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

102 points by botanical 1 day ago | 52 comments

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 1 day ago

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 1 day ago

> 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.

[–] thenewnewguy 1 day ago

I haven't done a super deep dive but from what I can tell, they only considered individual people that own a 10% stake, not other holders like index funds.

[–] throwaway27448 1 day ago

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 1 day ago

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 1 day ago

> 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.

[–] Ericson2314 9 hours ago

- More public transit (I am personally working on it)

- 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.

[–] thenewnewguy 1 day ago

It matters because to actually improve things in society we need to identify the true root causes.

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.

[–] danaris 1 day ago

But when the owners of oil companies collude to deceive the public about the dangers of continuing to burn fossil fuels; when the refuse to start working on a transition to green energy when it is absolutely 100% certain that one is needed; when they spend billions of dollars lobbying the government both to ensure they retain their massive subsidies, and to stifle efforts to decarbonize...

Yeah, you can totally blame them, hold them accountable, and it will help fix emissions problems.

[–] throwaway27448 1 day ago

> 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

[–] thenewnewguy 1 day ago

I'm not sure why you think my solution would be blindly hoping? We change things in modern society with laws (and enforcement for those laws).

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.

[–] upboundspiral 12 hours ago

Laws are laughable in the face of capital. The only reason we have electric cars in the first place is because persons and countries with capital massively invested in new technology.

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.

[–] throwaway27448 23 hours ago

Well pretending like capital isn't the root cause seems pretty confusing

[–] rcxdude 22 hours ago

You can blame capitalism perhaps (slightly debatable, TBH), but capital is just a component of that whole system (also, on the whole, not actually situated within board members of large companies. Those people are generally the representatives of capital).

[–] throw310822 22 hours ago

> The way you reduce demand in a capitalist society is by beating board members to death until society "decides" to improve

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?

[–] throwaway27448 22 hours ago

Do you have any better ideas? Can you think of a way to sufficiently motivate capital to make rational decisions short of overthrowing the government?

[–] upboundspiral 12 hours ago

You need a planned economy. It is ironic that in the West we no longer have any competition, just monopolies, thanks to the free hand of the market.

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.

[–] throw310822 22 hours ago

The existence and quality of other ideas doesn't make this one better or worse. This is just plain dumb.

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.

[–] d3vnull 21 hours ago

"It's not my fault, it's everyone else's fault!"

[–] ecocentrik 1 day ago

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 1 day ago

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.

[–] lostlogin 1 day ago

> 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 1 day ago

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

[–] slopinthebag 1 day ago

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.

[–] lostlogin 1 day ago

Is this an argument about free markets and regulation?

Eg should the responsibility be on tobacco smokers to look after themselves, or governments to regulate/restrict/ban.

[–] slopinthebag 15 hours ago

right, same as if the responsibility be on drinkers vs breweries and sellers.

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?

[–] milch 1 day ago

It would be a bit of a dishonest question in my opinion. Take the oil and car industry in the US for example. They've spent the past 70 years or so dismantling alternative transport infrastructure (among other things...). So how are we now going to assign the blame to the guy driving his car to work, instead of taking the bus that takes 4x as long, requires 3 transfers, and has people openly taking drugs on it? In the ideal world, sure, there would be a fair and even playing field of alternatives and the blame would 100% lie with the consumers who choose from this totally even field of possibilities. But we don't live in that ideal world.

[–] thenewnewguy 1 day ago

What if the guy in the car voted for pro-oil politicians whose campaign explicitly included expanding fossil fuel consumption and cutting budgets to trains and other public transit?

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.

[–] milch 1 day ago

Most people weren't voting age 70-50 years ago when public transit systems collapsed, so mostly they didn't vote on this. Even in places that have consistently voted pro transit for decades at this point, they quite literally still have decades of baggage to get rid of in the form of antiquated or hostile laws that were designed to slow them down, require workarounds or blow through their budget. You can't undo all of that even over multiple terms in-office.

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.

[–] thenewnewguy 17 hours ago

This is a massive dodge of the question - do voters not bear some level of culpability for the candidate they choose to vote for?

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.

[–] Ericson2314 1 day ago

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 1 day ago

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 1 day ago

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 1 day ago

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 :)

[–] xnx 1 day ago

> 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.

[–] glimshe 21 hours ago

These guys started with the conclusion and then tried to find a way to "prove" it.

[–] snapplebobapple 6 hours ago

So? Price carbon correctly and stfu

[–] Frieren 1 day ago

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.

[–] hhjinks 22 hours ago

I don't think you're strictly incorrect, but I don't think you're strictly correct either. Inequality is a precursor to discontent, and discontent breaks any social system, if there's enough of it.

[–] Ericson2314 1 day ago

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

[–] CircuitSeuss 1 day ago

Parent’s point is that economic inequality is so bad that the costs are meaningless to the ultra wealthy.

[–] Frieren 1 day ago

Thank you. Exactly that. Prices do not adapt to the scale that super-rich manage.

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.

[–] danaris 1 day ago

This is absolutely correct.

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.

[–] atleastoptimal 1 day ago

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 1 day ago

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 1 day ago

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 1 day ago

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