1% figure, it incl

    • by Calydor ( 739835 )

      The 1% might own all the factories and power plants, but the emissions of those constructions are spread out over all the people who buy the stuff produced and use the power generated.

  • Lets be clear, you can essentially directly correlate someone's carbon footprint with their wealth. If we want to reduce humanities collective carbon footprint we aren't going to do that without reducing its collective wealth. We aren't going to do that. And the inability to tell Bill Gates he can't fly around in a private jet is just one minor part of the problem. The real problem us that the commercially successful climate control measures are the one's that create wealth, not ones' that destroy it. Repla
    • Lets be clear, you can essentially directly correlate someone's carbon footprint with their wealth. If we want to reduce humanities collective carbon footprint we aren't going to do that without reducing its collective wealth.

      Somehow, I don't think it works that way. If it did, I could pollute more to be wealthier!

      And if there is no money to be made, it isn't happening.

      So just like sex, then?

      • by Deaddy ( 1090107 )

        Well, it's a causative effect and not a correlation, so it does not go 1:1 but more like through a chain of events.

        Basically the less you care about economic viability and ecological impact, the more you can sell cheap useless junk or advertising for said shit, or use nasty chemicals to produce things even cheaper, or ideally you do a combination of all the above.

        And then you can burn all your riches on important business flights and that kind of stuff.

    • Lets be clear, you can essentially directly correlate someone's carbon footprint with their wealth.

      Income in Singapore is about the same as in America, but the per capita carbon emissions are less than half.

    • by m00sh ( 2538182 )

      "Replacing ICE with electric cars" certainly made the world's richest man. I don't know how you say its not creating wealth; its created trillions.

  • Poor people take public transit, ride bicycles, or walk. They rent (and often share) accommodation in large buildings which are typically more efficiently heated and cooled than a home... and that's in wealthy places. The world's exceptionally poor live in shacks often cobbled together from what richer folk have discarded. They certainly can't afford to frequently consume expensive foods that come with large environmental impacts, either. They eat locally-sourced stuff because they have to.

    I mean, where

    • by m00sh ( 2538182 )

      Poor people take public transit, ride bicycles, or walk. They rent (and often share) accommodation in large buildings which are typically more efficiently heated and cooled than a home... and that's in wealthy places. The world's exceptionally poor live in shacks often cobbled together from what richer folk have discarded. They certainly can't afford to frequently consume expensive foods that come with large environmental impacts, either. They eat locally-sourced stuff because they have to.

      I mean, where the hell are poor people supposed to get a giant SUV to drive from their gas-heated McMansion to their excessively-large power boat?

      Well, the poor people are supposed to help the rich create the carbon footprint.

      It's not the rich who build and run the buildings, the airplanes and take the carbon out of the ground. It's the millions of poor people who all serve the few rich people.

  • having released the most carbon, wins!

  • by dohzer ( 867770 )

    What are they eating?!

  • The entitled don't give a fuck about this planet. After all they are the entitled.
  • The future of this planet depends on it.

    • You should care as much about the history of this planet as you do it's future.
      What you're suggesting has never worked out.
      You just end up with everybody being poorer.

  • These things are always proffered as apparently neutral people making unbiased recommendations, but they're nothing of the sort.

    I'm absolutely no fan of the super-wealthy with their often over-the-top lifestyles, but articles like this always contain structural biases that make them untrustworthy. For example, we're told the super-rich pollute much more than the poor as though [a] the super-rich are all engaged in equal activities, [b] there's no up-side to the actions of the super-rich, [c] the poor are vi

    • Who says that it's the same when Elon Musk takes a private jet between a Tesla facility and Boca Chica that this is on-par with the Kardashians taking a private jet from a Paris fashion shoot to a tropical vacation?

      They are both unnecessary. Musk leads best from far away. Arguably Musk's travel is worse because when he shows up they have to assign him wranglers to stop him from fucking things up.

  • It is interesting that the top 1% of the population by wealth emit as much CO2 as the bottom 66% by wealth but is this information useful in any way?

    I read some of the comments so far and found a few mentions of Elon Musk, mentioning that he got much of his wealth from selling electric cars, solar PV panels, and battery packs to other people with a lot of money. The implication is that people with a lot of money only make the world worse but Elon Musk is making the world better by giving people the product

    • The report it is based on has no actual metrics on what the "top 1%" emit. They just assume it

      How do we allocate country level consumption emissions to individuals?
      We divide national consumption emissions among individuals based solely on their income. We assume that above a certain base level of emissions (floor) and below a certain maximum emissions level (ceiling), emissions increase in proportion to income. We assume that individuals in the same income percentile in each country generate the same per c

  • by Gabest ( 852807 )

    Imagine if every 1% emmited that much, including the bottom.

  • I haven't even tried to get into the methodology, which I'm sure is flawed, but this report is just an opinion piece by activists (Greta Thunberg and Njoki Njehu). It's annoying to read it, as it conflates the idea with activism unrelated to climate, such as mentioning that the 20 wealthiest people are all white and 90% men.

    This doesn't mean that the ideas are bad. Taxing the rich more is certainly a good idea. However, it does make it harder for me to take this seriously.

