Edit: Note that this article is over 8 years old.
I had to look it up, but In 2021 the top 10% were earning about $120K/year.
Also, the guardian misrepresented the study in their title. The study is about “lifestyle emissions” The top 10% don’t produce 50% of all global emissions.
Exactly. Why don’t we separate this even further? Top 1% or top 0.5% or top 0.1%? That salary is almost required from a couple living in a city (60k/person, but one person is most likely making a large chunk of it), but people living in cities have way less of a carbon footprint by living closer to the grocery store, taking public transit, shopping locally, doing recycling/compost, community gardens, walking, etc.
I traveled twice as much in my car when I lived in Mississippi but made under 1/2 what I do now in Washington. I’m way more eco conscious now too.
It’s just barely above the low-income cutoff in some SF Bay counties.
The MSM don’t split it like that for the same reason they dilute wealth inequality. Because if the masses ever put 2 and 2 together, to realize that wealth inequality and the pursuit of profit is a corrosive force in society, and an existential threat to life, liberty, democracy, the rule of law, etc, etc — the root cause of many of the largest issues facing humanity — the ultra wealthy might be forced to give up their wealth… including the owners of MSM orgs.
You can find the updated report here:
https://www.oxfam.org/en/research/confronting-carbon-inequality
According to that about half of the top 10% lived in the US and EU in 2015. With especially China, but also countries like India having seen massive economic growth that share likely went down a lot. Looking at the Guardian article that is interesting as they position that as a rich country vs poor country problem, which is not entirely true.
$1 in 2015 is worth $1.30 today(2023), thus a 30% inflation from 2015 to 2023 ; 1/1.30= 0.76 ; 0.76*10= 7.6 ; thus 7.6% produce 50% of all global emissions. i know its bikini-bottom math but it does help to extrapolate things sometimes …
That top 10 percent figure is for USA. This is talking about world wide, so likely the top 10 percent is for a lot of people in the USA, and other western countries…There are a lot of people in 3rd world countries that don’t contribute any emissions compared to the average low income person in a western country.
Also, the guardian misrepresented the study in their title. The study is about “lifestyle emissions” The top 10% don’t produce 50% of all global emissions.
Heh, typical. Probably everybody knows the meme Just 100 companies responsible for 71% of global emissions, a title of another The Guardian article?
The study (Carbon Majors Report) talks about industrial emissions (which TG conveniently omits). And CMR talks about producers (industrial groups extracting fossil fuels), not companies like Apple. And CMR sometimes lumps whole national sectors together and counts them as 1 “producer”, like Chinas coal sector. Oh, and they include “downstream emissions” which means emissions caused by using (burning) the product (like gasoline).
The Guardian seems to put “fitting narrative” over “factual information” in more than one case. Deliberate misinformation. Maybe that’s necessary in the brawl with alt-right narratives, but I still despise it.
If you’re reading this than you’re probably included in that 10%
Yeah, this is true.
From the actual report:
The richest 10% (around 630 million people) accounted for 46% of the total emissions growth – only marginally less than the 49% contributed by the middle 40%. The poorest 50% barely increased their consumption emissions at all.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-top-countries-by-wealth-per-person/
Adding up the top 10 countries’ populations doesn’t even reach 630 million.
People will probably use this to say that the top 10% need to pay for taxes and be held accountable, without realizing they’re probably in that 10%.
I’d actually like to see the 10% broken down even further.
According to the last wealth calculator I tried I’m in the 30%
which 10%? there are two on the chart
Wait until the rest of the population catches up. That graph will look like a full height chonker.
Someone please correct me if I’m wrong, but given what I know a small bit about planetary poverty, if you’re reading this from a place with heaTing or air conditioning, on your own personal smart device or computer, you aren’t in that bottom 50%.
If I remember right, even with my problems I’m not even in the bottom 60%. Some places make in a month what I make in a day, when I have work.
Rating wealth by income (which this study does) is unusual and difficult. I don’t actually see any income numbers attached to their analysis which is suspicious.
Anyway, anyone with a net worth of around 90k USD is in that top 10%. Median net worth in the US was 127k in 2019. Which means that more than half of the 350M people in this country are in the worlds richest 10% (by wealth)
Picking a random American off the street gives you better than coin toss odds of finding a person in the “mega polluter” group you see in the thumbnail graph.
Even doing everything you can to “reduce carbon footprints” it’s still going to be orders of magnitude larger than a small village farmer in the middle of Nepal.
Doesnt mean it’s not worth doing, it just means there’s a lot more to be done.
