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Comment by vladms | Hacker News Reader

Wealth distribution is an issue, but lots of "wealth" is due to stuff that is owned by some and used by many.

Take a landlord as an example: he might have 100 houses and own 99% of the wealth in a village, but if the houses are inhabited, people still use them. If those people want to use a 300 sq meter houses rather than 50 sq meter studios, they do contribute as well to the climate issue.

This holds for other fields as well. Example: "... private air travel accounted for 6.3% of the ‘total commercial plus private aviation emissions’ in the USA in 2019, and 7.9% in 2021." https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01775-z

I honestly can't say that 92.1% which is from "normal" population is ignorable.

There are no easy solution and everybody is responsible by different degrees. Pointing fingers and wanting "others" to fix it first is not in my view something that ever worked.

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Your simplistic take is fundamentally wrong. It would take someone in the bottom 99% of the world's population more than 1,500 years to match the personal lifetime carbon footprint of a billionaire.

People in the top 1% can be attributed with 25% of emissions when you take their investments into account also.

But most importantly, they are the ones who actually "steer the boat". They are responsible for the utter lack of proper action against the pollution.

Your "arguments" are precisely the deflection they employ to steer public attention away from them. Notice the utter absurdity of asking the bottom 99% of humanity to take responsibility for what they have absolutely no control over.

In the event that it helps: telling people that they're wrong repeatedly is not a very effective way to get your point across.

It certainly doesn't help them, but it does help others reading the comment chain.

> Notice the utter absurdity of asking the bottom 99% of humanity to take responsibility for what they have absolutely no control over.

I notice the absurdity of you suggesting you have no responsibility.

It is a matter of how you choose the percentage. You choose 99%. If you would have said 50%, than whoops, suddenly you would include yourself in the responsible part. I claim that most rich people (western countries) are in the responsible part and maybe they should start reason like that.

You claim that rich people shouldn't fly. I would be fine with nobody flying. Or, even, with only rich people flying but not more than today (that would be still a 10x reduction in CO2!).

In my opinion too many people think in the terms of "what should the others do" rather in terms of "what should we all do", so that they have an excuse to do nothing.

You consistently try to re-frame the matter in a factually incorrect way.

While average individuals do have responsibility, theirs is many orders of magnitude smaller. Not only from their personal impact being comparatively minuscule, but because their objective possibilities to make substantial changes is negligible.

It's not "a matter of how you choose the percentage": the distribution is as it is, a "hockey stick" shape. The numbers just help to understand that.

Western people are far from being uniform in their wealth. While generally certainly substantially richer than other parts of the world, their societies nonetheless are wildly uneven in their wealth-distribution. You might want to look at actual data on the subject, your intuition is way off.

You're right on principle in that collective action is needed. But the reality of the matter is, collective action in western societies is captured by the rich. They control the media, the purse and the government effectively.

> I honestly can't say that 92.1% which is from "normal" population is ignorable.

It would be even harder to ignore if the 0.003% of the population causing 7.9% of the emissions were banned from private flight and had to start doing "normal" flight like everyone else :)

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