    • I haven't even tried to get into the methodology, which I'm sure is flawed, but this report is just an opinion piece by activists (Greta Thunberg and Njoki Njehu). It's annoying to read it, as it conflates the idea with activism unrelated to climate, such as mentioning that the 20 wealthiest people are all white and 90% men.

      This doesn't mean that the ideas are bad. Taxing the rich more is certainly a good idea. However, it does make it harder for me to take this seriously.

      The report is based on https://emissions-inequality.o... [emissions-inequality.org], but if you read the FAQ you can see it's based on bullshit and assumptions

  • If all of the top 1% and the bottom two thirds ceased all emissions, that would still leave us with two thirds of the emissions, caused by you and me, people in the global top third by wealth. You still have to change. The rich aren't single-handedly destroying the planet. By all means, get the rich to pay for lots of it, but you're not off the hook.

    • by hipp5 ( 1635263 )

      If all of the top 1% and the bottom two thirds ceased all emissions, that would still leave us with two thirds of the emissions, caused by you and me, people in the global top third by wealth. You still have to change. The rich aren't single-handedly destroying the planet. By all means, get the rich to pay for lots of it, but you're not off the hook.

      Exactly this. Don't get me wrong, I hate billionaires as much as the next guy, but this is just a distraction piece. All this narrative does is encourage blaming someone else instead of making meaningful change.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by drinkypoo ( 153816 )

      Your view of reality is absurd.

      GM, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil of California (through a subsidiary), Federal Engineering, Phillips Petroleum, and Mack Trucks were convicted of conspiracy [wikipedia.org] for a scheme in which they destroyed profitable public transportation systems (mostly rail lines) all over the country in order to increase demand for their products. But corporations are just legal fictions, they do not actually do anything as they are words on a page. In fact humans do things, and it's the humans running

  • .. and people follow them like they are sages. I am looking at you, Al Gore, Leo DiCaprio and some others.
  • In general, dealing with carbon dioxide emissions ultimately means having to do something about first world living standards. Just about everything that we've become accustomed to in the developed world uses energy and lots of it.

    Headlines like this only give me hope in the thinking that, if the world was fair, and a tax were equitably applied, then clearly it should affect the wealthiest far more than even the middle classes, as the headlines suggest that the wealthiest are responsible for significantly mo

  • by hoofie ( 201045 )

    And Slashdot continues to post more shite that the Editors can't be bothered to look at.

  • I think there is bad ideas behind this report.

    First, it's the idea of compare top against bottom. While it is interesting just from a pure number perspective, it push the idea that the poverty is caused by the wealthiness. And the reality is a lot more complex than that.

    Let's start about the emissions - consumption relationship. If emissions are bad, and consumption implies emissions, then the only definite solution is no consumption ergo, massive poverty or, in extreme, extinction.
    Fortunately for us, it's

  • by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Wednesday November 22, 2023 @07:27AM (#64023743)

    I wonder how many Slashdotters are going to grab pitchforks without realising they are in the richest 1% the article is talking about. The world has a lot and I really mean a *LOT* of poor people in it. If you're here, talking on a computer in the comfort of your home, chances are you're in the 1%.

    • by dargaud ( 518470 )
      "According to Credit Suisse, individuals with more than $1 million in wealth sit in the top 1 percent bracket." so I'm far from it, although I live comfortably.
    • I'm in someone else's home (I'm a renter) and I'm not in the global 1%.

      My emissions are much higher than people living in a mud hut somewhere, but I would be happy to live a lifestyle where they are lower. Unfortunately, we can't have functional public transportation in the USA, so I have to drive to work. And they don't let me have enough money to buy an EV that would do the job given my half hour commute, nor can I afford the rents where I would live closer. I am not being offered choices which would allo

      • I used to not own a car and took public transportation and walked everywhere.

        Then the pandemic hit and all the bus routes went away and still have not come back.

        I was forced to buy a car and by doing so have at least doubled my carbon footprint....

    • I reject that notion. I'm just sitting here at Starbucks, drinking my usual Venti Latte Skim while my new Tesla Model X is outside charging. I'm part of the solution, not the problem!

      Get off my well-manicured lawn, Jorge' just overseeded it yesterday!

  • Sorry, that's not even middle-class in most cities or even the suburbs. If your household income is 140k in the greater Boston area, that'll cover a mortgage and little else. You're drowning in debt just to afford food + a low-end home. I know Boston is one of the more expensive cities, but the greater area is 5 million people. NYC is more expensive and far larger as is most of California. The median household income for the USA is 74k. I can see it being in the top 10%, but it's very hard to view yo
  • Did anyone read the information it is based on? It's mostly bullshit and assumptions. From https://emissions-inequality.o... [emissions-inequality.org] :

    How do we allocate country level consumption emissions to individuals?

    We divide national consumption emissions among individuals based solely on their income. We ASSUME that above a certain base level of emissions (floor) and below a certain maximum emissions level (ceiling), emissions increase in proportion to income. We ASSUME that individuals in the same income percentile in eac

  • Here's your inconvenient truth. [hollywoodreporter.com]

    It must have been Tipper's vibrator.

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