Still though, if you’re gonna split up that top 10% into 10 more parts, you will probably once again find that the top 1% is responsible for most of the emissions that the top 10% is responsible for.
Guaranteed if you own a house in the US you’re part of the world’s top 10% in terms of wealth.
That doesn’t translate directly to emissions, though, because the vast majority of emissions are industry and travel, so what you buy and how you live are much greater factors than heating and cooling. Go vegan and you instantly drop out of that “contribute to 50% of lifestyle emissions” zone.
Of the world?
A net worth of $93,170 U.S. is enough to make you richer than 90 percent of people around the world,
For reference, earning at least $100k/yr puts you in the top 10%. Earning $3k/yr puts you in the top 50%.
But how much are “lifestyle consumption emissions” compared to total emissions? I have never seen the term before, so I cannot put it in context.
What I imagine:
- if a poor person heats 30 square meters, and a rich person heats 3000 square meters, that is a lifestyle-related emission, and will differ considerably
- if a poor person drives a car, but a rich person drives a luxury car, emissions will differ, but not considerably (the poor person’s car is old, while the rich person’s car has engine volume like a truck), but if the poor person has no car, emissions will differ considerably
- however, if the rich person takes a plane ride every week, and the poor person twice per year or once per decade, that will differ considerably
- both persons will need to eat, but if the rich person eats fancy food, maybe the transport, packaging and other factors add up to make a considerable difference? or maybe not…
…etc. A breakdown of how would be nice to see.
But how much are “lifestyle consumption emissions” compared to total emissions?
Yes, good question. In another Oxfam article from 2015 (where they use the same picture as posted here), they explain the term:
emissions associated with household consumption (which we here term ‘lifestyle consumption emissions’)
(page 6)
The idea seems to be: Look at who creates demand for how much emissions. It does not matter if the emissions caused by your household purchase are created in your own country or another country, they are counted as caused by your household.
Note 1 (page 13) has additional information:
The emissions estimates presented in this paper refer to emissions from individual consumption rather than national production, based on the estimates of national consumption emissions provided by Glen Peters of the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research, Oslo. In total, individual consumption makes up 64% of global emissions in the Peters dataset, with the remaining 36% attributed to government consumption, investments (in infrastructure etc) and international transport.
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That top ten percent includes many of those upper middle class folks
I think it includes almost all the middle class of places like the US and Europe.
Based on this calculator, being long term unemployed and living off social welfare in Hamburg, Germany puts you in the global top 11%.
Global “lifestyle” emissions not total carbon emissions, that’s a pretty important difference.
And rapidly advancing economies in the third world will increasingly industrialize. They need to be supported in expanding their energy needs in a green way and not shifting everything to oil like Saudi Arabia is pushing.
So what you’re saying is, that 'despite making up only 10% of the population, The richest are responsible for 49% of the CO2 emissions?
This is lifestyle CO2 emissions. I dont know the exact factors it includes but i wouæd expect it to be things like:
- groceries
- material stuff (cars, houses)
- vacation
- etc
I dont think things like power production is included. But the graph should definetly include a list over factors
Do not fucking imply class consciousness is equivalent to racism, please and thank you.
makes me wonder when people are going to start caring about the power draw from PC’s and consoles.
I love gaming. Grew up gaming. Make my living working in the fringes of the game industry. And it makes me wonder when we’re going to discuss the clock cycles in the room…
I take comfort that the coal rollers and assholes who fly 40 miles for nachos far outweigh any contributions my aging PC generates but I do worry in the aggregate: we’re powering machines to generate heat to provide entertainment, and at some point that’s going to come under examination.
Electricity isn’t that expensive, especially if you have renewables. Stuff and transportation is. The biggest cause for co2 at the top is consumerism.
Remember that, once you have your electronics, the entertainment you get from it is competing against entertainment from physical things, or travel, or something else.
In addition, in winter that electricity is turned into heat, which you need anyway to heat up your home. And heating has always taken much more electricity than video games in my experience.
All things considered, video games are a fairly efficient form of entertainment. You can do everything digitally (cheap), and hardware can be made to be very power efficient (it just isn’t because electricity is cheap).
IIRC the thermal efficiency of a PC/console is basically the same as most electric heating implements. I.e an electric radiator or a computer converts something like 80% of the energy it draws into heat. So theoretically, if you’re heating a room with electricity, you’re not polluting more when using a computer or console in it (apart from the servers/Internet consumption for online stuff)
Computers and electric heaters turn near-100% of the power into heat, as do most other things. Heat is just a waste product, electric heaters work by effectively “wasting” the electricity into heat.
