Don’t let anyone ever tell you that the rich aren’t ruining the world. According to a new study published in Nature Climate Change, the richest 10 percent of humans are responsible for two-thirds of global warming since 1990.
Ten percent of the population is slow-roasting the planet while the rest of us are getting lectured about taking shorter showers and using paper straws. The top 1 percent are responsible for 20 times more climate pollution than the rest of us combined.
That’s because they don’t just spend money on luxury private jets that they use to fly around the planet they’re actively destroying. They also own the corporations, factories, oil rigs, and all the carbon-spewing investments that keep their portfolios as hot as the atmosphere they are turning into a convection oven.
Rich People Are Mostly To Blame For Climate Change—Shocker
The study linked economic data to emissions and found that the global elite is the biggest reason every coastal city in the world will one day be underwater. Meanwhile, the poorest 50 percent of the planet produces just 10 percent of global emissions.
If everyone lived like them, climate change would barely be a footnote in history, right there alongside the hole in the ozone layer.
Instead of holding the rich and powerful accountable, intensifying our green energy initiatives, and taxing the hell out of these folks after reprioritizing the things we want to spend our tax dollars on, we’re told to “do our part” by driving an electric car or eating less red meat. Sure, it helps, but us eating a little less cow every month is like trying to dam a river with a pebble.
The truth is, as long as the ultrawealthy keep hoarding resources and refusing to clean up the messes produced by their global supply chains, your recycling bin will be helpless to stem the literal tides that will be crashing against your door when the ice caps melt and the oceans rise.
Economist Carl-Friedrich Schleussner, a co-author of the study, summed it up: “If everyone had emitted like the bottom 50 percent, the world would have seen minimal additional warming since 1990.” To put it another way, it’s not you, it’s them.
Until we rethink how wealth and power drive emissions, climate “solutions” that ignore corporate ownership and systemic inequality are just distractions. The planet isn’t dying because you forgot your reusable fork. It’s dying because the rich are competing against themselves to see who can most quickly convert the health and natural beauty of the planet into cash.
The post This Is Who’s Causing Global Warming, According to Science appeared first on VICE.
