World's richest 1% cause double CO2 emissions of poorest 50%, says Oxfam
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
However there is an even larger source [1] of carbon emissions that everyone contributes to on a far more frequent basis and that is the fashion industry. If anyone wants to start reducing emissions now, then changing purchasing behaviors for clothing, footwear and accessories is a great place to start.
Of course not everyone is into fast fashion, but even those that only buy clothing infrequently can make a difference by a.) only buying clothing/footwear/accessories made from sustainable materials, b.) only buying clothing made locally, or that is already warehoused locally (as shipping emissions would be spread out), c.) extending the lifespan of their clothing buy repairing/altering.
In general natural materials do tend to last longer than polyester/viscose, and even organic cotton is more sturdy than non-organic cotton.
Finally this behaviour can be extended to other household goods, eg buying bamboo cooking utensils instead of plastic.
[1] https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2019/09/23/costo-m...
This sounds nice but requires another generation before becomes socially acceptable again. More specifically, I know no middle-level manager who would dare to adopt it. (The top and bottom of the ladder could, for different reasons.)
The problem is more obsolescence than wear; "fast fashion" encouraging people to buy more new clothes leads to the old ones being disposed of.
We'll make them adopt it, then. That's what re-education camps are for.
Seriously -- this is kind of like saying (in February of 2020) "Telling people to wear masks sounds nice but it just won't fly because it's not socially acceptable. More specifically, I know of no one in my office who would dare to wear a mask in public (except the low-level shitworkers whom none of us hang out with anyways)".
When it's a matter of survival -- and yes, curtailing our living standards to head of the worst aspects of climate change clearly is -- there are always ways to make it "socially acceptable".
And I'm not referring to coercive means - it's simply a matter of political will, and this thing known as "basic integrity".
That's why (in all but the most backward places) nearly everyone (who isn't basically a jerk or an idiot) is willing to wear a mask now (at least in places where it's truly necessary), even though most of us thought it to be awkward and icky (or probably not worth the hassle) the hassle. Because enough people in positions of influence / visibility came through and said "Look, we really need to do this."
Oh, and laws ("coercion") also help too. But the main thing that moves the needle is -- people (in positions of influence) having the cuts to act with integrity, and simply be open and honest about what needs to be done. And of course to back that up by leading by example.
I fix my clothes not because I cannot afford new ones but because I strongly dislike that my jeans fail after a few months of use and because I prioritize differently.
I make patches from worn out pants, apply fabric glue and stitch them in place using thread with a matching colour. After doing it a few times I feel I can now make it next to impossible.
There's no reason people in middle management cannot do the same - if they want :-)
The flashy headline is basically saying first world living standards are unsustainable.
It's obviously worthwhile, it's about the survival of civilization after all. But apparently not worthwhile to the markets.
Sorry for the DM link but https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5388245/Pay-bonanza...
“Number of staff at scandal-hit Oxfam earning more than £100,000 has doubled in seven years”
The point that Oxfam these days is a business and reports like this are its product, and the metric of success is how much money these products make for Oxfam, not how much good they do. They technically still are a charity but they have strayed very far from their roots.
"On a global scale, an individual must have upwards of $744,400 in combined income, investments, and personal assets to rank in the top 1% of the world’s wealthiest individuals."
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/05061...
Because the combination of all that is what capital is?
It does not count control of corporations and political power, which can be important as well. (But tend to go hand in hand to a degree.)
There's also gross worth which is a total lifetime worth. This would be high if you used for example expensive education. But then this one is much more nebulous.
That is obviously true as can be seen from the rising CO2 levels and warming planet.
I'd still say Europe and most of the USA is "first world living standards".
An engineer's pre-tax salary in Europe would be like 20-60k euros in the South/East and 30-80k in the North.
The USA just has a lot more capital in tech so the demand for labor is a lot more robust. Europe has decent engineers but it's hard to command a high wage when there are a lot less companies competing for you and they have less capital to be able to pay you with.
https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10...
Here is the Oxfam press release:
https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/carbon-emissions-ric...
Here is the report in other languages (english, spanish, french):
https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/handle/10546/621052
Examples: "wealth taxes", "public investment, including to create decent job guarantees, alongside working-time reductions", "banning advertising in public spaces", "developing a wider set of gender-transformative indicators of economic progress", "social dialogue at all levels to ensure that the voices of workers in affected industries, women, low-income and marginalized groups are heard". Etc.
