Americas richest 10% is responsible for 40% of its planet heating pollution

https://journals.plos.org/climate/article?id=10.1371/journal.pclm.0000190

by nithinj • 3 years ago

168 152 3 years ago

journals.plos.org

alexnewman2• 3 years ago

Uhm, no. Current, America isn’t even responsible for 40% of the planet’s warming. Therefore, 10% of America cannot be responsible for 40%. I assume they mean 10% of america is responsible is for 40% of america’s planet heating. Which is of no surprise.

footy• 3 years ago

Yes, that's obviously what they mean. The pronoun "its" is modifying "America".

gaadd33• 3 years ago

English isn't your native language is it? The it's refers to America's warming. English isn't simple so it's an understandable mistake to make.

jezovuk• 3 years ago

it's -> its

readthenotes14• 3 years ago

The premise seems absurd: by owning stocks in companies that create pollution, the rich are responsible for said pollution but not the people who consume the companies' products.

I was hoping for a tally of extensive air travel, multiple homes, helicoptering in and out of burning Man, and similar follies.

georgeoliver• 3 years ago

The question of who owns a product's externalities is not absurd at all, but pretty complicated, and unfortunately rarely responsibly accounted for.

anonuser123456• 3 years ago

Maybe we could just implement a carbon tax and let the problem sort itself out?

readthenotes14• 3 years ago

Is it complicated?

Whyy are not the externalities owned by the owner of the product?

I can think of only 2 reasons:

- the consumer was forced to purchase the product without an option with dire consequences. In this case, the dominator is responsible. This is pretty much anything your taxes buy.

- the producer lied or hid something about the product. In this case, the liar is responsible. E.g., the lies about recycling plastic, the outcome of using internal combustion engines, the safety of leaded gasoline. The list of that is simply enormous.

What other complications do you see?

tshaddox2• 3 years ago

Why is that absurd? Surely the people who own the company are more responsible for the actions of the company than people who don’t own the company. If my local barbershop where I get my hair cut turns out to be a money laundering operation, surely the owners of the barbershop are responsible for that and I am not.

readthenotes14• 3 years ago

Your analogy is flawed unless you are the one laundering money in the barbershop.

The producers of pollution would be irrelevant if they had no customers.

misja111• 3 years ago

Good to know! So now I can go ahead and buy a SUV, take the airplane for travelling whenever I want, put a couple of airco's in my house and I don't have to feel too responsible for the environmental consequences because the shareholders are the ones who are responsible.

nicbou2• 3 years ago

The difference is that the money laundering was not caused by you getting a haircut. Money laundering is not an inherent externality of getting your hair cut.

Amazon's emissions are created by producing and shipping the crap you buy. You triggered the bad action.

mypastself• 3 years ago

It seems to mean I can rent a gas-guzzling car and drive it everywhere, while resting easy knowing all the emissions and pollution are actually the capitalists’ fault.

M1ch4312• 3 years ago

If you are not an active investor in any shape or form - e.g. shaping the company/suggesting how things could be more sustainable, then you're just in it for the money/playing a game.

You're not an active participant functionally in society - as a shareholder/investor I'm pretty sure you can directly influence company policy if you extend yourself. You may not be able to dictate it if you do not have decision-making power, but nevertheless your words would most likely be more valued than the average person's.

People are assaulted by ad campaigns. Advertisement companies and corporations have subverted or even hacked the average person's brain - you are convinced in 50+ different directions to buy X product, get the latest version, or get a new subscription. It's easy to depend on corporations to solve all your problems. It's a carefully crafted dopamine rush; seeing the ad(s), buying the product, using unsustainable services like Amazon or even the major shipping companies to ship your item from wherever with copious amounts of emissions.

Do the people want a new iPhone every year? Well, even if they didn't, they are coerced to upgrade by the cellular phone companies (who probably recycle to some degree if you trade-in, but I digress). Or - they are convinced by Apple themselves - which is some sort of cult in its own right.

Planned obsolescence should be illegal, and I'm sure these mostly wasteful practices are not necessary in the grand scheme of things.

