Quokk.auWorld’s richest 1% have already used fair share of emissions for 2026, says Oxfam
www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/10/wor…
The world’s richest 1% have used up their fair share of carbon emissions just 10 days into 2026, analysis has found.
Meanwhile, the richest 0.1% took just three days to exhaust their annual carbon budget, according to the research by Oxfam.
The charity said the worst effects of the emissions would be faced by those who had done the least to cause the climate crisis, including people in low-income countries on the frontlines of climate breakdown, Indigenous groups, women and girls.
Lower- and middle-income countries are most at risk from the detrimental effects of these emissions, with global economic damage potentially adding up to £44tn by 2050.
Not only are the super-rich responsible for most carbon emissions, but they also invest in the most polluting industries. A billionaire carries, on average, an investment portfolio in companies that will produce 1.9m tonnes of CO2 a year – roughly equivalent to the annual emissions of 400,000 petrol cars.
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RedSnt 🧩♂️👓🖥️Some sites break when you disable javascript, but guardian.com instead starts working.
Thanks for the tip! I thought I had every extension for finer control, but I guess I hadn’t thought of one that just disables javascript, and you’re right, it does just work on that site.
I’m using ublock origin to disable JS globally and re-enable it per-site from the popup. I didn’t realize it could do that until I read the manual.
Ahh, yeah, that’s much more convenient, saves having another icon in the already crowded extension bar.
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simping for the establishment by… pointing out how the ultra wealthy produce much more emissions than most people and thus cause disproportionate climate harms that they themselves will be able to avoid many of with their massive wealth?
lol wut
Yet my neighbor shamed me for riding a motorcycle once this year
Motorcycles, having far less weight per user, should be more efficient, no?
As long as you’re not riding a big bore super duper noisy exhaust idgaf.
A tiny 390 that eats like a gallon per 100km in a city. I also do not get stuck in traffic jams which also contributes.
The MythBusters did that one, obviously the info is a bit out of date now but IIRC over the three decades of models they tested they found that motorcycles, while more fuel efficient per mile, have none of the pollution controls of cars so they put out more emissions per mile than the average car of the same age.
hanrahanTo give this some context, to be in the richest 1% for income, you need to earn about $80k USD equivalent per year or have a net wealth of about $1.2Million USD equivalent.
https://daadscholarship.com/how-much-money-need-to-earn-to-join-top-1-of-the-world-in-2025/
Our annual emissions per person for a sustainable emsiions budget is aboit 2-3t per year. Mostly were relying on the poor to do their bit eg the average Ethipoan emits aboit 0.2t per year. The average American about 15t.
Anyone who owns a large dog, or flys, or eats lots of beef, or drives a car is emitting morw then theiir share
We could start by banning all flying.
As Professor Kevin Anderson has talked of often, if we had the richest 10% live like the average European we could cut emissions by 40%, not enough but a good start and could be easiely implemented in a month.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/07/un-expert-human-rights-climate-crisis-economy
Outgoing special rapporteur David Boyd says ‘there’s something wrong with our brains that we can’t understand how grave this is’
I really think that’s misinformation.
If you earn 80k$ USD but live in a city where your costs are 30k$USD for rent and food, and you pay taxes of 40% (leaves you with 48k$USD), that’s 18k$USD. That’s 1.5k$ /month that still has to pay for insurances, transport, etc. Where I live, it’s at 400€/month at least just for the car because public transport sucks ass here. Insurances are about 200€/month for me but I assume that can be more if you’re at 80k$USD.
All in all, about 1k$ or less per month disposable income. Is that really 1%er life?
That means that I’m in the top 10% along with nearly everybody in my country and my life isn’t glorious. Far from it. If 80k$USD is 1% and just 12k difference means you have to start cutting back on stuff like sharing the apartment, getting cheaper insurances, living in a cheaper place further away from work, buying cheaper groceries, not going to the restaurant or ordering in, cancelling subscriptions and so on, then 1% really doesn’t mean much.
And all that is a single person! Imagine having a family. 80k would be nowhere near enough to start a family, raise children with activities, pay for tuition or anything else. That’s 1%? No way.
If I earned 80k in the middle of bumfuck nowhere where I live, sure, that would be amazing. That’s not going to happen though.
IMO statements like that are from napkin calculations that use averages or medians that do not correct for anything and ignore exponentials. I’d really like to see classification of 1% by net income. I bet it would be very different than just gross income across all countries.
Thanks for the info. Living in the US without a car I’m left wondering how much time it takes for me to use my share. I’d wager I haven’t passed it yet but I’m not naive enough to think it’s much more than a month.
Hellfire103The world’s richest 1 % have a net worth of just over 1 million USD or more. The world’s richest 10 % have a net worth of around 83 000 USD or more.
If humanity was a just another species of our size, its sustainable population would count half a million individuals.
Photosynthetic primary productivity calculations put a hard ceiling at about half a billion.
I think a safe long term population will be less than a hundred million. At a roughly Edo period Japan technology level.
And just ten days in, folks - for the top 1%. It seems the richest 0.1% needed only three.
While, ironically, the immediate climate crisis affects the poor and marginalized. Then when they come knocking on our door for help, we’re told by certain loud voices that it’s the immigrants who are at fault.
When the people wake up, I can’t imagine what they’ll do to the empathy-starved elite. It won’t be pretty.
Pretty? It’ll be beautiful.
I’m losing hope that it will happen in our lifetime. There’s just too many brainwashed idiots who rabidly support facism
I’m fairly certain I will die in WWIII before being able to see that glory.
In ww2. 70 million civilians died in Europe alone
I live about 4 hrs away from a Minuteman lll AFB (and 13 hrs away from another one). Depending on how the wind blows a nuclear strike could take out tens of millions.
5 days ago USA Today did an article with fallout data in the so-called Sponge region.
https://www.usatoday.com/graphics/interactives/us-nuclear-weapons-expansion-fallout-map/
Note that the world’s top 1% is 83 million people, which includes way more than 1% of the population of places like the US and western Europe.
If you’re a “middle class” homeowner in a high cost-of-living area, you’re part of this statistic.
Yeah but within those 1% the pattern essentially is the same where a small minority puts out way more CO2 than the average person
I expect even some bigger gaps, because top 1% is usually when you start having enough money to have good living standards efficiently. I.e. at this point you have the option of having efficient construction and waste less on cooling and heating, you can afford more sustainable clothing, both in terms of material and durability, etc. But unfortunately lots of people just decide to turbocharge destructive consumption instead.
I mean, accounting for purchasing power parity, you wouldn’t, by definition.
How dare you question your social betters.
Now go back to sorting your recycling.