27% of global CO2 emissions are due to electricity generation. They could be cut to almost zero if we only decided to build nuclear power plants. That's an easy, clear and direct technical solution to the technical issue of dangerous levels of CO2 emissions.
Otherwise, if what you're concerned with is inequality, why mix that with the issue of emissions and ask for "climate justice"? The concept of a "world carbon budget" is a way to claim that the size of the pie is predetermined and unchangeable and that the only way to ensure others can get a slice of it is to reduce the size of ours. Let's start producing electricity in a clean way and the total size of the pie will grow.
This pie actually IS limited.
I say strange because both are independent and don't require the other to be addressed in tandem.
If you don't actually care about other people, and you're already on the wealthy side, then why do you care about environmental damage? If the sea level rises, you're not going to be in the flooded area? If the forest burns, do you care if you've got filtered air and fire insurance?
Also - most humans once they reach a basic level of food, shelter, actually start caring a lot about their local environment. It’s mostly poverty that puts you in a desperate situation where you don’t care about what you destroy to get food or shelter.
But just look around, who generally around you are the most vocal environmentalist. For me it’s pretty wealthy people.
That's why you get the left-right distinction.
(I don't think I've seen sincere right-wing environmentalism beyond a limited kind of NIMBYist habitat protection and some not very sincere blue-green Tory branding?)
I think it's more like, the complete absence of ideas from the right, and absence of genuine caring about the issue in general, is what has left environmentalism with no one but socialists to work with.
Decentralization
Community-based economics
Post-patriarchal values (later translated to ecofeminism and Ethics of care)
Respect for diversity
Global responsibility
Future focus
I think this marriage between actual environmental concerns and a socialist ideology is the reason of the so called "rejection of science" by the right. The fact is that the actual science of climate change comes with a hefty baggage of left-wing ideas that found a pressing technical issue to piggyback on. If the choice is between accepting or rejecting the whole package, conservative/ libertarian people will reject it entirely.
But anyway, here's what the right could propose: let's replace all our energy generation from non-renewable sources with nuclear power. Every single watt of it. I'm sure there would be no objections from that side. And on the left?
The proven reactor designs all require uranium enrichment and produce plutonium. That's why Iran's reactor is hugely controversial. The designs that don't do this are either not proven or certainly not widely deployed.
The right is proposing nuclear power and returning to more local supply chains therefore cutting the carbon emissions of the shipping industry. Seems pretty substantial to me.
I don't think that local supply chains are a hallmark of right-wing politics. Globalisation and the resulting world-spanning trade agreements were primarily driven by organisations like the WTO.
Anti-Nuclear hysterics are not limited to the left and in German (as an example) de-nuclearisation was supported by both the Schroeder and the Merkle (center-left and center-right) governments. It's "renaissance" in the last decade or so has happened on both sides of the aisle.
Just take recycling as a similar issue; how do you get people to recycle? You make it expensive to not recycle. But for that you need political will and that requires philosophy and moral values ("desire to protect the environment") to already have a hold in society. It's easiest to attach them to an already existing framework that's compatible to do the heavy lifting. In Europe this was the socialist movement.
As soon as the shit really starts hitting the fan, I expect eco-fascism to pop up all over the place. It's only a matter of time.
I don't think so. 27% of our CO2 emissions are in electricity generation. Replacing every non-renewable energy source with nuclear we could bring those emissions to zero. Reconverting to electrical our other sources of emissions (heating, transport) where possible could cut another 20-30% of our emissions. That's an easy solution, realtively cheap and feasible with today's technologies, and not requiring massive societal transformations.
> Reconverting to electrical our other sources of emissions (heating, transport) where possible could cut another 20-30% of our emissions.
Not sure what you mean by this. Transport and heating were never electrical to begin with, were they?
Without changing our patterns of resource consumption this will not change. And that will not come without societal transformations that de-emphasise consumerism and with it capitalism to some degree.
Quite possibly .. in 2040. We need renewables in the meantime.
[0] Growth of installed photovoltaic (nameplate) power: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photovoltaics#/media/File:PV_c...
If we installed nuclear capacity for 200% of today's power generation, instead, we'd have enough spare capacity to convert transport, heating and some industrial processes to electric, reducing our carbon footprint beyond the 30% mark into the 40% or 50%.
I think you're making an important connection here.