Apple has done a lot of harmful things to the phone to perpetuate this business model: removing the ability to easily replace the battery as a consumer/non-licensed repairman (which is probably a major cause of failure/new phone purchases) and AFAIK not allowing aftermarket/third-party components with a DRM restriction (e.g. screens). Why get your phone repaired (or mess around with their self-repair kit) when you can get yet another phone that was senselessly made because one thing got a little better. I wonder how many phones exist currently in the United States vs. our population. Something to look into I suppose.

But regardless, the biggest sickness (in my mind) of the US with how we do business is the fact that we choose to clog the highways with trucks loaded to the brim/airplanes to ship products domestically/commercially.

I'm only a layman, but I can't imagine that's an efficient use of energy when compared to alternatives like high speed rail - which is something we absolutely need to consider investing in as a society if we ever want to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. For transportation we need to consider this, and most assuredly for freight. If we could lay rail way back then; we can now + we can 1) plan it exponentially better with many technology advancements 2) fully power these services with renewable energy.

The best I can do as a non-investor, as somebody who has little resources/no clout, is this post right here. In a world of unelected corporations (read: anti-competitive monopolies) who essentially govern over me (legalized bribery/lobbying), rape the environment and make people dependent on them, and nobody in "power" is truly playing hardball with them and their unlimited greed -- I'm pretty helpless to do anything, but go with the flow (besides, though very unlikely, get filthy rich from a lottery ticket and emulate Musk). That's what the average American does, even the average voter who votes blue.

If you have money, you can effect change. If you know people with money, you can effect change.

pbhjpbhj2• 3 years ago

If you have money, you can effect change. If you know people with money, you can effect change. //

How's your record go on this. Even with family members (not rich, but much richer than me) my influence is essentially zero versus the influence advertising has on them.

That probably pales against the influence those who pay them have.

Perhaps you meant "if you know people, with money, who are already won over to your cause; then you can effect change by partnering with them". Which is effectively "rich people can use they're influence on poor people, and their resources, to effect change".

personomas• 3 years ago

Yeah, the article pretty much proves the opposite. Namely, that the average man in the top 10% are not really much more (or, only a very little bit) responsible for pollution than the average man in the rest 90%.

akira2501• 3 years ago

the rich are responsible for said pollution but not the people who consume the companies' products.

Neither would be. That's just how markets work. If you think the market produces more harm than good, than that is a government issue, and what you want is more regulation. Which fairly impacts both profit and consumption equally.

I was hoping for a tally of extensive air travel, multiple homes, helicoptering in and out of burning Man, and similar follies.

Yea, I prefer a little more entertainment in my class warfare, too.

sokoloff3• 3 years ago

They have to introduce that argument in order to create a tenuous chain of logic to their goal:

Results suggest an alternative income or shareholder-based carbon tax, focused on investments, may have equity advantages over traditional consumer-facing cap-and-trade or carbon tax options and be a useful policy tool to encourage decarbonization while raising revenue for climate finance.

Nifty3929• 3 years ago

Producing things is no longer desirable. Now it’s more fun to criticize those who produce, because they produce.

thereisnospork• 3 years ago

Of course the top percentage has a higher per capital footprint? Most economic activity[0] distills down to energy expenditure, and therefore emissions.

[0]Which the wealthy do more of by definition.

pbhjpbhj2• 3 years ago

Some richer people buy carbon offsets or products from companies that claim to be zero emissions, and such. These things are expensive and so much more affordable for the wealthy. It could easily be the top 0.00001% entirely offset their emissions impact -- but probably they'd still have more externalised impact in other things, micro plastics, resource wastage, ...

It's not essential that the rich have a greater impact. Similarly, rich nations are in a better position to take action.

atleastoptimal• 3 years ago

Honestly lower than I thought, given that the top 10% own 100% of America's private jets and luxury yachts

tinco3• 3 years ago

Do you think that private jets and yachts are a significant portion of CO2?

First of all, such things are of the top 0.1%, not the 10%. You need to be thinking of more mundane things. As someone on this forum you very likely belong to the top 10%.

