Richest 0.1% (8M) produce more carbon pollution than 3.5B
oxfam.org
oxfam.org
> a person with a 20% share in a company has 20% of its emissions allocated to their shareholder emissions
While shareholders obviously hold a greater degree of control over a company's emissions than a random consumer, assigning 100% of the blame for oil company emissions to the owners and 0% to people buying oil seems insane.
Also, filtering only for owners that control a 10% or higher stake masively skews the results as large portions of companies are held by the general public in much smaller quantities via 401ks, pensions, etc.
Considering everyone is in index (or mutual) funds these days, do they actually own any shares in the underlying companies? I’m not sure they do? The fund surely owns shares of various companies, but the holders of the fund aren’t shareholders in the underlying companies.
Perhaps this is a silly point to make, but the fund providers will show up as 10% owners if the general public has any significant stake in these companies.
Ok well people are obviously going to keep doing it, so what is the point of caring about fault to begin with if you can't do anything about it? We at least have legal control over capital.
Anyway you can blame basically anything on the masses of people; it's just a fucking stupid train of thought with (again) zero utility. It's the nonreligious liberal version of praying to stop school shootings.
- Cheep Chinese EVs
- Another attempt (ugh) at getting Detroit to cooperate
- Denser housing
- Higher gas/carbon taxes
should all contribute to people driving with gas less in the relatively near future.
Blaming the owners of oil companies doesn't help fix emissions problems, becuse oil companies are going to pollute a ton essentially regardless of who owns them. The real solution to that problem is to reduce the global consumption and demand for oil.
Blindly hoping humans choose to behave differently without removing the pressures that cause them to act such a way is fucked up. The way you reduce demand in a capitalist society is by beating board members to death until society "decides" to improve.
Or we could figure out a collectively rational way to manage the economy, the blood flow of all humanity. Just a thought. Or we could stick to hope and drive humanity off a cliff
For example, many countries are already passing laws to limit the sale of new ICE vehicles and/or to provide incentives to own electric vehicles. And these laws are effective - we can track new vehicle sales and see that we are tending in a positive direction.
Laws are the end of the political process, not the beginning.
Case in point, gas taxes just make people grumble and not necessarily switch to electric cars.
You know what doesn't make people grumble? Cheap solar panels / cheap cars that are the result of planned investment on a continent scale, funded by the government through both research and investment grants.
Money is power, and power is political. Passing laws without changing economic policies is how a country goes to irrelevance.
In the modern age one needs a long term investment plan. Without it, the entrenched powers (big oil, etc) exert their enormous influence to keep a country backwards. You need to fight capital power with capital power.
I can't imagine how someone can believe something so stupid. So if we kill the owners or board members of an oil company, the company ceases to produce and the total oil consumption decreases by the amount that company used to produce? Is this really what you believe?
Besides, yes I have better ideas- the ones we are currently implementing now, reducing the demand of fossil fuels by providing alternatives. The problem is that energy is what keeps 8 billion people alive. Cut the flow of energy or substantially increase its price, and billions will die.
> billions will die
That's going to happen regardless. We can't produce sufficient fertilizer.
You need a government willing to invest and spend trillions on their policy agendas (clean energy, etc). You need a government that recognizes the enormous power that capital and finance have, and moves to curtail them.
FDR did this, and Wall Street hated him. Post WW2, during Bretton Woods, the conference that would decide the economic fate of the world for 2-3 decades, no banker was allowed to attend.
People have forgotten but Bretton Woods was a planned economy. Fixed exchange rates, fatories told what not to and what to produce. The government intervening to keep the costs of goods to a certain level.
The post war boom was a highly controlled experiment by New Dealers that had lived through the Great Depression and wanted to avoid such a scenario at all costs.
Yeah, you can totally blame them, hold them accountable, and it will help fix emissions problems.
But what’s the appropriate allocation? I don’t think it’s zero. It shouldn’t be a larger percentage than their shareholding.
There are other examples. Eg someone who manufactures or sells dangerous items. Drugs, alcohol, guns.
They have some degree of liability in many jurisdictions. They aren't entirely responsible for what their products do. But are they zero percent responsible?
that answer might be a more accurate number than the percentage of their shareholding.
Eg should the responsibility be on tobacco smokers to look after themselves, or governments to regulate/restrict/ban.
like should we say that a brewer is morally culpable for deaths due to alcoholism and assign them a percentage of this blame based on market cap or something?
Because ultimately the way we organize society is we have a democracy and we vote on representatives to make the laws. Companies actually don't get to directly cut public transit, they have to convince voters to do that.
And there's the whole thing about the US political system, which discourages any more than 2 parties, which disincentivizes members of those parties from actually following through on campaign promises vis a vis lobbying money for their reelection campaign and future positions on the boards of companies whose laws they decide on. Then the information who to vote for comes from media companies owned by...
Plus, some people's votes are simply more equal than others’. And sometimes we can ignore some people's votes by cheating just a little bit (see Bush vs Gore).
There are simply so many factors at play here that I still think twisting this as an "individual choice" problem is disingenuous at best. There are people who have the power to make changes, but it's not your average Joe on an average salary.
I'm not talking about candidates reneging on their promises, places that are voting in favor of public transit but got messed up by their ancestors, etc. - I'm talking about people voting today for politicians that are clearly pro-oil and follow through on that.
The exceptions are driving and flying. 8M is more than the private jet users, I assume. Getting rid of ICE driving is going very well (outside fossil-Luddite America).
Getting rid of flying is harder, but I fully support a rail bridge across the Bearing Strait. I'll take long sleeper trains working remote before I get to my old world vacation proper. This is good for circadian rhythm too.
Have you been to Siberia or Alaska? If you're not flying you're going to have a LONG drive once you get to either side.
You don’t have to ban a thing for 100% of cases, there will always be outliers. My wife and I love driving deep into the wilderness. But still the vast majority of our travel is routes with heavy traffic, let’s replace those trips
Yes, this is a very, very, very large Capital project :)
Large capital project = extremely high carbon cost
Producing cement, moving aggregate, and pouring concrete takes an immense amount of fuel.
It is not their money. It is our resources that they are wasting. We need to better provide for our fellow humans even if that costs the rich a percentage of their luxuries.
And let's not forget about the top 0.01%. The smaller the percentage, the more depraved the rich are, and the more they use their money to influence politics and increase poverty and suffering.
And it seems that it touched some sensible point as the comment is at -3 right now.
That does not change that billionaires are incompatible with capitalism. They have too much power, so instead of reducing costs, increasing production or providing better services they just play to be god with our resources. And they monopolize the economy, stop competition, and kill capitalism. And I think that capitalism is not that good and needs a lot of help from the government to function, but it was better than authoritarian waste.
The overall world carbon gini coefficient is less than the wealth coefficient. And this is totally expected: ultra-rich people cannot consume fast enough to pollute more in proportion to how much richer they are. For example, to do this would private jets, they would have to be paying for other people to ride separate private jets, as there is only so much time they want to spend in an airplane themselves.
A carbon tax might not hit private jets hard enough, but it would definitely hit "regular people's" (still rich by global standard's) air travel, and that would lower a lot of emissions.
And, moreover, inequality breaks democracy.
Their ability to spend effectively infinite amounts of money makes them nearly immune to prosecution, and even moreso to litigation. They also spend it on lobbying, which in many cases amounts to buying the loyalty of Congresspeople.
You "only" need ~$7 million to crack the global 0.1%. By income it's around $600k/year. That's nowhere close to private jet money.