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%.
Oh the second source was household income rather than individual, putting the percentage at about 37% of us households are in the globally top 1%.
Still doesn’t add up. 37% of the US population is 120 million. 1% of the global population is still 80 million.
Are you comparing US household income to global individual income? If that’s the case I can see your percentages working, but that comparison doesn’t make much sense so I’m still lost.
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.
Quoting Taylor Swift is… an interesting choice when talking about climate changes.
Didn’t her recent tour require 90+ semi trucks just to go from city to city? Not even going to mention all the emissions that result from whenever they have to travel by plane.
Yes, popular music acts that tour are a HUGE part of the problem.
Also, my bad I’m not tryna harp on you just because I recognized a song lyric. I’m a Taylor Swift fan myself. Well, more of a chiefs fan. And by value of the transitive property…
Edit: also apparently all air travel only accounts for about 2% of emissions. So while my point isnt technically wrong it’s missing the forest for the trees
Didn’t her recent tour require 90+ semi trucks just to go from city to city? Not even going to mention all the emissions that result from whenever they have to travel by plane.
Yes, popular music acts that tour are a HUGE part of the problem
They absolutely are not. 90 trucks is nothing.
At any given time there are millions of semis (2.97 million total) driving the streets. Literally every single thing you’ve ever purchased in your life has been on a semi.
90 trucks driving for a couple months is not significant.
I already mentioned I was wrong about the air travel. I looked up the numbers and edited my comment immediately.
Yeah the trucks are a drop in the sea as well.
But stop kidding yourself that the 90 semi trucks is nothing. It’s all pollution.
What other tour and/or concert is slipping around 90 semi trucks??
You bring up a good point that there are millions of semi trucks on the road. But that’s ridiculous to compare her 90 semi trucks to all the trucks on the road
Let’s compare her to other touring artists. To be honest I don’t have the numbers off top of my head I’ll have to look him up. But I was reading an article the other day about how her tour is one of the largest productions to date.
So no, her 90 trucks are not a huge part of the problem. That wording was wrong on my part. But among touring artist, she is easily one of the biggest polluters.
Honestly 90 semi trucks are a tiny problem. So once we’re down to pop acts, we solved climate issues already. Long solved.
As I replied to other people, yes the wording was poor.
But, it’s so silly to compare her fleet of semi trucks to all the semi trucks in the world. I mean wouldn’t it make a bit more sense to compare her to other touring acts? Was just reading an article yesterday about how hers is one of the largest and most expensive tours ever.
That’s nothing. If 90 trucks were a HUGE part of the problem we’d have solved that in an hour. The problem is in the millions of trucks, cars, ships, airplanes, plants, etc.
Yes my wording was terrible. you’re right that it’s the millions of other things constantly polluting that’s the problem.
My point was just that her tour is one of the largest ever. Largest ever also means one of the most polluting ever.
It’s a joke with many layers
fwiw I used to live in India many years ago.
Was lucky enough to emigrate to the states when I was eight years old. We didn’t have a car back then. My dad had a moped that we used a lot.
But yeah, I didn’t use to be part of the problem. But now I am as well
Just how small do you think the western world is? The US alone is 330 million, which is 4% of the world’s population.
And the EU is 450M.
By the numbers a bit less than half the Western world is in the one percent.
Edit - I should have been more clear above. I was thinking about countries, not people.
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 world’s population is about 8.1 billion. The top 1% of that is 81 million. The population of the G7 (a reasonable substitute for the richest countries) is approx 800 million. So, if you’re in the top 10% and in a G7 country, you’re in that top 1%.
Top 10% income in the US is approx $170k per year. That’s mid-level manager wages.
Are you not conflating top 10% of wealthy people with top 10% of wealth? Looking at these differently vastly changes the results, e.g.:
Of course, in the real world numbers are much more skewed and you have hundreds of millions in developing nations at the bottom making literal pennies a day, bringing the “top 10%” of wealth (not top 10% of wealthy people) to include some single mom making 45k in the US.