How often do you order on Amazon? How often do you dine out? Do you have a heated pool? How often do you fly? How often do you eat beef or pork? How long is your daily commute?

Those are the sort of things that influence your CO2 expenditure. Sure you could 10x that with flying private jets, but almost no one does that so it's not as significant.

pydry2• 3 years ago

It's not almost no one.

When my boss's boss's boss spends 4 hours on a private jet he creates as much CO2 as I do in a year.

I need a house. He doesnt need a jet. His jet should be banned yesterday.

shaky-carrousel• 3 years ago

A household would need to earn an annual income of around $200k to be in the top 10%. Are you saying most people here earn that amount of money?

ClumsyPilot3• 3 years ago

How often do you order on Amazon? How often do you dine out?

You took the bait. Swallowed it hook, line and sinker.

I bought shrimp the other day, they were farmed locally, transported to Malaysia, peeled there and transported back. I bought canned pears, they traveleled the world too.

So while you are arguing and pointing fingers at other consumers over irrelevant cocempts like eating out, industry continues its destructing practices that are actually responsible for majority of emissions

evandijk70• 3 years ago

Correct, I'd like to add two big mundane factors; Intercontinental flights and heating and cooling your house - the second one is a big contributor to global CO2 expenditures and is strongly influenced by the size of your house.

jabradoodle3• 3 years ago

First of all, such things are of the top 0.1%, not the 10%.

Exactly, the 0.1% are part of the 10%

mavhc5• 3 years ago

There aren't that many private jets, the article talks amount their investments causing 40% of their emissions, so not directly causing it.

I suspect house size is mostly to blame.

But the solution is simple, tax everything the amount it costs to clean up the pollution it causes, and then use that money to clean up the pollution. If importing from a country that does not to this, tax the imports.

jiofj2• 3 years ago

Since there is no way currently of removing CO2, and we don't even know how that technology would work, there is no fair tax amount. Any amount you set will just be a robbery. Might as well make it a cent per ton, or a gorillion dollars per ton.

imtringued2• 3 years ago

That would mean a carbon tax of $1000 per ton because direct air capture of CO2 and storing CO2 is on the same order of difficulty as storing nuclear waste. Possibly worse because CO2 is a gas that can leak out through tiny gaps so every storage site has to be inspected for leaks forever. Pumping CO2 underground is the equivalent of letting a tree capture CO2 with a random chance of the tree starting to rot and releasing all its CO2.

The only realistic storage option is solid carbon and that is why I put the price tag so high.

mrweasel2• 3 years ago

the article talks amount their investments causing 40% of their emissions, so not directly causing it.

I don't think it's investment in real estate, but more: a 0.05% stake in GM for instance. If the 40% is as a result of investments in companies that pollute, then I fail to see the point of the article. It makes little difference if those positions are held by the richest 10% or the poorest, the environmental impact is the same.

There is a question of whether climate change is a minor concern for the wealthiest individuals, compared to the middle class. Most evidence seems to show that the rich simply do not care or at least do not feel like they should make changes to their lifestyle.

Currently taxing seems like the only viable solution, but can we really tax a private jet enough that those who use them the most would scale back? I doubt it. What would a flight from San Jose to San Francisco need to cost to stop someone like Elon Musk from firing up the jet?

sentimentscan2• 3 years ago

Cleaning pollution is hard, carbon capture is insanely expensive. We could take this take money and instead of storing that carbon (as other comments suggest) we could further the transformation of grid from fossil fuels to green energy, R&D and to make impact more meaningful provide "carbon tax" to developing countries to ditch fossil fuel as so on.

olalonde• 3 years ago

The truth is that even the "extremely" rich Americans do not consume "extremely" more than the average American. Elon Musk is, give or take, a million times richer than the average American. But he doesn't consume a million times as much food as the average American, nor does he fly a million times more, nor is his living space a million times larger, etc. Sure they consume more, but not orders of magnitude more.

oblio3• 3 years ago

Jet + yacht + mansions + ... I'm fairly sure that Musk and is entourage's consumption is probably at least 1 order of magnitude higher than the regular person's. Probably 2 orders of magnitude.

