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The richest Americans account for 40 percent of U.S. climate emissions
- didgetmaster 3y agoI would wager that most airline pilots find themselves in the top 10% in terms of wealth and/or income. Are all the emissions of the planes they fly figured into the calculation for this study? I was having trouble following what is being calculated.
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- dullcrisp 3y agoSeems like they’d have to be counted multiple times between the oil company investors, the airline investors, and the passengers, etc. Disclaimer though I haven’t read the article, but I am curious how they do the accounting. Edit: or are they considering the entity that owns the fuel that’s being burned? But the whole issue is that the carbon is an externality of other economic processes. I could offer to accept ownership of all carbon emitted by any company for a nominal fee and become the world’s only polluter according to that methodology.
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- c0nducktr 3y agoThe pilot's fly the plane, but they aren't the reason the plane flies.
- troyvit 3y agoSo if we all eat the top 10% of rich Americans would we fart out 40% of earth's methane? The answer is "No" because this article is talking mainly about the investing patterns of the top 10% of Americans, and those investments (so they say) fund more emissions. Something smells off about that (and it's not the rich person I just ate). I guess I don't believe that it's purely the investments of the top 10% that are driving these companies that emit so much.
- spullara 3y agoIf you define emissions as basically equivalent to money you are bound to see a correlation. Original article: https://journals.plos.org/climate/article?id=10.1371/journal.pclm.0000190 https://journals.plos.org/climate/article?id=10.1371/journal...
- mancerayder 3y agoI came to the article thinking I might have found something interesting to learn, and then I came across this: Starr and his colleagues analyzed income data across U.S. households from 1990 to 2019 and linked it to emissions generated directly and indirectly from that income. They included income tied to emissions related to the operation of a business, such as from a coal-fired power plant. But they also included income, such as from investments, that supported services or products from those industries. “As you move up the income ladder, an increasing share of emissions is associated with investments,” said Starr So this reads almost like an implicit tautology, if I can phrase it like that. Basically, investments are tied to climate emissions -> wealthier people have more of these (because wealth is defined this way, hence tautology) -> wealthy are tied to carbon emissions. Not useful. I was hoping to read about air travel or large homes or such.
- mancerayder 3y agoThere should be a term for social science clickbait, which is a lot of what these social science 'studies' seem to turn into.
- donw 3y agoGiven the replication crisis, it's safe to assume pretty much everything from the social sciences at this point in time is outright false, if not deliberate propaganda -- because if you're funded by the Muppets Are Better At Everything Foundation, you sure aren't going to publish a paper titled "Actually, Muppets Are Just Puppets With Extra Proctology".
- m463 3y agoRich landowning cattle ranchers generate more greenhouse gas emissions than vegan college graduates that recycle.
- s1artibartfast 3y agoIt all comes down to attribution of emissions to producers vs consumers, and has been debated adnauseum. Is the rancher emitting or the hamburger consumer. Is the plane passenger emitting, or a shareholder. Ect
- phelm 3y agoShould read “The richest 10 percent”
- Jeff_Brown 3y agoThis is not merely dumb but actively harmful -- people will read the headline and think, "I'm not in the elite, and therefore have no climate responsibility." (It's dumb because the measure of interest is consumption, not investment. It's not exactly the gas companies' fault that consumers use gas; if they quit, someone else would start.)
- ourmandave 3y ago“As you move up the income ladder, an increasing share of emissions is associated with investments,” said Starr. It's not rich people flying first class or whatever, but their investments in the worst CO2 emitters.
- protoman3000 3y agoThe profits generated and accumulated in the wealthy class should in the long run not exist - theoretically. But of course they do, and the answer to that is that somebody else is paying the price for their externalities. I’m not jealous and wish for everybody to be able to achieve wealth, but please with due calculation of everybody involved. Because the goal of this economic game is not that you win and I lose, but that we both win sufficiently and then I don’t care if you have a nicer boat. But we didn’t play this game, instead your wealth directly correlates with how much you pollute the commons, we both lose. The credit you own has no legitimation anymore. Why should we continue to act as if does? Ofc the situation is extremely complicated and we can’t just disown or let the polluters “pay back” immediately, but things evidently have to change for this damage to both of us to stop.
- mancerayder 3y ago>But we didn’t play this game, instead your wealth directly correlates with how much you pollute the commons, we both lose. The credit you own has no legitimation anymore. Why should we continue to act as if does? Doesn't that include index funds in your 401k? Bank funds that you might own that invest in polluting companies? And don't wealthier people have more shares of stocks in general? I am asking someone to disprove my assertion that the article leans on a self-referential argument about wealth and carbon emissions. Or are we saying wealthy people (top 10 percent, we're told) invest specifically in these companies and not others? How would a clean wealthy person store or invest their wealth? Real estate, gold?
- protoman3000 3y agoI can understand that you think in specifics but think for a second about the general value principles behind e.g. digging oil out of the ground. The value is the oil, the cost is the work for extraction and the pollution. Somebody having done the work to get out the oil is attributed credits because they did the work, had the cost in this referential way that you complained about below. How many credits they get is determined by demand and supply, where theoretically everybody looks at all the costs and utility and comes up with their idea of a price and then the market clears. Now, then problem evidently is: We didn’t consider the costs your extraction put on all of us, the pollution. It was just “nah it’s fine”, but all things considered it’s not. Maybe the calculation is so bad that you now owe us for putting this cost on us - which would incentivize nobody to do that again. But we didn’t do it, and we gave you so many more credits than you deserved on all rational arguments that the whole picture is skewed.
- learn-forever 3y agoThere's quite a lot of climate-change journalism that seems to be less about working to solve the problems and more about agitating against capitalism
- gremlinsinc 3y agothey're often the same problem, though. So it's a fair evaluation.
- c0nducktr 3y agoWhat do you think that is?
- primitivesuave 3y agoIt seems like they started with the conclusion they wanted (i.e. shareholders should bear financially responsible for the emissions of their investments) and designed a study that would confirm it. A more interesting and meaningful comparison would be of households and lifestyle/consumption habits.
- pangolinja 3y agoI assume this still ignores the environmental impact of the US military, the world's biggest polluter by far.
- Etrnl_President 3y agoWow! Almost as much as the Department of Defense.