Emissions of richest 1 percent more than double the emissions of poorest 50%
oxfam.org
oxfam.org
For example, while the US has technically cut down on it's emissions it's done this (in part) by largely exporting the coal it used to burn to China. On a per country basis this is great but obviously it doesn't solve the real problem. The Chinese want the same standard of living as Americans and American's taking less flights doesn't seem like a viable strategy.
This is coming from someone that really cares about this but often resulting policies seem incredibly shortsighted in mitigating our worldwide, long term emissions. With that said, this study's methods are atrocious.
https://howrichami.givingwhatwecan.org/how-rich-am-i
Also keep in mind that if you give your income to poorer people they will likely spend it in a way that produces emissions. IMO your best bet would be to take cash out of the bank then shred it and bury it deep underground with a shovel (burning would produce CO2). Also, quit your job.
This is a world issue. There are billions of people that have never flown on an airplane and probably billions of people that have never been in a bus.
The 1% are largely the only people unaffected by climate change while it greatly effects communities in the global south.
https://activerain.com/blogsview/5136164/are-you-in-the-top-...
Ownership by and of itself is not socially useful. If an object transfers from Scrooge McDuck to Daddy Warbucks, and nothing else changes, nothing useful is done.
The 1% get excellent educations and have amazing social networks. We need a scheme to encourage them to become socially useful.
My preference is 99.5% estate taxes,[1] coupled with heavy taxation of unearned income (money you get without having to work for it).
1. Conserving estates made sense when wealthy male life expectancy was in the fities, and welathy males did not start to produce offspring until their forties; daily life was more dangerous (naked flames and heavy drapes, ill-treated and cantankerous farm animals everywhere, and on and on); and society was a lot more volatile than it is now.[2]
These days, a wealthy male will die in their nineties, with children in their sixties. The kids don't need the estate; they've already had all the help they can make use of.
This is what that hero of much economic theory, the rational social planner, would do to derive a return on investment from wealthy families.
2. The period since WWII is the longest period of peace in Europe for several hundred years, if not ever.
Tell that to the various socialist and former-communist countries where industrial capital has depreciated to nothingness with a lack of maintenance because the capital lacked a beneficial owner.
That would imply that the top 4% would account for 64% of outcome under discussion, which is much more drastic than the top 10% accounting for only 52% of total.
The choice to have (greater than replacement) children should be seen as an "emissions" or "income" choice for this kind of reporting, else it fails to capture the systemic externalities of their actual lifestyle.
This, as i understand it, is a sort of form of The Repugnant conclusion: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/repugnant-conclusion/ , whereby the choice to increase population is a choice to divide the resources amongst greater and greater people, resulting in a smaller share per person. I don't think the developed world, or the "1%" should be held accountable for these sorts of outcomes.
The only way to put blame on someone's shoulders is to assign it to those in decision-making positions, which, you guessed it, is overwhelmingly the 1%.
How do the poor not have choices? They have a choice to have >replacement children or not.
> you've introduced a recursion that makes it nigh-impossible to calculate the emissions of any group.
If you assume those heirs will never hit a terminal at replacement birthrate, then there probably would need to be some weighting function that approaches 0 after many generations.
It's also somewhat-to-highly myopic to assume that relative wealth isn't an important factor in an era when humans are faced with devastation of the natural processes that we've relied on for millenia (I.e. rising tide raises all boats). Sure, we have social media and iphones, but those don't feed and slake us, and the A/C bill is overdue.
Cf. modern, independent (even 1st world modern) farmers' plight. It's not possible to make a go of it being a subsistence-type local producer. Someone will come in and undercut you with an ersatz product and financial/legal maneuvering.
Aside from that, it's largely been proven that the hysteria surrounding birthrate and overpopulation is a red herring strongly advocated by industries trying to obfuscate the problem of climate change.
The quote is about a one off donation for christmas cheer. Not the long term consequences of a generation long choice.
[0] https://kingscollections.org/exhibitions/specialcollections/...
That i definitely agree with. Seems to be a mix of education and selfishness
So how far back should we consider heirs? Primordial soup is ultimately responsible for all emissions?
Surely it's more interesting to look at actual emission rates than to disavow personal choices based on how many children my grandparents had.
What these numbers show is that despite being prone to having more children, the poor account for much less emissions than the rich. That in some centuries there may be so many poor people as to offset this difference is a) speculation and b) doesn't answer the question of who is responsible for emissions and what segment of the population we can address now to best mitigate the problem.
What the data shows is that a small slice of the world contributes an outsized amount of emissions. And, historically, has put the bulk of problematic, modern-times CO2 in the atmosphere.
What the data also shows is that, those poor people aside, the rich are doing a great job of warming the planet into dangerous territory, thank you very much.
So, even if one rid the planet of those pesky reproducing poors, the rich would still cook the planet and (continue to) cause a runaway Greenhouse Effect.
There’s no way to solve this problem through population reduction in any reasonable amount of time. And even if we believed there were it would be incredibly violent and unethical.
This is just a way to sidestep the reality that the world’s richest (and that probably comfortably includes the American middle class) has done the most to cause this problem, but the world’s poorest will be hit the hardest by it.
"The richest one percent of the world’s population are responsible for more than twice as much carbon pollution as the 3.1 billion people who made up the poorest half of humanity during a critical 25-year period of unprecedented emissions growth."
Assuming this is correct the number of children poor people have is essentially irrelevant. The premise of your argument is that increasing the population divides a finite resource amongst all members. Now take into account the articles premise that carbon pollution scales exponentially with wealth.
If you now apply the offspring argument the emissions multiplier for offspring in the developed world dwarfs all else. This isn't an original argument, it was made very popular by a 2017 paper by Wynes and Nicholas:
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541
If you read the paper it's clear that offspring in the developed world contribute, not the 3.1 billion poorest people on the planet.
The difference in population growth rate between high income countries and low income countries is about 2.5x. I'd bet on income inequality and carbon consumption changing at a higher rate than that, and frankly wouldn't think the actual takeaway of this headline would change if the top 1% had half, instead of double, the carbon contribution of a group that is 50x their size.
2) The longterm equilibrium state is not relevant when the concern is about pressing climate concerns for this current century.