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Personal carbon footprint of the rich is vastly underestimated

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Re: Personal carbon footprint of the rich is vastly underestimated

#31

Post by voiper1 »

OK I can't even (easily) find the numbers.

What is an average person's carbon footprint? what is a rich person's carbon footprint? 10x, 100x?

Best I see right now is https://www.visualcapitalist.com/co2-emissions-by-income/ which is from 2019 and doesn't say exactly who's covered - I assume it's a global mix?

Income Group Average income (USD) Share of CO₂ Emissions Top 1% $310K 15% Next 9% $90K 34% Middle 40% $16K 43% Bottom 50% $2K 8%

So the top 10% by income account for 49% of the carbon emissions, and the next 40% for 43%, and the lowest 50% for 8%.

So that would mean if I got this right: Top 1%: 94x / year / person Next 9%: 24x / year / person Middle 40%: 7x / year / person Bottom 50%: 1X/year/person

So the top 1% person uses about 14x more carbon than a middle 40% person. Over one order of magnitude. I actually expected it to be far worse, what with the yachts and private planes.

Any better sources/numbers for this?

Re: Personal carbon footprint of the rich is vastly underestimated

#32

Post by peteey »

LUmBULtERA wrote: post #20

I don't think I disagree with anything in the article. However, I'd weary that many people extrapolate the conclusions to mean that the average person shouldn't do anything differently. For many many people in the world (not all yet), their ROI is positive for most household and transportation electrification projects. That is, they not only help the environment by switching to electric appliances and cars rather tha…

>electric bikes

Its not safe to cycle for practical purposes in my city.

The city make gestures like painting a few road shoulders green and nature trails for exercise. This does not get me to work, daycare, the dentist, etc.

Generally in America, bikes are more of a novelty than transportation.

Re: Personal carbon footprint of the rich is vastly underestimated

#33

Post by [deleted] »

devit wrote: post #22

Aren't "personal carbon footprints", whether of the rich or not, insignificant compared to industrial carbon emissions? I can find 3.7 * 10^13 kg CO2 for energy yearly worldwide. On the other hand, there are around 25 * 10^3 private jets each emitting 4.9 CO2 kg/mile, with mach 1 being 767 miles/hour, which gives 4.9 * 25 * 10^3 * 767 * 24 * 365 kg CO2 = 8.23 * 10^11 per year assuming the jets are running all the tim…

[deleted]

Re: Personal carbon footprint of the rich is vastly underestimated

#34

Post by black6 »

austin-cheney wrote: post #26

However, participants from the top 10% were more likely to support certain climate policies, such as increasing the price of electricity during peak periods, taxing red meat consumption or subsidising carbon dioxide removal technologies such as carbon capture and storage. I bet they are. Regulation impacts everybody equally. So if you have a poor person who is responsible for 1% of the emissions compared to a rich pe…

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.

Anatole France

Re: Personal carbon footprint of the rich is vastly underestimated

#35

Post by theluketaylor »

david-gpu wrote: post #5

This is why I am in favor of a carbon dividend: tax carbon emissions at the source and distribute the revenue equally among residents. This way the average person doesn't experience any difference. The main challenge is finding a reasonable way of dealing with imports.

Also a fan of revenue neutral carbon pricing that uses a standard dividend. Pricing externalities does seem like the only realistic way to solve tragedy of the commons issues like climate change. The weight of regulating individual actions would be impossibly complex.

I also think pricing alone isn't sufficient since there are many poor people who can't really make different choices about their consumption even if they want to. Without choice carbon pricing loses effectiveness, since there isn't any way to optimize your costs.

The edge case I think about a lot is a poor urban/suburban renter without access to functional public transit. Since they rent they can't take steps to improve the efficiency of their dwelling. They can't rely on transit to get to work due to poor service reliability. Sprawling car-centric development means cycling is dangerous and far, so they must maintain a private vehicle, which is likely to be old and inefficient in order to be affordable. A dividend is unlikely to be sufficient to fundamentally change any of these conditions since this person is likely to be roughly revenue-neutral.

Re: Personal carbon footprint of the rich is vastly underestimated

#36

Post by lostmsu »

tempfile wrote: post #28
devit wrote: post #22

Aren't "personal carbon footprints", whether of the rich or not, insignificant compared to industrial carbon emissions? I can find 3.7 * 10^13 kg CO2 for energy yearly worldwide. On the other hand, there are around 25 * 10^3 private jets each emitting 4.9 CO2 kg/mile, with mach 1 being 767 miles/hour, which gives 4.9 * 25 * 10^3 * 767 * 24 * 365 kg CO2 = 8.23 * 10^11 per year assuming the jets are running all the tim…

This definitely gets said a lot, but I am not sure it's a meaningful thing to say. After all, something like 20% of emissions come from agriculture. If you count that as industrial emissions (surely it is an industry) then it must dwarf personal footprints. But the food you eat surely belongs to your personal footprint as well? I'm not confident that when people make this comparison, they account for the double count…

The rich don't eat 20x food though.

Re: Personal carbon footprint of the rich is vastly underestimated

#37

Post by bendigedig »

lostmsu wrote: post #36
tempfile wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This definitely gets said a lot, but I am not sure it's a meaningful thing to say. After all, something like 20% of emissions come from agriculture. If you count that as industrial emissions (surely it is an industry) then it must dwarf personal footprints. But the food you eat surely belongs to your personal footprint as well? I'm not confident that when people make this comparison, they account for the double count…

The rich don't eat 20x food though.

They eat a lot more meat though. And that's much more CO_2 intensive than grains and legumes.

Re: Personal carbon footprint of the rich is vastly underestimated

#38

Post by steve_adams_86 »

dsign wrote: post #23

Doesn't it follow that if we all get rich, then things will be much worse? But let's do another thought experiment: take everything from everybody. Clothing, housing, cars, infrastructure. If you also take away agriculture, the current population's numbers will starve, but not before foraging anything left. If you don't, then the environmental footprint of a naked and destitute human population in its current numbers…

Which great extinction did humans cause in the past?

Re: Personal carbon footprint of the rich is vastly underestimated

#39

Post by bendigedig »

tempfile wrote: post #27

Is grossly underestimated by whom? Oh, by just random people off the street? I am not sure why we are surprised that people with no expertise on the topic have absolutely no idea what affects their carbon footprint.

But surely that's the point of this study? i.e. to help communicate this fact to the masses? You know, with evidence instead of hunches and stuff?

Re: Personal carbon footprint of the rich is vastly underestimated

#40

Post by bottom999mottob »

paulcole wrote: post #2

Any time you spend thinking or breath you spend talking about someone else’s carbon footprint is a total fool’s errand. Nobody will ever change their carbon footprint because of what someone else tells them. There will always be someone worse than them who they can point to and say, “Well I’m not as bad as them so they should change. If people cared at all about this, they’d change their own behavior. And it’s fine t…

People are allowed to be outraged that Taylor Swift generates a larger carbon footprint than the average person... This is a pretty solipsistic point of view that acknowledges that we do indeed live in a society. Doesn't mean we can't try to do better in the face of impending doom.
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