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ITT: people who don't realize that the article is talking about them because they're either in that 1% or damn close to it.
Yeah, 60k/year per person is the top 1% globally. That's about 60% of the us if I'm doing my math right.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2023/9/15/23874111/charity-philanthropy-americans-global-rich
https://www.statista.com/statistics/203183/percentage-distribution-of-household-income-in-the-us/
60% of the US population is like 200 million. 1% of the global population is 80 million. Your maths is way off.
I'd assume something closer to 6% of the US are in the top 1%.
Yup most of the Western world is in the top 1 percent. The rest of the Western world benefits from it.
It's me. Hi. I'm the problem. It's me.
It's funny how often people who are in the global 5-10% talk about how clueless the 1% of the West is, while being so clueless about their own wealth.
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
In the US, 7% of transportation emissions are commercial air travel, while 58% are passenger cars.
Flying is worse per-trip than driving, but car centric infrastructure is worse than flying.
Similarly, what you eat is way more important than how far it traveled. Most agricultural emissions happen at the farm.
It's actually better for the environment to grow tomatoes in Florida or Mexico and ship them to NYC in the fall or winter than to grow tomatoes locally in a heated greenhouse.
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.
ITT: People who don't understand cradle to grave manufacturing. When I decide to make a product I take on responsibility for that product until it is no longer in use and has been properly disposed of. That is ethical manufacturing as decided by industry.
If your product is transportation then you are responsible for the emissions created by transporting. The consumer gets no say in it. Even if they were extremely well researched, which no consumer has that type of resources, they are still not privy to all of a businesses practices at every level.
Assholes in this thread want to push off all the responsibility on to consumers, as if being a consumer is unethical. This is a scapegoat for manufacturers who don't want to foot the bill because their product is not viable if you consider the all the corners they cut.
Don't believe me, look up any lawsuit that deals with any superpac. Businesses are responsible.
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.
Twelve of the world’s wealthiest billionaires produce more greenhouse gas emissions from their yachts, private jets, mansions and financial investments than the annual energy emissions of 2m homes, ...
“Billionaires generate obscene amounts of carbon pollution with their yachts and private jets – but this is dwarfed by the pollution caused by their investments,” said Oxfam International’s inequality policy adviser Alex Maitland.
“Through the corporations they own, billionaires emit a million times more carbon than the average person. They tend to favour investments in heavily polluting industries, like fossil fuels. ...
The carbon footprints of the investments were calculated by examining the equity stakes that the billionaires held in companies. Estimates of the carbon impact of their holdings was calculated using the company’s declarations on scope 1 emissions – direct emissions from sources owned or controlled by a company – and scope 2, indirect emissions.
Most of that isn't their direct expenses, but from the businesses they own. Their actual travel and direct expenses are a small fraction of the emissions stated in that:
A superyacht kept on permanent standby generates about 7,000 tonnes of CO2 a year, according to the analysis.
“The emissions of the superyachts are way above anything else,”
The average carbon footprint in the US is 16 tons. 7000/16 = 437.5. The emissions of these billionaires is mostly not private jets and super yachts, and the emissions from super yachts and private jets are a very small percentage of the US's total transportation emissions.
The emissions of these billionaires is mostly not private jets and super yachts, and the emissions from super yachts and private jets are a very small percentage of the US’s total transportation emissions.
I'd say their personal emissions for their luxuries are still significantly several times the average person.
Sure. In terms of directly produced emissions, most billionaires emit somewhere between 100-1000 times as much as the average American.
Which, yeah, isn't all that equitable. But there just aren't that many billionaires, and there's hundreds of millions of average Americans.
It's not like wealth, where the richest 735 billionaires have as much wealth as the poorest 166 million Americans.
Yes, we can all do our bit to help out, but workers pointing fingers at other workers will only ever benefit the ruling class.
Don't forget that you have more than one finger. You have fingers to spare to point blame at those who deserve it, and few of us in first world countries don't.
No shit?
Of course the 1% are accounting for the majority of personal emissions, they are the only ones who can afford to.
What I want to know is how much of the total emissions are non private in origin.
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?
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".
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.
I'll be honest, I do believe that CEOs should be personally held repsonsible for the shit their companies pull, in general. And after-the-fact, too. If you led a company and later it gets fined for something it did while you were CEO, that's on you. Say 50% of fines have to be paid by the C-suites personally.
But independent of that, in a report such as this, it of course makes little sense because the title wants to strongly suggest they create more carbon emissions as consumers (say via owning yachts and shit) than the poorest 66%. And that's a very false equivalence. Now you could argue they're responsible for more carbon emissions, and I would maybe agree with that, yes. They make the decisions that enable this carbon usage, and they could, if they wanted to, cut large swathes of it albeit probably not lasting.
But yeah, agreed, pretty shit headline.
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.
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.
Isn't it more planet reponsible then to order from Amazon where, if I order say 6 items, they'll come from the same warehouse in the same delivery (at least ove here!) instead of in 6 deliveries from 6 different vendors who also all had to get individual deliveries of their stock first?
That's one way to not be accountable
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.
Go look at any multimillionaire's house in California and then compared its resource usage to a dilapidated trailer in the deep south in a poor county. They'll be using 50-100x the resources of the poor family.
when you own 90% of the wealth and resources, i'm kind of shocked that is "poorest 90%"
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!