The appeal of the later is - to my mind - the most important reason to be careful about claiming that Science supports a political position or as is sometimes said "My position isn't political; it's just a fact." It presumes that people who are backed up against a wall will concede the point rather then just destroy the whole edifice i.e. say that if this is what Science says then not only is the conclusion wrong but the process is wrong.
Any specific proposals on how to do it?
It's a lot easier to emit an additional 5t of carbon by jetting to the other side of the planet and back again, though.
Now think about someone who is taking such trips bi-weekly (as I know someone) and their job isn't even making them at least net-positive for the world either.
Pinning the blame of climate change is an excellent way to give a disliked party another kick. And you get to feel morally superior.
If only it fixed the actual problem.
Even if you go vegan, thrift all your clothes and minimize your consumption, you have such a tiny footprint compared to corporations that naturally value profit over the environment.
Blaming people for what corporations should be held accountable for is counterproductive and distracting. We should focus on enacting laws to protect us from the damage corporations are doing to the planet.
If more people thrifted, went vegan, and minimised their consumption, it would shrink the footprint of these corporations as well. These things don't all exist in a vacuum. Shipping/manufacturing companies pollute the earth shipping/manufacturing things for consumers.
Now, it's not to say that these businesses shouldn't be held accountable, but people need to take some personal responsibility too. Once regulatory action passes, and corporations are forced to abide by environmentally conscious laws, consumers will be forced to be less consumeristic just by force of economics. It'll come down to consumers in one way or another.
This mindset and ideal was created almost entirely by big corporations. They haven't simply satisfied existing demands for decades, they have created and planted those demands via advertising, in order to sell their products. Add the factors of planned obsolescence and lack of repairability on top of that, and you have a recipe for constant consumption and endless waste creation. Then they tried to foist recycling on us as an end-all be-all solution to the pollution we're creating, but it not even close to being enough, by several orders of magnitude.
We need to increase quality, reduce quantity and make do with much much less. And the start of that is to do something about the 100 corporations that are responsible for ~70% of all emissions.
Tax all emissions hard, as a start.
Corporations aren't some faceless evil entity. They're made up by people trying to make money to buy material goods to raise their quality of life and status in society. This is what bothers me about the "evil corporations" scapegoat. People paint this picture of "corporations" as if they're an infection that was given to the human race, but they're just part of the human condition. Humans are to blame.
Some people feel the narrative of "Oh BP aren't responsible for the consequences of their actions, it's just that people want their product so very much" is PR from oil industry lobbyists.
And that "It'll come down to consumers in one way or another" and that what's needed is more people to shop in thrift shops and become vegan?
The problem with the "corporation mechanism" is that it absolves people from any moral responsibility, because shareholder values. It's a viscous mechanism that drives people to dissociate themselves from the consequences of their actions.
Corporations are people and they produce things that people want and use. If suddenly we had 0 corporations according to your theory, what would the world look like? You’d have nothing.
This is an interesting usage. The same sentence comes up a lot and normally it is intended to mean "corporations are (legally) people (though they are obviously not literally people)." But you seem to mean "corporations are literally people." I think the distinction normally made is actually kind of important, because not only is a corporation obviously not literally a single person with intentions and agency, but it's also a little different than "a group of people" because of the economic dynamics imposed by corporate law. How about this: Corporations do what their directors (people) order, and directors are ultimately beholden to activist shareholders (also people). The activist shareholders typically want to maximize profits, and believe the corporation can do so by meeting market demand (of people).
People have consciousness, emotions, morals, values, friends, lovers, depression, hunger, pain, hopes and dreams.
Corporations are not people. Come on, repeat it with me; corporations are not people. Let it sink in, because that's important. People have intrinsic value. Corporations don't.
To suddenly have 0 corporations in the world, you'd need have magic and that's the end of the discussion. Because, you know, magic.
They can only get those profits because they supply a demand in an economy of scale. Any law against a corporation will only reflect down on the consumers as prices go up or supply reduces. This is what it means to take responsibility together. If the majority of people can't live without their curent living standard and constant consumerism no law can be put into place to change a thing.
If people stooped buying iphones (just example, not picking on Apple) Apple would stop building them.
If people would travel less, there would be less planes burning fuel. If people would stop buying cheap plastic crap, there would be less plastic created, less fuel used by ships bringing stuff from china etc.
Sure some corporations rely on government or b2b, but a lot are consumer dependent.
And yes one single consumer changing his ways doesn't change much. Several millions or more, can start having an effect.
