“The super-rich are treating our planet like their personal playground, setting it ablaze for pleasure and profit. Their dirty investments and luxury toys —private jets and yachts— aren’t just symbols of excess; they’re a direct threat to people and the planet,” said Oxfam International Executive Director Amitabh Behar.
This is bad. Reminder that there’s ~2000 of them known, though, so it only takes 8 seconds for everyone else to pass their annual emissions collectively.
It’s not an excuse to not care about your own impact.
Here’s the actual study
This number is almost entirely investment emissions, how much the companies they own emit.
Oxfam’s analysis found that investment emissions are the most significant part of a billionaire’s carbon footprint. The average investment emissions of 50 of the world’s richest billionaires were around 2.6 million tonnes of CO2 equivalents (CO2e) each. That is around 340 times their emissions from private jets and superyachts combined. Each billionaire’s investment emissions are equivalent to almost 400,000 years of consumption emissions by the average person, or 2.6 million years of consumption emissions by someone in the poorest 50% of the world.44
Aren’t they responsible for the risk their investments carry? Isn’t that part of the value proposition?
If they have so much investments in companies producing CO2, why aren’t they using their weight to push for lower emissions?
You could assign company emissions to the consumers, the employees, or the owners. Without any one of those the company wouldn’t emit. I just wanted to make it clear that this study assigns it to the owners.
Im beginning to give up on lemmy. Thanks for trying.
Including investments seems a bit disingenuous. I’m sure their personal carbon footprint is already huge without having to include that.
If you don’t include investment emissions, they’d emit more in 22 days than the average person does in their life.
Yep, these companies wouldn’t stop existing if their shares were distributed evenly between people and the clients should be considered responsible for the emissions considering they’re the ones requesting the product.
There are so many better climate change comparisons than this yet I keep hearing this stupid one repeated over and over. Ultimately it doesn’t matter than billionaires personally emite more carbon than “the average person” because even if they dropped that stat to match the average there would be absolutely no difference.
Target the biggest carbon emitters which is businesses. Every time carbon emissions is brought up it should be in the context of making businesses emit less carbon. Make them pay for emitting carbon, give tax credits for green technology that stuff will be infinetly more effective that targeting specific people.
I don’t care that Taylor swift took a jet to her concert its not her issue to fix. Its the responsibility of the government to solve this through strong environmental policy. Government policy changing incentives will flow down to the individual and adjust their behaviour instead of a mob trying to shame individuals into changing their behaviour.
Billionaires usually are business leaders.
Musk and Bezos etc. There’s a few exceptions like Swift but for the most part you’re talking about the same people.
I know they are the same people but it’s still two different things. A persons carbon footprint is different to the business even if that person is the ceo
If we eliminate all the billionaires the rest of us will continue to live for at least another century… It is worth doing.
I’m vegetarian for the climate, but I’m willing to eat the rich for the climate too
