• andrew@lemmy.stuart.fun
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    8 months ago

    The cover photo is a jet plane but remember, US$140,000/year is the threshold they’re quoting in the article so the reality is more like a decent car or two and a house in a nicer area will drop you into that range.

    • Clent@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      1% of the world’s population is 80,000,000 people.

      There is too much variance in a population that large to make any reasonable statements or suggest adjustments.

      We already know that people living on pennies per day aren’t the problem.

    • flames5123@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Exactly. I wonder what the top 0.5% emit, or the top 0.1% emit. 140k is just a married couple living in a city. But people that live in a city can take public transit or walk to the store, therefore they won’t be contributing that much to these huge emissions.

    • pahlimur@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      This is my family’s combined income and my god people need to stop thinking we are wealthy. I’m currently staring at a $1000 car on Facebook marketplace to hopefully save some money because I know how to fix it. I am constantly buying cheap shit to afford to live, we are not rich at all. I have more in common with a homeless person than a wealthy person.

      • andrew@lemmy.stuart.fun
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        8 months ago

        I don’t disagree with you, but relative to the rest of the world we produce a lot more pollution. If anything, there’s probably a local peak at a certain income where, you know, you can afford a car but not a recent model with newer regulations, and you might have to fix it up to get it just within range for emissions testing. Stuff like that.

        Anyway, it’s not about quality of life, it’s about pollution. I’m with you on the cost of everything, definitely.

  • grue@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    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.

      • TaTTe@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        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%.

        • JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works
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          8 months ago

          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%.

          • TaTTe@lemmy.world
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            8 months ago

            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.

    • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      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.

    • EatATaco@lemm.ee
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      8 months ago

      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.

    • merc@sh.itjust.works
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      8 months ago

      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.

  • Adramis@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    8 months ago

    It feels disingenuous at best to lump in people making $60k/year with Jeff Bezos and other billionaires. Just twelve billionaires account for 2,100,000 homes worth of emissions, and that’s only the raw output of their travel and other direct expenses: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/20/twelve-billionaires-climate-emissions-jeff-bezos-bill-gates-elon-musk-carbon-divide

    Yes, we can all do our bit to help out, but workers pointing fingers at other workers will only ever benefit the ruling class.

    • Fredthefishlord@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      8 months ago

      Yes, we can all do our bit to help out, but workers pointing fingers at other workers will only ever benefit the ruling class.

      Don’t forget that you have more than one finger. You have fingers to spare to point blame at those who deserve it, and few of us in first world countries don’t.

    • merc@sh.itjust.works
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      8 months ago

      Yeah, 1% of 8.1 billion is 81 million. So, it’s roughly the top 10% of population of the wealthiest countries.

      That includes both Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, but also middle managers in marketing, astronomers, HR managers, air traffic controllers, etc.

  • M0oP0o@mander.xyz
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    8 months ago

    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.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    8 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    The richest 1% of humanity is responsible for more carbon emissions than the poorest 66%, with dire consequences for vulnerable communities and global efforts to tackle the climate emergency, a report says.

    For the past six months, the Guardian has worked with Oxfam, the Stockholm Environment Institute and other experts on an exclusive basis to produce a special investigation, The Great Carbon Divide.

    Over the period from 1990 to 2019, the accumulated emissions of the 1% were equivalent to wiping out last year’s harvests of EU corn, US wheat, Bangladeshi rice and Chinese soya beans.

    “The super-rich are plundering and polluting the planet to the point of destruction and it is those who can least afford it who are paying the highest price,” said Chiara Liguori, Oxfam’s senior climate justice policy adviser.

    The extravagant carbon footprint of the 0.1% – from superyachts, private jets and mansions to space flights and doomsday bunkers – is 77 times higher than the upper level needed for global warming to peak at 1.5C.

    Oxfam International’s interim executive director, Amitabh Behar, said: “Not taxing wealth allows the richest to rob from us, ruin our planet and renege on democracy.


    The original article contains 853 words, the summary contains 194 words. Saved 77%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

  • GreenM@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Aren’t you now glad we aren’t all ultra rich mofos ? Noone would be able to breathe that out.

  • Bye@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    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.

    • n2burns@lemmy.ca
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      8 months ago

      How much of your carbon emissions are due to your quality of life and how much is due to inefficiencies/waste?

        • n2burns@lemmy.ca
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          8 months ago

          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.

            • n2burns@lemmy.ca
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              8 months ago

              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.

    • bstix@feddit.dk
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      8 months ago

      The overpopulation isn’t happening in the 1%.

      It makes jack shit of a difference to the environment if there is one billion or two billion starving people. They’re not the ones burning carbon or eating steak.

    • rchive@lemm.ee
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      8 months ago

      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.

  • Aux@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    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.

    • EatATaco@lemm.ee
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      8 months ago

      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.

      • GiveMemes@jlai.lu
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        8 months ago

        Almost definitely worse lol. We have the option to modify the genome of the plants we eat in order to make then better in every way and still some people are like “no that’s icky because science”.

      • CraigeryTheKid@lemm.ee
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        8 months ago

        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.

        • Aux@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          We sholdn’t eat less meat, meat is pretty much zero emission and closed loop food production. We should more.

    • commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      8 months ago

      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.

    • maynarkh@feddit.nl
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      8 months ago

      If you buy from Amazon, it’s YOU who are responsoble for all associated emissions like delivery, manufacturing, etc, not Bezos.

      That would only be true if Amazon had real competition and would not be acting like a monopoly, as many other companies do.

      • Aux@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Amazon is NOT a monopoly. And the problem here is not Amazon, but the products YOU buy. It doesn’t matter if you buy from Amazon or Wallmart or whatever.

      • rchive@lemm.ee
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        8 months ago

        Amazon is very much not a monopoly. There are thousands of online retailers. There are also a lot of delivery services, no idea if there are thousands, but there’s a lot.

        • Carighan Maconar@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          Isn’t it more planet reponsible then to order from Amazon where, if I order say 6 items, they’ll come from the same warehouse in the same delivery (at least ove here!) instead of in 6 deliveries from 6 different vendors who also all had to get individual deliveries of their stock first?

          • Aux@lemmy.world
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            8 months ago

            Yes, it’s better to bulk order from Amazon. Just don’t order one small thing like a screwdriver, a whole truck driving around for your 100g package is dumb.

            • kablammy@sh.itjust.works
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              8 months ago

              Surely it’s still more efficient for the truck to carry that screwdriver and a whole truckload of other goods, in a single journey, with optimised route, rather than me (and every other Amazon shopper) driving my car to the nearest hardware store to buy that screwdriver?

    • wizzor@sopuli.xyz
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      8 months ago

      It is worth noting that the richest 1% includes everyone who makes more than 140k$/year.

    • Carighan Maconar@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      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.

      • Aux@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        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.