Resistance heating is 100% efficient, all the power you pull will be converted to heat.
If you heat with a heat pump then it will have >100% heating efficiency and you’ll be worse off to heat with your computer.
I imagine most computer related pollution would come from big tech companies like Google (Alphabet), Microsoft, Amazon, etc. Since servers (Google Drive, Youtube, Onedrive, AWS, AI stuff) may require regular replacement of parts and a lot of electricity.
There’s a reason they like to build their data centres next to power stations - it’s significantly cheaper. Hopefully that gives you an idea just how much power they go through…
I don’t have a console, but I’ve hooked up a Kill-A-Watt to my crazy gaming PC with a TDP > 600w. When working, browsing, listening to music, watching videos, etc, it only uses around 60w, or the same as a single incandescent light bulb. When playing a modern AAA game, it uses around 250w. Not great considering the power consumption of a Switch or Steam Deck, but orders of magnitude less than typical U.S. household heating and cooling. I’d guess AI and crypto BS uses more energy than all PCs combined. Though I guess we all indirectly use AI (or rather, get used by AI).
Even the top of the line gaming PC’s hardly draw 750w under full load, mine is pretty much the maxed out Gen4 and running stable diffusion will put it at 575w at absolute most, and that’s including my monitor and peripherals (speakers w/ subwoofer, USB etc). Normal gaming will vary, 2077 pushes it to the 450w range sometimes but not much. And even then, I’m gaming for maybe 3 hours at most?
If I were running Stable Diffusion over night, that’s one thing and it would definitely get my room to 90F. But a few hours gaming, even 8+ hours isn’t too much to account for, especially if it’s used to offset other costs - for example using an electric heater/radiator that draws 1500w and has no other use other than providing temporary heat.
I also think we have plenty of ways to game with low power if the mobile PC market is anything to go by. We don’t necessarily need 3080-4090’s drawing 500w for their full loads. Especially if we adopted other means of powering our grid, at that point it’s only an issue of the heat generation, which is sort of a necessity anyway so if we’re going this way then we may as well build homes with PC generated heating in mind! (\s but maybe lets do it?)
Expropriate them now!
You do realize that you are from the top 10% richest of the world right?
How would you know anything about my finances?
stop uttering communist blasphemy, else democracy will come pay you a visit
WTF
…and? Nothing is going change.
it does help to spread awareness about climate change, and potentially vote for a climate conscious president for once
Doesn’t work too well when everyone voting intends to be among the top 10% themselves and no one at all wants to be in the lower 50%. Sorry, but I’m super cynical these days because I (and everyone else in the developed world) learned all about global warming in detail 25+ years ago in elementary school. We knew what it was, what caused it, and how to prevent it… but no one did anything and instead we added 2 billion people to the total population since then. The awareness is already there, but no one is willing to come up with any meaningful implementable solutions because the actual solution is simply lowering emissions overall which people do not want to do.
buying useless stuff, price gouging, consumerist practices like planned obscolecense and just accumulating needless wealth all happen on the expense of climate. future decades will dictate how much people are allowed to live on this earth and hopefully how much wealth is one allowed to accumulate in a lifetime. so far we need to abolish the united states, third world has emission extent next to none, europe being europe, and china with its growth, is at least proactive toward climate (maybe should it work on human rights more maybe ? i dont know) , and even after an afterthought, living in a very hot/cold place is in fact very energy intensive: take for instance the middle east where every household is equipped with AC’s running 24/7: living in such climate is just ineffcient ( i would wager living between the northern and southern 30° parallels is a waste of energy ) also is living in canada and scandinavia beyond 60°N: so ideally living in between the 30 and 60° parallels is more efficient, and now you have to adjuste population growth accordingly, and all this is leading to communism since it implies living space sharing. accepting immigrants should be the norm, but at a predetermined rate. also billionaires shouldnt exist: all that accumulated wealth going into waste that could reflect the amount of emissions generated by the person withholding it.
Yes, like I said, we already know all this. I agree with all your points. But no one is willing to do anything about it that makes a meaningful difference. All the things you describe were essentially the same 25 years ago when I first learned about this.
back then climate change (cc) wasn’t too obvious: but now we got wildfires, melting icebergs, venise going underwater (which is nice in fact): awareness can spread much quicker now with the advent of internet. people realize the damage when they see immediate consequences, when most of the time it could be late at that point …
Lookin’ at you Swift and Kelce!
why are you downvoted ? people need to shake it off sometime …
