So we could basically solve climate change just by killing a few thousand people?
Sounds like a fair trade for the billions of lives it would save.
From the article:
The richest 1 percent (77 million people) were responsible for 16 percent of global consumption emissions in 2019 —more than all car and road transport emissions. The richest 10 percent accounted for half (50 percent) of emissions.
To be a member of the richest 1% of the world you need a net worth of about $800k – so while the billionaire class is still a massive problem, an even larger problem ecologically is that tens of millions of moderately wealthy people from wealthy nations have massively outsized carbon footprints.
77 million people
This would include several members of my family and they can either give up their destructive lifestyles or get fucked too.
Do they live in NYC and just refuse to use public transit? If so, yea I agree, fuck’em. Do they live in the suburbs because they likely can’t afford to live in a city where they wouldn’t need their car? Well now you get into the actual problem that a competent, non-capitalist government would need to solve. Simply killing the petite-bourgeious will solve nothing and honestly would just cause their wealth to be sucked upward make the problem even worse for everyone else.
while the billionaire class is still a massive problem, an even larger problem ecologically is that tens of millions of moderately wealthy people from wealthy nations have massively outsized carbon footprints.
It is definitely false that that’s a larger problem. The top corporations emit way more carbon than all the petite-bourgeois SUV drivers and so on. I think the number people constantly trot out is that the top 100 companies (a fraction of a fraction of a percent here) do 70% of the emitting.
To be a member of the richest 1% of the world you need a net worth of about $800k – so while the billionaire class is still a massive problem, an even larger problem ecologically is that tens of millions of moderately wealthy people from wealthy nations have massively outsized carbon footprints.
This can not be correct. My wife inherited her parent’s house when the last one died when she was 17 or so (guardianship until 18, whatever, not the point) - but we’re poor af. I mean we’re not lining up at the food bank, but no way we’re top 1%. It’s worth $800k easy (CAD, but still, throw in some other ‘things’ we own and we’re there).
In most of the world, $800,000 is enough money that you and your wife would never have to work another day in your lives. Even in Canada that’s 20-ish years of the median household income.
People confuse the richest 1% of America and the richest 1% of the world. The former is multimillionnaires, the latter is like, software engineers in America. This article concerns the latter.
The US is, give or take, 4% of the global population. So, the top income quintile ($153,000/yr and above) brings you to around 1% of the global population, with room for well-off people in other countries.
In case your math skills are rusty, the global 1% is 80 million people. That’s the same size as Germany, the country. Yes it includes oil barons, multinational CEOs, and whatnot, but also like, professionals in expensive cost-of-living areas like Californian software engineers.
These people run and own the largest polluting inustries in the world, removing them does not solve the problem. We must strip them of their power and additionally remove their destructive legacies.
The soviet union eliminated capitalism and I’ll say their environmental record was pretty awful.
not as awful as countries like amerikkka, and soviet environmental protection laws were very strong at the start and they were diluted over time by revisionists after the death of Stalin. But even IF the USSR had not been better it is a mistake of the past, and climate change and environmental preservation and restoration is central to every leftist platform, so like wtf is ur point. Like even IF u werent just outright factually wrong what is ur point “we cant fix anything because someone in the past failed”?
