Personal carbon footprint of the rich is vastly underestimated
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The main challenge is finding a reasonable way of dealing with imports.
It’s a drop in the proverbial bucket for some Federal agency to annually assess the rough carbon intensity of a dollar’s worth of exports from 150 nations across a few dozen industries.
It's just madness! Instead we regulated them and the problem resolved.
Which requires revisiting the postal treaties that lead to shipping from China costing less than across town.
I also think pricing alone isn't sufficient since there are many poor people who can't really make different choices about their consumption even if they want to. Without choice carbon pricing loses effectiveness, since there isn't any way to optimize your costs.
The edge case I think about a lot is a poor urban/suburban renter without access to functional public transit. Since they rent they can't take steps to improve the efficiency of their dwelling. They can't rely on transit to get to work due to poor service reliability. Sprawling car-centric development means cycling is dangerous and far, so they must maintain a private vehicle, which is likely to be old and inefficient in order to be affordable. A dividend is unlikely to be sufficient to fundamentally change any of these conditions since this person is likely to be roughly revenue-neutral.
I've always thought this would be the best way to get political support from a majority. There's enough data out there that the gov't ought to be able to (a) come up with some very firm predictions of who would come out ahead and (b) whip up a website for people to profile their own case.
Turning off the lights is almost a don't-give-a-damn item in the age of the LED, when you have 6W doing the job of 60W.
Recycling is a scam that was originally introduced by the plastics industry in order to overcome people's objections against discardable plastic objects. Most of it ends up in landfills.
To really cut your carbon footprint, don't take flights.
There is a term jet set for the rich, referring to their means to fly frequently all over the place, internationally and domestically. That spews carbon like anything.
But let's do another thought experiment: take everything from everybody. Clothing, housing, cars, infrastructure. If you also take away agriculture, the current population's numbers will starve, but not before foraging anything left. If you don't, then the environmental footprint of a naked and destitute human population in its current numbers will still be damning to the planet.
If you don't think any of this is accurate, take a look at the Middle East. Most of what once was the cradle of civilization because of its fertility is now cracked desert. And that happened way before the modern age. You can also go a little back in time, to the beginning of the Holocene, and see how humans had already managed to cause a great extinction.
Maybe there is a "middle way" where we enforce an acceptable level of wealth and well-being for each human being, and keep our demography in check, and we escape runaway greenhouse effect. It will be a regime that many today would find disagreeable (myself included), but some sacrifices must be made. And/or we start talking seriously about those rockets to move out of the planet....
It’s like everyone shares the pool, and everyone gets out and goes to the bathroom to defecate. But not this one guy, he “doesn’t have time” to get out and shit, so he just shits over in the corner of the pool.
It’s still better that most people use the bathroom, but it’s pretty demotivating to some people to see that guy celebrated for his achievements while he’s shitting in everyone’s pool. Hopefully his contributions to society are ambitious enough from a humanitarian and humanist perspective to make it worth it to most people.
This perspective is why I try really hard to avoid shitting in the pool, as well as only pursuing goals that I believe can have a genuine and sustainable improvement, no matter how small, on the quality of life of most everyone on the planet-either directly or indirectly.
Average people should not be asked to reduce their consumption so that rich people can continue getting away with their excess
I'm not suggesting anyone drive less even. Just switch to superior electrified products (and support renewable electricity+batteries as appropriate).
[0] https://www.jdpower.com/cars/shopping-guides/how-much-do-peo....
"Just switch" as if that's an easy or affordable thing to do
I have to heat my house somehow, I'm not going to go cold during the winter to reduce how much carbon I use, and I can't afford to replace my gas heating with electric, replace all of the insulation and windows in my house to make heating more efficient, etc
If using less gas is a choice between "go broke" or "go cold", my choice is to use gas
And if you're in the US and you can't afford much (which it sounds like you're implying), use the IRA funds!
[0] https://www.jdpower.com/cars/shopping-guides/how-much-do-peo....
Its not safe to cycle for practical purposes in my city.
The city make gestures like painting a few road shoulders green and nature trails for exercise. This does not get me to work, daycare, the dentist, etc.
Generally in America, bikes are more of a novelty than transportation.
If you want to set e-bikes folks' hair on fire, show how many shoes the government could buy for the cost of an e-bike distribution program. Then, apply that number to the population that would be served by those e-bikes.
I can find 3.7 * 10^13 kg CO2 for energy yearly worldwide.
On the other hand, there are around 25 * 10^3 private jets each emitting 4.9 CO2 kg/mile, with mach 1 being 767 miles/hour, which gives 4.9 * 25 * 10^3 * 767 * 24 * 365 kg CO2 = 8.23 * 10^11 per year assuming the jets are running all the time at the speed of sound.
8.23 * 10^11 / (3.7 * 10^13) = 2.2%, with assumptions that make this a significant overestimate. Internet sources claim 0.9% from civil aviation.
I'm not confident that when people make this comparison, they account for the double counting. After all, most (?) industry does something that's eventually consumed by someone. What proportion of responsibility goes to the industry versus the consumer? Obviously not a well-posed problem.
For example, it's not hard for me to imagine someone wealthy having strawberries delivered to every house they own, week after week, just in case they decide to visit that house and want strawberries
Maybe that's not very common, but we are talking about a class of people that will take a private jet to another city to get breakfast at their favorite restaurant there
Let get poor rich, then we can speak about care of environment.
What is an average person's carbon footprint? what is a rich person's carbon footprint? 10x, 100x?
Best I see right now is https://www.visualcapitalist.com/co2-emissions-by-income/ which is from 2019 and doesn't say exactly who's covered - I assume it's a global mix?