Still, there aren't that many of them and we can probably create an overconsumption tax that would handle most of it. At least we could get money from them to repair the damage.

helpfulContrib• 3 years ago

Cute, now factor in the US military (hint: its in the top 5 of the worlds worst polluters...)

https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2022/10/pentagon-cli...

https://theconversation.com/us-military-is-a-bigger-polluter...

Its easy to forget - after all, this particularly heinous polluter of the world operates in near-total secrecy - but it must be taken into account in all of these assessments.

When you add its military pollution, the numbers for the American people are even more atrocious.

(Disclaimer: I've worked on products designed to reduce these emissions .. I know full well how monumental the task is ..)

WeylandYutani• 3 years ago

A lot of progressives are angry at the cheap plastic crap that Action sells but they conveniently forget that poor people don't scuba dive in the Carribbean much.

ed_mercer• 3 years ago

Not sure what your argument is. Is it that rich people do and therefore cause more plastic waste?

lionkor• 3 years ago

probably yeah, and it makes sense as long as you stay in the bubble of thinking that your plastic trash doesn't get shipped to some place to be dumped and forgotten

... close to the ocean

xctr94• 3 years ago

The argument is that we’re going after the wrong things, usually. Of course we want to improve things across all vectors, but we’ve been disproportionately asking the lower and middle classes to make sacrifices; and have been too lenient with corporations and the ultra-rich. Most pollution isn’t caused directly by the things we’ve been fighting.

timeon2• 3 years ago

No this is just straw-man. If someone is caring for one thing it does not mean they do not care about other.

wtcactus4• 3 years ago

This is a ridiculous hammering of numbers, designed to pass some ideological message totally devoid of any root in reality.

USA total CO2 emissions are less than 14% of global emissions. You aren't doing the environment any favors by pretending that it's by targeting a subset of US population, that you are going to change anything relevant on global emissions.

bluescrn3• 3 years ago

Meanwhile, the private jets continue to fly, and the little people think 'well, there's no way I'm giving up my car/meat/heating/AC while the elite are still globetrotting via private jets and superyachts', and our leaders still refuse to set a half-decent example.

wtcactus4• 3 years ago

It's a great thing the "little people" don't give up on their car/meat/heating/AC. Forcing anyone to give up on any of those - either by direct prohibition or taxation - its a totalitarian move.

meandmycode• 3 years ago

Do you have a source for the 14%?

cutemonster6• 3 years ago

Not GP but this says 14% 2021: https://www.statista.com/topics/3185/us-greenhouse-gas-emiss...

(Btw there are now some sibling comments)

cutemonster6• 3 years ago

14% is a lot -- the US is just 4% of the world population.

Targeting that subset in the US and other countries, seems to have real effects, the opposite to what you said.

(if whatever methods chosen to influence their behaviour, actually worked).

wtcactus4• 3 years ago

The argument that X country it's "only" Y% of global population effectively rewards over population and put in question people being allowed to migrate into the West.

USA is a huge country, and compared to many Asian countries, it's not polluting anywhere near the same amount compared to their available natural resources.

The same way you may feel it's acceptable to tell Americans: "well, consume less", others else should feel acceptable to tell China and others: "well, procreate less".

fatuna• 3 years ago

But every country on Earth can say the same, right? Everybody is 'only responsible for a fraction of the total polution'. It's a tragedy of the commons kind of situation.

fennecfoxy• 3 years ago

Is that the US' direct emissions? Or does that include international emissions that are the result of US economic activity?

Surely if an American citizen buys a product from China, the emissions involved in producing that product and shipping it over are counted against America, right?

If the US ships rubbish to a foreign country where it's burnt (because they were the cheapest option), are those emissions counted against the US?

andrewstuart• 3 years ago

Nothing can be done.

Greed and self interest trumps all.

Synaesthesia• 3 years ago

When I watched this TV show where real estate agents were selling massive houses to the rich and famous in Beverly Hills, expansive multi-million dollar homes, I just though of all the concrete and materials used to build such homes (all of which emit CO2 when made) and the heating and cooling bills associated with that.

