Majority of private jets carrying 3 passengers or less, releasing 10 times as much carbon per passenger than a commercial flight.
As a peasant, I don’t think reducing my carbon footprint will offset the disgusting (increasing) display of greed from the elites.
The easy solution is to just directly tax carbon emissions and dump the money into methods to reduce emissions (transit, trains, green construction, agricultural controls, etc.)
People don’t like taxes though, so this will never happen. An emissions-based tax is possibly the easiest way to disproportionately tax the wealthy.
Yes!!
I’ve long argued that courageous states should radically reform their tax system. Rebase the entire tax system around carbon tax, setting the level to ensure the state has the same income base.
There’s a naturally progressive tax system built into that but we could make it even more progressive by laddering up the rates as the carbon emissions increase.
Perhaps the greatest scam the rich ever pulled off was convincing the common people that climate change is somehow our fault instead of theirs. A single billionaire harms the earth an order of magnitude more in a single year than most small towns will in a decade
A single billionaire harms the earth an order of magnitude more in a single year than most small towns will in a decade
But if you and your family stop using plastic straws, turn the heat down in winter, meticulously sort all your recycling and use public transport more for the next decade, you can help Jeff Bezos offset the emissions for his next weekend trip to the Maldives!
Source needed!
I was being incredibly conservative and generous to the billionaires, considering the carbon footprint of just 125 of them is bigger than the entire nation of France
Well sort of. The source says it’s from their investments, not from their lifestyle.
Unless people have made an active choice to move their savings into an ESG pot, this will be true for everyone, just scaled according to the size of the pot.
Sort of an important mention, yes, but also sort of skewed.
As the article points out 50%-70% of their emissions are due to their investments, meaning those 125 billionaires still have more direct emissions of the size of up to half the country of france.
And I don’t think its fair to equate having some little money in the bank, with employing brokers to ensure the exploitation of human labour and planetary resources enables you and your children to live in luxury without ever having to work
The difference is living off of what you work for and needing a bank account vs living off of your capital (meaning other peoples labour)
But the “little money in the bank” is in aggregate making a huge contribution.
So it’s easy to find the people who we want to blame big. But in aggregate we all have a role to play. That’s a harder message to swallow.
Yeah I can recycle and grow my own food and compost and ride my bike and walk places as much as I want. It won’t save as much carbon in my lifetime as even one of these flights.
It’s depressing, but I still do it because I don’t want to be part of the problem and I’ll need to know how to do these things when the world really goes to shit.
We need both. The elite’s footprint is gross and disgusting, but we peasants are far more numerous, so reducing the elite’s footprint alone won’t do the trick.
the thing is, i will refuse to behave until the bigger misbehavers are held accountable
This kind of reasoning is why we are not making progress. It’s much easier to hold others to high standards when you’ve applied these to yourself first. The same goes for countries: it will be easier to pressure China/India when the West has done their part.
No, we are not making peogress because of your kind of reasoning. We need to make accountable to the bourgeois, the rulling class, even if the whole working class reduced its carbon footprint it would still not make a significant change, they must be replaced and forced to change their ways.
It’s pretty crazy how it spiked on 2020, rich really were not risking getting sick…