Income Group Average income (USD) Share of CO₂ Emissions Top 1% $310K 15% Next 9% $90K 34% Middle 40% $16K 43% Bottom 50% $2K 8%
So the top 10% by income account for 49% of the carbon emissions, and the next 40% for 43%, and the lowest 50% for 8%.
So that would mean if I got this right: Top 1%: 94x / year / person Next 9%: 24x / year / person Middle 40%: 7x / year / person Bottom 50%: 1X/year/person
So the top 1% person uses about 14x more carbon than a middle 40% person. Over one order of magnitude. I actually expected it to be far worse, what with the yachts and private planes.
Any better sources/numbers for this?
I scanned the paper and didn't find how it controls for the participants' misperception of income inequality to begin with. For example if the survey participants underestimated income inequality between cohorts, that might be the reason they underestimate carbon inequality - they just imagined the top 1% as more similar to other people!
Nobody will ever change their carbon footprint because of what someone else tells them. There will always be someone worse than them who they can point to and say, “Well I’m not as bad as them so they should change.
If people cared at all about this, they’d change their own behavior. And it’s fine to not care about this at all. And it’s also clear that people don’t care about this at all or they would change rather than hope that someone else will change.
Politicians are incentivized to get elected so don’t expect them to do anything that would risk that — like making laws that inconvenience the people who vote for them or give them money.
Whether I eat meat (I don’t) or Taylor Swift flies in a private jet (she does) doesn’t matter at all when it comes to the environment. That ship has sailed and the effects of climate change are pretty much baked in at this point. The hope is that I’m wealthy enough (in a global context) to avoid any real inconvenience to myself before I die.
The last to starve will be the first to suffocate.
(Almost the same can be said for all more positive approaches, except we can't know for sure they will work, we can only hope. This goes for everything in life. Only Death and allegedly Taxes are certain.)
Otherwise we are not making any real progress. We certainly pretend that we are though.
Until governments start collectively implementing policies which actually contain or reduce climate change, instead of greenwashing and shifting blame overseas, fatalism is probably the only valid approach, despite how dumb it is. And don't get this old song about personal improvements etc. In no universe individual humans can invent and scale DAC, or deploy giant sunshields, or spread sulphur in the troposphere over thousands of flights. And anything else is pointless really.
If you think there’s going to be some great concerted effort and legislation and magic new technology coming, get real.
If you want to “fix” climate change then a lot of people are going to need to decide to make massive shifts in how they live. And that just isn’t going to happen by choice.
But do keep dreaming about that technology that lets us keep living as wastefully as we do.
You might get away with that if you're old enough to die before it gets bad. But if/when we get to serious effects from climate change then wealth isn't going help much because people will very quickly stop respecting the laws that enforce it.
Not if they die first. It all depends on how quickly things get bad.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?t...
You’ll notice that countries trying to reduce emissions are successfully doing so on a per capita basis. Countries which are not trying, aren’t. There you go, GP’s point empirically disproven.
https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-greenhouse-gas-emissions
“Global emissions have increased rapidly over the last 50 years and have not yet peaked”
If Denmark is trying but India and China aren’t, does it really matter lol?
Denmark's emissions move the needle exactly in proportion to Denmark's emissions. They alone won't save the world if India and China aren't reducing emissions, which is why we should be convincing them to reduce emissions, not throwing our hands in the air with totally non-factual claims like:
> Any time you spend thinking or breath you spend talking about someone else’s carbon footprint is a total fool’s errand.
This is demonstrably, unequivocally untrue. Thinking and breath spent talking about someone else's carbon footprint is reducing people's carbon footprints.
I know cynicism and fatalism sounds cool to certain types of people, but it's generally intellectually lazy and in this case it makes you simply wrong.
It's interesting how you're taking this position about how "people" always excuse their own behavior by pointing to larger polluters and therefore we're doomed, but what I see in the data is that plenty of people aren't engaging in that behavior. However, you are, and you're projecting that onto everyone else (despite clear evidence otherwise). You can simply choose not to :)
It can has already gotten bad so let's just give up and let it get worse and worse? Climate change isn't a binary phenomenon. It can always get worse.
It's rather "I do meaningful actions (i.e. I don't take plane) so I'd be happy if they would do it too".
I mean, sure?
Same as it’s OK for Taylor Swift to be outraged that Jeff Bezos generates a larger carbon footprint than her. Or same as it’s OK for me to be outraged that you generate a larger carbon footprint than me.
What good does the outrage do besides help each person ignore the fact that theyre the problem?
The poor and middle class pay and suffer from climate change initiatives while the rich and powerful fly around on private jets to climate conferences. Clearly there is something going on here.
As a refresher, climate denialism "is rejection of the idea that changes in the Earth's climate or weather patterns are caused by human activity."
If drinking too much really gives people hangovers, wouldn’t they just never drink too much?
If going into debt made it harder for people to afford the things they want, wouldn’t they just never spend more than they have?
People’s hypocrisy and witting or unwitting opting into bad outcomes has quite literally zero bearing on whether the bad outcomes exist or not.
This is the kind of thing that makes it on to the news because it connects something abstract with everyday people.
> The vast majority of participants across the four countries overestimated the average personal carbon footprint of the poorest 50% and underestimated those of the richest 10% and 1%.
Edit: are you an LLM?
Was it really so hard to find an ineffective policy for reducing carbon that he had to name check one aimed at a different environmental goal?
I bet they are. Regulation impacts everybody equally. So if you have a poor person who is responsible for 1% of the emissions compared to a rich person increased regulation applies to each of them in the same way, for example paying more for a hamburger. That is not disruptive or consequential for the rich person either financially or in their emission footprint and they get to feel good about making the world cleaner.
Anatole France