It's all unnecessary stuff, you don't need a collosal mansion, that's the sort of thing which contributes to these figures. Their extremely vapid, "luxurious" lives ... It's sad

lotsofpulp3• 3 years ago

No one needs detached single family homes with garages and individual cars and vacations to the beach either.

A family of 6 living in a single room could be thinking the same watching Home Improvement.

ClumsyPilot3• 3 years ago

Waste is a well defined concept to most people - if you have several houses and sevrral cars that you cannot possibly use most of the year, thats a waste.

tomp• 3 years ago

Noone needs the internet, yet here you are posting on HN.

Western/industrial human civilisation has long since surpassed most human needs and moved on to human wants.

And that’s a good thing.

somedude8952• 3 years ago

The lifestyle of the rich is a drop in the bucket and not what the article is about. Since when did HN get so envy-driven?

super256• 3 years ago

If I am understanding correctly, this is a very dishonest study:

If Elon Musk owns 30% of Tesla, and Tesla produces 1 Gigaton of CO2 each year the study would assign 300 Megatons to Musk, even though the cars are produced for someone else(!).

tarcar• 3 years ago

The title is editorialized, the original title is "Income-based U.S. household carbon footprints (1990–2019) offer new insights on emissions inequality and climate finance" and the abstract says "In 2019, fully 40% of total U.S. emissions were associated with income flows to the highest earning 10% of households".

somedude8952• 3 years ago

"associated with income flows"

Yeah so the editorialized title is ignorant at best and deliberately misleading at worst. I've flagged it.

refurb• 3 years ago

I mean that seems entirely intuitive. Most income flows involve emissions.

So the highest income have the highest emissions from income flows.

Did the authors somehow think this wasn’t true?

suckitsam• 3 years ago

"Top X% of earners/producers responsible for the top Y% of production/expenditures/consumption" is a whole genre.

It's great because the top 10% are bad and the rest of us are good.

I'll hide under my bed (where I recycle my straw wrappers) if you show me global numbers.

xnx• 3 years ago

If wealth was redistributed, so would pollution. There are a lot of good reasons for wealth distribution (or to prevent its accumulation), but preventing pollution isn't one of them.

throw0101b• 3 years ago

If wealth was redistributed, so would pollution.

If wealth was redistributed, some people would be able to start affording rent and groceries (instead of have to choose one or the other): they would not necessarily be able to start flying on private jets. If wealth was redistributed, some folks may be able to afford to buy a newer more fuel efficient car (or hybrid/EV) instead of limping along in their 2004 Chevy.

Qiu_Zhanxuan• 3 years ago

"The american way of life is non-negotiable" George H.W. Bush

To be honest, America decided long ago the rest of the world would suffer as long as America could afford it.

oooyay• 3 years ago

The line about judging investments purely from a holding standpoint is kinda fraught and I'm surprised to see it so confidently printed. What the authors are appealing to is the E in ESG investing. Freakonomics recently did a great interview with Kelly Shue about the effects of ESG investing and viable counter examples like Engine Number 1: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/are-e-s-g-investors-actuall...

The gist of the study that Kelly performed showed that many, if not most, companies with good E values are companies who never had environmental impact in the first place. They exist in well trodden spaces whose biggest impacts were office space and data centers. The net action of divesture causes less money available to be able to innovate, doesn't provide the kind of momentum an activist investor like Engine Number 1 can, and works by proliferating the idea that change can be claimed by effectively ignoring that problematic companies exist and will continue to exist. The last bit, for those unaware, comes from the fact that even if all cars today were made fully electric there is still a huge line of demand for essential products, like fertilizer, that include oil derivatives.

My point more broadly being in order to judge consumers you can't just look at holdings, you need to see what they're materially supporting. If they materially support the indefinite expansion of oil extraction and not trying to innovate away from oil then they're doing harm. Simply investing in a company is not indication of how an investor would vote when presented an opportunity to change the company direction by a group of activists. Engine Number 1 did exactly this with Exxon and shareholders voted as I described.

Americas richest 10% is responsible for 40% of its planet heating pollution

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