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Personal carbon footprint of the rich is vastly underestimated

cam.ac.uk

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Re: Personal carbon footprint of the rich is vastly underestimated

#41

Post by euroderf »

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.

> carbon dividend: tax carbon emissions at the source and distribute the revenue equally among residents

I've always thought this would be the best way to get political support from a majority. There's enough data out there that the gov't ought to be able to (a) come up with some very firm predictions of who would come out ahead and (b) whip up a website for people to profile their own case.

Re: Personal carbon footprint of the rich is vastly underestimated

#42

Post by dsign »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #38
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?

There is some hair-splitting around the term, but here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction

Re: Personal carbon footprint of the rich is vastly underestimated

#43

Post by llamaimperative »

orourke wrote: post #30

Because “carbon” in these conversations is a proxy to “stuff” as an important input to everything. Of course, the rich have more stuff. Interestingly, focusing on carbon allows for applying a moral dimension to having more stuff: it’s not only wrong to have more because I have less and don’t like that, but because you are hurting is all.

No not really. Carbon emissions refers to carbon emissions which are put into our shared air and affect our shared environment.

Re: Personal carbon footprint of the rich is vastly underestimated

#44

Post by llamaimperative »

newsclues wrote: post #16

This has been obvious for quite some time, and is a key criticism of the "climate deniers". The poor and middle class pay and suffer from climate change initiatives while the rich and powerful fly around on private jets to climate conferences. Clearly there is something going on here.

Can you explain the chain of reasoning from "rich people shouldn't be flying on private jets to climate conferences" to climate denialism?

As a refresher, climate denialism "is rejection of the idea that changes in the Earth's climate or weather patterns are caused by human activity."

Re: Personal carbon footprint of the rich is vastly underestimated

#45

Post by pxeger1 »

jvanderbot wrote: post #19
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.

I agree. Imagine if we had tried to tackle ozone depletion by saying "thou shall not buy CFCs nor use products or services which make use of CFC" and had created a "CFC personal footprint" and set about finding those individuals whose choices seemed to create the worst measure of CFC footprint. It's just madness! Instead we regulated them and the problem resolved.

The reason CFC regulation succeeded is just because they turned out to be easy to replace. This is not the case for hydrocarbons and concrete

Re: Personal carbon footprint of the rich is vastly underestimated

#46

Post by tempfile »

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.

Yes, that is my point (although the other reply is correct - the diets of the rich are generally more carbon-intensive).

Re: Personal carbon footprint of the rich is vastly underestimated

#47

Post by tempfile »

bendigedig wrote: post #39
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?

To communicate what fact? That some random people on the street can't guesstimate carbon footprints very well?

Re: Personal carbon footprint of the rich is vastly underestimated

#48

Post by fsndz »

max_streese wrote: post #13
fsndz wrote: post #3

[flagged]

The article itself states this too (though without the undertone). To me this does not undermine the research though. Why would it?

because most damage is institutional so most of the work has to be done by institutions (states) and corporations. you can track the carbon footprint of rich people all you want, this won't change a thing until states and corporations are forced or voluntarily do what is necessary. It is like trying to do cost optimisation in your company by slashing the department with the lowest budget while leaving the ones with big fat budgets almost untouched. Doesn't make sense, will not work. Personal responsibilisation will only make sense in a framework where states and corporations first do their fair share (see yellow vest in France).

Re: Personal carbon footprint of the rich is vastly underestimated

#49

Post by bendigedig »

tempfile wrote: post #47
bendigedig wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

To communicate what fact? That some random people on the street can't guesstimate carbon footprints very well?

To communicate the fact to people that they and others likely misunderstand their own carbon foot print.

This is the kind of thing that makes it on to the news because it connects something abstract with everyday people.

Re: Personal carbon footprint of the rich is vastly underestimated

#50

Post by kazinator »

> For example, recycling, shutting off the lights when leaving a room and avoiding plastic packaging are lower-impact behaviours that are overestimated in terms of how much they can reduce one’s carbon footprint.

Turning off the lights is almost a don't-give-a-damn item in the age of the LED, when you have 6W doing the job of 60W.

Recycling is a scam that was originally introduced by the plastics industry in order to overcome people's objections against discardable plastic objects. Most of it ends up in landfills.

To really cut your carbon footprint, don't take flights.

There is a term jet set for the rich, referring to their means to fly frequently all over the place, internationally and domestically. That spews carbon like anything.

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