America’s wealthiest people are also some of the world’s biggest polluters – not only because of their massive homes and private jets, but because of the fossil fuels generated by the companies they invest their money in.
Every day we’re here just to learn billionaires & families should be crushed and their wealth redistributed amongst third world countries.
That would just make other billionaires somewhere else. The problem is the system not the people
Yup, the problem is firmly the system, but suggesting a worldwide change to socialism/communism is less “palatable” and believable by the average person.
So “eat the rich” is a decent compromise for a comment not intended to approach any sort of complex answer, while still being a move in a better direction than suggesting things to continue as they are.
If anyone is asking how do we pay to solve the climate crisis. I think its pretty clear who should be paying.
Anyone else just feel like we should eat the rich?
I think it’s way overdue.
On one hand, yes, on the other, eating shit isn’t very appealing.
Envy and jealousy will get you nowhere in life. Strive to do better. Maybe join the upper classes through hard work and sacrifice?
We already work and strife more than those upper classes ever would in their entire life.
How about those upper classes pay their due taxes instead of using loopholes to be a leach on society?
Either that or we eat them.
Thanks for the suggestion I just became a billionaire
“You don’t understand. Ferengi workers don’t want to stop the exploitation. We want to find a way to become the exploiters.”
— Rom
CO² tax on oil and fuel production i say.
Every time I see such evaluations I get this picture of an economically illiterate person just making assumptions from some statistics they are unable to comprehend. A bit like with electrical engineering.
And in any case the useful metric would be pollution per dollar (or per joule) spent by a person, not totals. I don’t think I have to explain why, it’s obvious.
Why would capital have anything to do with it?
A private jet that pollutes 1.2 metric ton for a flight where a regular diesel car would pollute 0.3 metric ton. Isn’t going to be better just because the private jet costs 4 million while the car is only 30 thousands.
Pollution is pollution, doesn’t matter how much it costs. The planet doesn’t care. It will die anyway and take us with it.
So please, tell us why it is “obvious” to you.
but because of the fossil fuels generated by the companies they invest their money in.
Lemme go ahead and roll my eyes here. Yes, American Airlines produces a significant percentage of the world’s greenhouse emissions. But they burn that fuel for the passengers, not just for the benefit of shareholders. Same with ExxonMobil, BP, etc.
Consumption is what drives pollution. Investments to profit off of that consumption is secondary.
Their biggest success is convincing common folks it’s out fault.
Consumption driven by advertising based on Edward Bernays work, which explicitly intends to create fissures within people and then sell them cures to the fissures they created,m. Just disallowing advertising would have a substantial effect on consumption.
We need a 95% tax bracket for anyone that makes more than a few million/year.
A few million/year is a reasonable amount of money for a (highly) successful person to make. A wealth tax for people making over a billion or just $100M per year is enough to fix a lot of the problems in this country without destroying the “American dream”
The way I see it, if you make enough money to buy a nice, moderate house in California or Hawaii once per year, you are already making too much money. My cutoff would probably be closer to $2-3M… though I’d be willing to go higher if paired with an annual “wealth tax”… say, if you have a value of over - for example - $20M (incl. stocks and any other non-liquid assets) you must pay 20% of any excess value in taxes annually. That would be on top of the 95% multimillionaire income tax.
There’s a steep cliff between the 95% and the .01%. I wonder what proportion is just the .01
The income of the top 1% alone – households making more than $550,000 – was linked to 15% to 17% of this pollution.
The report also identified “super-emitters.” They are almost exclusively among the wealthiest top 0.1% of Americans, concentrated in industries such as finance, insurance and mining, and produce around 3,000 tons of carbon pollution a year. To put that in perspective, it’s estimated people should limit their carbon footprint to around 2.3 tons a year to tackle climate change.
Thank you for finding that for me
So fucking sick of billionaires
What do you even do when you exceed 100 Millions?
They must be mentally sick in some way “just one mooare billion pleaaase”
I imagine its just a prick waving contest between the rich. They just compare the number in their account to the others and want to have a bigger number.
TL;DR: one doesn’t become rich by respecting others.
Feel like some people here are being emotionally invested thinking this study is a sort of a blame game encouraging us to berate the wealthy individuals for their investments. I can’t say whether the researchers had this in mind or not but from reading the study it looks like an aim of devising this metric was to figure out a strategy of investment taxation to deter wealthy people from investing in industries that are ravaging the planet:
By linking GHG emissions with the incomes it enables our work has quantified the scale of emissions inequality in U.S. society and the extreme and growing concentration of emissions among very wealthy households. It also offers some suggestions on how accelerated decarbonization and revenue generation might occur, such as an income or shareholder-based carbon tax that reflects the GHG intensity of one’s income sources or financial assets. This is distinct from consumer facing carbon taxes that rely on individuals decarbonizing the economy by shifting their consumption to less GHG intensive goods and services and thereby encouraging companies to respond to their new preferences. A consumer-facing approach assumes individual consumers have the knowledge, financial resources, and agency to shift spending and the power to alter corporate decision making on the GHG intensity of their supply chain and operations. An alternative income or shareholder facing carbon tax puts pressure on executives and large shareholders (i.e. those with the most economic and corporate power) to act in their own self-interest and decarbonize their supply chain and operations in order to reduce taxes on their compensation and investments. Recent work has calculated that a climate inspired wealth tax could indeed be an effective tool to raise revenue for adaptation and mitigation efforts [52, 53].
Sounds like a conservative nummber
