America’s wealthiest people are also some of the world’s biggest polluters – not only because of their massive homes and private jets, but because of the fossil fuels generated by the companies they invest their money in.
Every day we’re here just to learn billionaires & families should be crushed and their wealth redistributed amongst third world countries.
That would just make other billionaires somewhere else. The problem is the system not the people
He did not say “once”. I think they’re suggesting a systematic approach. I periodic Purge if you will. Like some shitty movie.
The moment they go above a certain amount and still act shitty, they are food.
I wouldn’t care about rich people if they just paid their workers, paid their taxes, looked at reducing the pollution of their companies, didn’t lobby against the public interests, and just were all around swell people.
The problem is that they aren’t, none of them are.
Either they become like that from being rich, or only awful people are moralless enough to become rich. But there isn’t a single good rich person.
Yup, the problem is firmly the system, but suggesting a worldwide change to socialism/communism is less “palatable” and believable by the average person.
So “eat the rich” is a decent compromise for a comment not intended to approach any sort of complex answer, while still being a move in a better direction than suggesting things to continue as they are.
The US subsidizes fossil fuels to the tune of 600B per year. You pay for pollution with your taxes.
This is a piss poor metric. It is not what these people personally emit but what they emit by all the companies that they may own. Even though those companies produce products you and me consume.
In other words if I am a massive farmer and in the ten percent wealth category, my carbon footprint includes all the food produced and you consume from my farm.
The study’s primary metric appears to include both supplier and producer emissions proportional to income and investments. What alternative do you suggest?
I feel that I see more and more articles that give the false impression that rich are the only people we should put a pressure for pollution. This will give more and more people the illusion that they can pollute because their pollution is very minor compared to the pollution of the rich.
The reality is while richer people pollute more. The ratio of pollution between a rich and a normal person is not comparable to the ratio of the wealth difference.
In fact, for pollution, everyone effort has a real effect.
More precisely I read an article that made it clear that if a super rich has 100000x more money, they will pollute directly only 40x more than most people. (the number are probably wrong but the order of magnitude is correct).
This mean that pollution is not just for the rich, but for everyone. And your personal effort count.
Pollution is a truly a systemic problem, not a personal responsibility problem, even for the wealthiest heaviest polluters. It certainly doesn’t help when people treat their surroundings like trashcans, but that will always pale in comparison to the scale of pollution produced by industry.
The reason wealthy people are still the issue is that they have an insane overabundance of control over industry, governments, and economic systems, and that control is currently being wielded irresponsibly.
The only way for non-wealthy people to truly fight climate change is collective action. The top 1% on the other hand could damn near personally begin reconstructing problematic parts of our polluting economic systems, but they simply aren’t motivated to do so because that wouldn’t increase their capital, at least not as much as the way they are currently behaving does. They are only motivated by increasing their wealth, apparently, based on how they behave.
What is the collective but a collection of individuals? What, therefore, is collective action, but a collection of individuals choosing to take responsibility and do what they can?
Imagine politicians and CEOs decided tomorrow to make meat production sustainable and ethical. The cost of meat would skyrocket (yes, even if we removed all corporate profit). The very next day all those individuals that aren’t responsible, according to your logic, would be in the street protesting.
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Or if I’m in the 10% bracken and have invested most of that money in the Stock-Market I’d get a fraction of the emissions of all companies in the world?
I feel like those articles are just so people have someone else to point fingers at and feel as if they don’t have to change anything themselves.
Sure personal responsibility alone won’t help without laws but those laws won’t happen if people show that they are behind those measures.
I want to see a politician trying to triple the gas prices and the prices on meat and see that politician be elected.
People really think they are existing in a vacuum and companies are only polluting for the fun of it - but don’t accept how the by far biggest contribution is the average Livestyle of everyone…Banning private jets and things like that is probably a good idea to get people behind you but I feel as if it’s mostly a gesture compared to a law that would slash meat consumption in half or tackle the fact that everyone sees going everywhere in their truck when biking or walking would’ve worked fine. The single person doesn’t have power but everyone together has and politicians want to get elected so they only tackle an issue when they feel the people are behind them.
One point of view could be that since these billionaires are the ones financially benefitting from the companies, that they should also be the ones paying the true cost of the production.
It’s true that the consumers are consuming, but why are the companies making products without cleaning up after their production? Why are billionaires allowed to extract money out of this and leave the environment in an irreparable state.
Consumers would probably prefer that their money went to the product including all the associated costs of producing it, but consumers don’t get that choice, because the company owners extract the money for themselves.
Anyone else just feel like we should eat the rich?
I think it’s way overdue.
Won’t stop the meat producing companies or the oil companies from existing - that just moves the emissions of them to their heirs.
That metric is really bad - as long as there’s demand for gas or meat those emissions need to be attached to someone - and attaching them to the owner just takes away all responsibility from everyone and tells them that they don’t have to change anything.
If BP would Stop producing oil tomorrow the price would probably jump but then other companies would step in and fill that gap and nothing would’ve changed pollution wise.
I’m not advocating for it, but I will say there are no Romanovs around, so it’s not 100% that it’s always the heir next.
On one hand, yes, on the other, eating shit isn’t very appealing.
Envy and jealousy will get you nowhere in life. Strive to do better. Maybe join the upper classes through hard work and sacrifice?
We already work and strife more than those upper classes ever would in their entire life.
How about those upper classes pay their due taxes instead of using loopholes to be a leach on society?
Either that or we eat them.
