This is just embarrassing. It basically assumes away the results.
Methods:
"We start with national consumption emissions data for 117 countries from 1990 to 2015 period. This reflects both the emissions produced in a country and those embedded in imports, while excluding those embedded in exports. We allocate national consumption emissions to individuals within each country based on a functional relationship between income and emissions, drawing on new income distribution datasets.
We assume, based on numerous studies at national, regional and global levels, that emissions rise in proportion to income, above a minimum emissions floor and to a maximum emissions ceiling. These estimates of the consumption emissions of individuals in each country are then sorted into a global distribution according to income."
I think they assume that emissions are corrrlated with income which is well founded assumption and just do a bit of math over countries and income distributions to get a rough idea of how much richness of countries and individuals work in tandem to result in huge emissions inequality and polarisation.
The study says 50% of the world still lives in 'extreme poverty' (< $5.50 / day). It seems the far better question is how do we improve the standard of living of these people in a sustainable fashion? The emissions of wealthy countries seems marginal in the longterm once the rest of the world gets plugged in.
For example, while the US has technically cut down on it's emissions it's done this (in part) by largely exporting the coal it used to burn to China. On a per country basis this is great but obviously it doesn't solve the real problem. The Chinese want the same standard of living as Americans and American's taking less flights doesn't seem like a viable strategy.
This is coming from someone that really cares about this but often resulting policies seem incredibly shortsighted in mitigating our worldwide, long term emissions. With that said, this study's methods are atrocious.
There is nothing sustainable about the current situation, so it seems that this is not a "more important question" but rather a question that needs to be solved in parallel.
1.3 billion people live in developed countries. Even if then rest of the world catches up I don't think calling developed countries emissions 'marginal' is warranted.
Also keep in mind that if you give your income to poorer people they will likely spend it in a way that produces emissions. IMO your best bet would be to take cash out of the bank then shred it and bury it deep underground with a shovel (burning would produce CO2). Also, quit your job.
How can you be sure of that? The 1% own airlines, cruise liners, factories that produce buses and cars, etc. The other 99% ride on those for enjoyment and business. The problem with your argument is that you somehow believe that the 1% is warming the planet and the only people benefiting are the 1%. This is your flaw. The 1% are rich because they add value to the other 99%. Without the 1%, you wouldn’t have air travel or buses!
Ownership by and of itself is not socially useful. If an object transfers from Scrooge McDuck to Daddy Warbucks, and nothing else changes, nothing useful is done.
The 1% get excellent educations and have amazing social networks. We need a scheme to encourage them to become socially useful.
My preference is 99.5% estate taxes,[1] coupled with heavy taxation of unearned income (money you get without having to work for it).
1. Conserving estates made sense when wealthy male life expectancy was in the fities, and welathy males did not start to produce offspring until their forties; daily life was more dangerous (naked flames and heavy drapes, ill-treated and cantankerous farm animals everywhere, and on and on); and society was a lot more volatile than it is now.[2]
These days, a wealthy male will die in their nineties, with children in their sixties. The kids don't need the estate; they've already had all the help they can make use of.
This is what that hero of much economic theory, the rational social planner, would do to derive a return on investment from wealthy families.
2. The period since WWII is the longest period of peace in Europe for several hundred years, if not ever.
> Ownership by and of itself is not socially useful.
Tell that to the various socialist and former-communist countries where industrial capital has depreciated to nothingness with a lack of maintenance because the capital lacked a beneficial owner.
It’s 1% of the world. So incomes over $100k I think.
This is a world issue. There are billions of people that have never flown on an airplane and probably billions of people that have never been in a bus.
The 1% are largely the only people unaffected by climate change while it greatly effects communities in the global south.
Cruise liners given as an example of how beneficial is the richest 1% to humanity that consists mostly of poor people? Wow. I had to check if a cruise liner is what I think it is.
I didn’t read this article but a Guardian article about the same thing mentions the top 10% accounting for 52% of emissions. Bit more drastic than Pareto.
By Pareto, I would expect the top 20% of the top 20% to be responsible for 80% of the top 20% outcomes (which are 80% of total).
That would imply that the top 4% would account for 64% of outcome under discussion, which is much more drastic than the top 10% accounting for only 52% of total.
If we hold people accountable for their offspring then the poorest have orders of magnitude more heirs and thus should multiply their emissions.
The choice to have (greater than replacement) children should be seen as an "emissions" or "income" choice for this kind of reporting, else it fails to capture the systemic externalities of their actual lifestyle.
This, as i understand it, is a sort of form of The Repugnant conclusion: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/repugnant-conclusion/ , whereby the choice to increase population is a choice to divide the resources amongst greater and greater people, resulting in a smaller share per person.
