Yet another Hacker News

Richest 0.1% (8M) produce more carbon pollution than 3.5B

77 points botanical 1 hour ago 21 comments

atleastoptimal 53 minutes ago | parent

Is that really a surprise? Most of the world bikes or takes a train. The richest 0.1% have fleets of taxis, private jets, etc.

praxulus 44 minutes ago | parent

Less than 1% of the top 0.1% own a private jet. There are roughly 25,000 private jets in the world, but over 8 million people in the global top 0.1%.

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.

DocTomoe 37 minutes ago | parent

Virtually no-one owns a private jet because it just doesn't make sense to do so unless you basically live in one. A lot more people timeshare/charter one. Which I am perfectly fine with. People need to go places, and public air travel has been made consistently unpleasant, regardless of the flight class.

praxulus 20 minutes ago | parent

Regularly flying private is still out of reach for most people in the global 0.1%. It's more of a 0.01% thing.

Frieren 47 minutes ago | parent

Inequality breaks capitalism. Spending so much money as the 0.1% spends in luxury makes no sense. To let millions die of preventable diseases, or even hunger makes no sense. The fact that as a society we let them do that is a failure that needs to be corrected.

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.

Ericson2314 39 minutes ago | parent

Actually with Carbon inequality, the problem is that driving and flying is not expensive enough!

thenewnewguy 44 minutes ago | parent

Their methodology is extremely suspect in my opinion, as they attribute "shareholder emissions" to anyone that owns 10% or more of a company. Direct quote from their doc:

> 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.

Ericson2314 41 minutes ago | parent

If they take both supply chains of consumption and ownership into account, they are straight-up double-counting, unless they are separating opex and capex or something.

what 30 minutes ago | parent

> 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.

throwaway27448 26 minutes ago | parent

There is little utility in blaming consumers for the crimes of capital. Consumers are going to consume. Capital is the entity with directable responsibility (if only via state violence). Why not just shake your fist at the tide coming in for all the good this "blame" does?

Ericson2314 17 minutes ago | parent

If the farmer didn't buy electric tractors, it's not really your fault. But if you drive a gas vehicle yes it's your fault.

throwaway27448 16 minutes ago | parent

> But if you drive a gas vehicle yes it's your fault.

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.

lostlogin 23 minutes ago | parent

> 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.

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?

Ericson2314 18 minutes ago | parent

There is no right answer re blaming the customer or owner. This is push vs pull.

slopinthebag 18 minutes ago | parent

one question we could ask is, how much carbon emissions would these allocations represent if there were no consumers?

that answer might be a more accurate number than the percentage of their shareholding.

ecocentrik 19 minutes ago | parent

The comparison to the poorest 3.5b is also not as useful as comparing the top 0.1% to the top 10%, which I would imagine pollute orders of magnitude more than the top 0.1%. I'm sure they're both shocking numbers compared to humans living sedentary agrarian lifestyles.

wisty 10 minutes ago | parent

Nitpick, the top 10% are probably not 100x worse than the 0.1% (they are only 100x more numerous). But yeah it's rage bait to ignore basically 99% of the people in 1st world countries.

Ericson2314 42 minutes ago | parent

This is mostly a distraction because so much Carbon pollution is within supply chains, and therefore not wise to ascribe to individual consumers.

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.

saintfire 34 minutes ago | parent

Unhinged to think the bulk of the population can work remote on train rides with 0 demand. Dropping you from one frozen wasteland to another is not desirable.

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.

californical 27 minutes ago | parent

They didn’t say replacing 100% of flights or drives with trains, but the vast majority of trips people take would be popular enough to sustain regular service for those people.

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

Ericson2314 21 minutes ago | parent

I'm talking about white collar workers working remote on a multi-day HSR trip all the way from the Continental US, through BC-CA, AK-US, RU, etc.

Yes, this is a very, very, very large Capital project :)