The wealthy do pay a lot of taxes. How about cutting spending instead? Oh…THAT. Never seems to come up though.
Curious also: are you really going to eat rich people? For dinner? Then what? Keep eating your way down until you reach the middle class? Envy and jealousy are a burden, my friend.
“You don’t understand. Ferengi workers don’t want to stop the exploitation. We want to find a way to become the exploiters.”
— Rom
Thanks for the suggestion I just became a billionaire
We need a 95% tax bracket for anyone that makes more than a few million/year.
And a wealth tax for people having more value than like 10 millions (or less actually).
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A few million/year is a reasonable amount of money for a (highly) successful person to make. A wealth tax for people making over a billion or just $100M per year is enough to fix a lot of the problems in this country without destroying the “American dream”
The way I see it, if you make enough money to buy a nice, moderate house in California or Hawaii once per year, you are already making too much money. My cutoff would probably be closer to $2-3M… though I’d be willing to go higher if paired with an annual “wealth tax”… say, if you have a value of over - for example - $20M (incl. stocks and any other non-liquid assets) you must pay 20% of any excess value in taxes annually. That would be on top of the 95% multimillionaire income tax.
So fucking sick of billionaires
What do you even do when you exceed 100 Millions?
They must be mentally sick in some way “just one mooare billion pleaaase”
If you have over a billion dollars, you could spend every waking moment shovelling money into a fire and you would still have over a billion dollars when you die
When I first started reading this sentence, I thought I was with you, but by the end I was scratching my head.
My point is how much money a billion is. You literally couldn’t get rid of it fast enough to keep it from piling up (assuming it is accruing risk free interest).
I imagine its just a prick waving contest between the rich. They just compare the number in their account to the others and want to have a bigger number.
There’s a steep cliff between the 95% and the .01%. I wonder what proportion is just the .01
The income of the top 1% alone – households making more than $550,000 – was linked to 15% to 17% of this pollution.
The report also identified “super-emitters.” They are almost exclusively among the wealthiest top 0.1% of Americans, concentrated in industries such as finance, insurance and mining, and produce around 3,000 tons of carbon pollution a year. To put that in perspective, it’s estimated people should limit their carbon footprint to around 2.3 tons a year to tackle climate change.
Thank you for finding that for me
If anyone is asking how do we pay to solve the climate crisis. I think its pretty clear who should be paying.
China and India, but you won’t admit it.
Who are the factories of the west and emit co2 for our products.
CO² tax on oil and fuel production i say.
As much as I understand the hate towards rich people governments are just as much at fault for subsidising, directly funding and giving land to those companies in the first place for people to be able to make money off them.
Yeah, governments are totally just giving this shit out with no compulsion from the rich.
They may as well be polluting methane gas because they’re so full of shit
This is the best summary I could come up with:
America’s wealthiest people are also some of the world’s biggest polluters – not only because of their massive homes and private jets, but because of the fossil fuels generated by the companies they invest their money in.
That gave a carbon footprint for each dollar of economic activity in the US, which the researchers linked to households using population survey data that showed the industries people work for and their income from wages and investments.
The report also identified “super-emitters.” They are almost exclusively among the wealthiest top 0.1% of Americans, concentrated in industries such as finance, insurance and mining, and produce around 3,000 tons of carbon pollution a year.
Kimberly Nicholas, associate professor of sustainability science at Lund University in Sweden, who was not involved in the report, said the study helps reveal how closely income, especially from investments, is tied to planet-heating pollution.
Sometimes when people talk about ways to tackle the climate crisis, they bring up population control, said Mark Paul, a political economist at Rutgers University who was also not involved in the study.
Globally, the planet-heating pollution produced by billionaires is a million times higher than the average person outside the world’s wealthiest 10%, according to a report last year from the nonprofit Oxfam.
I’m a bot and I’m open source!
It’s a strange accounting method, that almost completely reflects wealth distribution and ignores carbon.
For instance, you might say childhood obesity is a problem, then measure people’s investments in fast food as a measure of their contribution to the problem. And find that it’s the same people at fault, at almost the exact same percentage!
It’s a stretch to say that because they invest in a company, that they “produce” the greenhouse gases that that company emits.
Yeah, they could invest elsewhere but it’s just disingenuous to say they’re responsible for all those carbon emissions.
I can see how it’s strange on the surface, but ultimately the carbon emissions wouldn’t be there if the polluting activity was not funded. So to whom would the carbon emissions be attributed otherwise? Just the CEO?
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but because of the fossil fuels generated by the companies they invest their money in.
Lemme go ahead and roll my eyes here. Yes, American Airlines produces a significant percentage of the world’s greenhouse emissions. But they burn that fuel for the passengers, not just for the benefit of shareholders. Same with ExxonMobil, BP, etc.
Consumption is what drives pollution. Investments to profit off of that consumption is secondary.
Their biggest success is convincing common folks it’s out fault.
Consumption driven by advertising based on Edward Bernays work, which explicitly intends to create fissures within people and then sell them cures to the fissures they created,m. Just disallowing advertising would have a substantial effect on consumption.
That’s a complicated situation because if not rich people, we’ll see other rich people in the same situation, like I don’t think world’s biggest companies will stop existing anytime soon, even if healthy eco alternatives get bigger investiment in the future.
And I’ll wager my left eye there’ll still be western capitalist-sympathizers(because they themselves are not capitalists, as they own no capital nor any means of production, mass or otherwise) having themselves a jolly old wankfest about how we shouldn’t be having a good long think about the Robespierre method