I don't think the developed world, or the "1%" should be held accountable for these sorts of outcomes.
"The richest one percent of the world’s population are responsible for more than twice as much carbon pollution as the 3.1 billion people who made up the poorest half of humanity during a critical 25-year period of unprecedented emissions growth."
Assuming this is correct the number of children poor people have is essentially irrelevant. The premise of your argument is that increasing the population divides a finite resource amongst all members. Now take into account the articles premise that carbon pollution scales exponentially with wealth.
If you now apply the offspring argument the emissions multiplier for offspring in the developed world dwarfs all else. This isn't an original argument, it was made very popular by a 2017 paper by Wynes and Nicholas:
> If we hold people accountable for their offspring then the poorest have orders of magnitude more heirs and thus should multiply their emissions.
So how far back should we consider heirs? Primordial soup is ultimately responsible for all emissions?
Surely it's more interesting to look at actual emission rates than to disavow personal choices based on how many children my grandparents had.
What these numbers show is that despite being prone to having more children, the poor account for much less emissions than the rich. That in some centuries there may be so many poor people as to offset this difference is a) speculation and b) doesn't answer the question of who is responsible for emissions and what segment of the population we can address now to best mitigate the problem.
You're giving me this mental image of a fat king stuffing his face, lamenting how the starving villagers will eventually eat all the food.
The difference in population growth rate between high income countries and low income countries is about 2.5x. I'd bet on income inequality and carbon consumption changing at a higher rate than that, and frankly wouldn't think the actual takeaway of this headline would change if the top 1% had half, instead of double, the carbon contribution of a group that is 50x their size.
1) The population is expected to cap off before we ever reach a population at which the bottom 50% consume as much as the top 1% at current rates. In fact,the population is expected to never reach a value where the bottom 50% then consume as the top 1% does now, at current rates. That is, we don't expect the population to ever double.
2) The longterm equilibrium state is not relevant when the concern is about pressing climate concerns for this current century.
Imagine the world is a web server. Suddenly it sees explosive growth. The server starts to buckle under the pressure. We can kick people off, or we can address the core algorithms which are wasteful of resources.
What the data shows is that a small slice of the world contributes an outsized amount of emissions. And, historically, has put the bulk of problematic, modern-times CO2 in the atmosphere.
What the data also shows is that, those poor people aside, the rich are doing a great job of warming the planet into dangerous territory, thank you very much.
So, even if one rid the planet of those pesky reproducing poors, the rich would still cook the planet and (continue to) cause a runaway Greenhouse Effect.
There’s no way to solve this problem through population reduction in any reasonable amount of time. And even if we believed there were it would be incredibly violent and unethical.
This is just a way to sidestep the reality that the world’s richest (and that probably comfortably includes the American middle class) has done the most to cause this problem, but the world’s poorest will be hit the hardest by it.
The quote is a reflection of a Malthusian political economy's revolting conception of the poor. A Christmas Carol is a critique of the same. [0] The rich do not have fewer children for reasons of their superior ethics.
If you hold people accountable for their heirs then you've introduced a recursion that makes it nigh-impossible to calculate the emissions of any group. In any case, the title figure is rather staggering, and means that the exponent on the 1% assures their heirs' level of consumption too.
The only way to put blame on someone's shoulders is to assign it to those in decision-making positions, which, you guessed it, is overwhelmingly the 1%.
How do the poor not have choices? They have a choice to have >replacement children or not.
> you've introduced a recursion that makes it nigh-impossible to calculate the emissions of any group.
If you assume those heirs will never hit a terminal at replacement birthrate, then there probably would need to be some weighting function that approaches 0 after many generations.
My point is that the set of choices available to the poorest among us is largely determined by the richest among us. The only way for the poor to improve their situation is by playing the game of consumptive behavior that has been laid before them by those in positions of power. Keep in mind that reproduction is a deep-seated biological drive and that the one factor strongly correlated with lower birthrates, education, is a scarce resource and one that is subject to all sorts of manipulation at many levels of governance.
It's also somewhat-to-highly myopic to assume that relative wealth isn't an important factor in an era when humans are faced with devastation of the natural processes that we've relied on for millenia (I.e. rising tide raises all boats). Sure, we have social media and iphones, but those don't feed and slake us, and the A/C bill is overdue.
Cf. modern, independent (even 1st world modern) farmers' plight. It's not possible to make a go of it being a subsistence-type local producer. Someone will come in and undercut you with an ersatz product and financial/legal maneuvering.
Aside from that, it's largely been proven that the hysteria surrounding birthrate and overpopulation is a red herring strongly advocated by industries trying to obfuscate the problem of climate change.