Point is you can make all the laws you want, corporations are great at finding workarounds[1]. We have to get people to consume less[2] or in the long run figure how we can make all of this stuff with less environment impact.
[1] just look at all the "disruptive" startups, most of them are using workarounds to get ahead (uber, airbnb)
[2] Of course if we actually managed to do that, we would pretty much kill of our whole economy, which is build upon the idea of everything always going up (revenue, gdp, stocks, housing, retirement plans, ...), so we are dammed if we do and damned if we don't.Corporations, by definition, rely on government; the corporate form is a government-created privilege that is also government-granted in each specific instance.
But, of course, government, and businesses of all kinds, ultimately depend on people. I mean, if people just stopped listening to a government, it would ceases to exist as a government.
Sure I meant they rely on them for their revenue (the government is their customer, like military contractors)
> But, of course, government, and businesses of all kinds, ultimately depend on people. I mean, if people just stopped listening to a government, it would ceases to exist as a government.
This is only sort of true in democracies. There are plenty of places where people don't get a choice of listening to government or not.
People nearly always have a choice; there are just often consequences to an individual negative choice that people don't like, which nearly always in love someone else making a positive choice. If people in the aggregate chose “no”, the government would have no power.
I think advertisement is a big problem here. The way that advertisement has been weaponized in the last 100 years is astounding. The means and methods advertisement employs to wake and create desires in people is scary and I don't think many outside the field of advertisement really do understand how targeted the manipulations have become.
Yes, people buy IPhones, and Nikes and all that other fancy stuff. But weaponized employment of memes (in Dawkins' sense) is the reason for it. We're trained and educated to be good little consumers, starting from the earliest childhood.
The middle 73% is with the middle, aka target of the article - don't anger the people who pay your bills.
While I think it's still best for us all to reduce where we can - I also agree that the individual would quickly change their habits if corporations started to charge a sustainable price for their goods instead of leveraging the planets future.
As far as greener technology has been driven by incentives from democratic nations, the 50% have much more influence.
Tesla (let's say) is not dependent on the wealth of billionaires: it is dependent on billions from government grants, some of which end up in the billionaires' pockets.
We also need to consider the target of those technologies, how much greener they are, and how they impact consumption. Say those 1% are developing incrementally better technologies for the 1% that inadvertently increases the environmental impact (e.g. replacement of technologies where the bulk of the impact comes from production rather than use), then there is a strong possibility that the situation is being made even worse.
Fun for a game. Not so for politics.
Basically the true poor don't have any CO2 emissions.
So pick any other group they are much bigger.
The rich countries who live longer, are happier and more content are responsible for most of the CO2 pollution at the moment.
It is arguable however how much of the CO2 the true poor should be accountable for. To create vaccines and medical procedures and all our knowledge takes phenomenal amounts of CO2. Developing countries medical sucks compared to the west but it's futuristic compared to 50 years ago.
This is what our CO2 emissions bought us -
https://mobile.twitter.com/MaxCRoser/status/1306699978002268...
The only reason to not go carbon neutral right away is that it would hurt the capital class (of which I'm a member).
Top 1%: >$100k/ year
Top 10%: >$35k/ year
Taxing frequent flyers is an interesting idea but I wonder how would that work in practice. In current state it's more of an encouraged behaviour. There is also the issue of "the plane would take off anyways". Maybe forcing a decrease in flight frequency would be more helpful.
That's only true short term, then the offer is adjusted to the demand.
Well, I might be rich enough to be in the top single digit %, but I am apparently not rich enough to lobby the government.
So yeah, if the revolution against the rich means it's against me as well - fine. I'll take part in it.
Why wait for the great father in Washington to do the things you want for you? Just start living more sustainably.
>I want it to tax my co2 consumption
Estimate the tax and send the check to the Treasury. What's the holdup ?
I can see no moral reason that ones monetary capability to damage the climate more than others should give the right to do so.
It is time to price in the damage that is done by consumption and emission of greenhouse gases. This won't recover the wealth (in form of consumtion rights on the climate) that was stolen by the rich from the poor, but will at least restrict such from happening in the future.
It is true that critisizing the individual consumption of the wealthy will not change anything. We need regulations. However I think particulary the 1% have responsibility to lobby for this as they have the greatest amount of power as well as the greatest responsibility in terms of damage done to our world per person.
Any ideas how we force these regulations? The 1% is NOT lobbying for change at the moment. How do we make them?