I understand the distinction you’re making, but in this case we’re talking about the top 1% of wealthiest people. From the article:
The most comprehensive study of global climate inequality ever undertaken shows that this elite group, made up of 77 million people including billionaires, millionaires and those paid more than US$140,000 (£112,500) a year, accounted for 16% of all CO2 emissions in 2019
Also, the phrase “the top 10% of wealth” doesn’t really make any sense. How can wealth itself have percentiles? A percentile shows the percentage of scores that a particular score surpassed. So, the wealthiest 10% means people whose wealth is higher than 90% of other people. What would the top 10% of wealth be?
I think the point you’re trying to make is that the top 0.01% are much, much wealthier than the typical person in the top 1%, and probably one individual in that top 0.01% probably contributes as much CO2 as hundreds or thousands of people who are merely in the top 1%. And, I fully agree. But, this article has put the cutoff at the top 1%, which includes both Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates but also your dentist, the guy who owns the Chevy dealership, and the woman who manages the HR department.
Two things can be true. In this case, it’s that the ultra-wealthy with private jets, multiple houses, etc. live lifestyles that put out vast amounts of CO2. But, also, a fairly average American lifestyle is also very CO2 intensive, compared to how a poor person in India or Cameroon lives.
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.
so we cut cut emissions by 60% with a guillotine
Or… we can just double the efford for maximizing gains and see introducing 2% with guillotine give as profit?
Temporary solution
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.
If that shit were cheaper, people would be all over it.
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?
All ways of extinguishing the massive concentration of wealth are valid and welcome.
Burn them at the stick !!! 🥵 🤗
Was it perhaps an irishladdie?
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.
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.
We sholdn’t eat less meat, meat is pretty much zero emission and closed loop food production. We should more.
organic food definitely uses more resources per unit output than “commercial” ag. It can’t supply the world’s food supply unless they greatly increase their capabilities. It’s either “modern methods” or we reduce the worlds population.
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.
The point of a Limited Company is that people who own and work for the company are not held responsible for the actions of the company. Exceptions apply, of course. This is done to protect people from the failures of the business. If the company you work for goes bankrupt for whatever reason, you don’t want to owe millions to the creditors of the company out of your pocket.
Limited Liability Company just means there aren’t any shareholders. Only the owner can be held to account and/or will lose money if the business goes under.
Every trucker that owns their own vehicle/routes is running an LLC and it isn’t so they can be protected from the failure of their business, it’s because they’re the only ones who will be impacted if the company goes under.
Source: I was an Owner-Operator and had to learn this terminology when setting up my LLC.
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.
I mean yeah, that’s a really good savings.
That’s one way to not be accountable
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.
Removed by mod
It is worth noting that the richest 1% includes everyone who makes more than 140k$/year.
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.
Yes, you are.
when you own 90% of the wealth and resources, i’m kind of shocked that is “poorest 90%”
Enjoy this relevant ahort film by Denis Villeneuve (hook me up, pipe bot!)
Aren’t you now glad we aren’t all ultra rich mofos ? Noone would be able to breathe that out.
No shit
You don’t say…
In other news, water is wet
This is why I don’t believe people when they say “we don’t have an overpopulation problem, we have a distribution problem”
Because if everyone in the world had my lifestyle, we would be emitting an insane amount of carbon. And I don’t want my standard of living to go down, and in fact I want everyone to live as nicely as I do. So clearly we need fewer people.
How much of your carbon emissions are due to your quality of life and how much is due to inefficiencies/waste?
The vast bulk are from travel and meat consumption
Assuming you live in North America, travel is highly inefficient with personal cars and high airplane usage.
Meat consumption on the other hand is a lifestyle choice. Personally, if be willing to reduce mine if we stopped subsidizing the industry and therefore stopped incentivizing such high consumption.
Why are you waiting until the meat industry is no longer subsidised to reduce your meat consumption?
I’m on a budget. I eat less meat than the average North American, but I still need protein and meat is a lot less expensive than many of the alternatives, partially because we subsidize the meat industry so much.
On the other hand, if everyone in the world had your lifestyle the world would be much more wealthy and could make a lot of positive changes.
Are you flying around the world on PJs constantly?
All air travel is only 2% of carbon emissions.
