Do your part and recycle your plastics, peasants!
Flies away in private jet
A valid critique, but also worth mentioning, as discussed in the article, much of the GHG emissions for the top 10% (which includes households down to ~$200k) comes from passive income.
Friendly reminder to check who you bank with and what’s in your 401k if you find yourself in that group.
Having not read the article, I would wager a guess that because 401k balances are invested in diverse funds, and if the fund composition includes corporations contributing to emissions… and you are making money off their profitability… you are therefore contributing to those emissions. Pick other things to invest in.
https://youtu.be/NJ7W6HFHPYs - This video from Climate Town explains how the bank or credit union only keeps a fraction of your money in reserve when you deposit your money in a savings account, certificate of deposit, or other bank account. The bank/CU is investing the majority of your money, and ecological harm is not a consideration when they are choosing investments. When you deposit money with a financial institution it is almost certain that some portion of your money is being invested in ecologically harmful organizations.
Similarly, your 401k funds are likely in index funds or mutual funds that hold significant shares in ecologically and socially harmful companies like ExxonMobil, Nestle, Chevron, Coca-Cola, et. al.
Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) investment funds exist that ideally exclude ecologically & socially harmful industries, but every ESG fund I have ever encountered is not nearly exclusive enough and has significantly higher fees.
For example - the Vanguard ESG International Stock ETF VSGX excludes adult entertainment, recreational drugs, gambling, weapons, nuclear power, and fossil fuels, yet Nestle is the second largest holding in the fund, and many of the other stocks in the fund likely contribute to environmental and social harm indirectly.
Consider investing in small-businesses and organizations in your local community instead. It is truly bizarre and unique to our time that investing on Wall Street is more accessible than investing on Main Street.
Probably has to do with the investments themselves. You may not be personally ‘picking’ the investments, however, most target funds include investments that have such investments. Source: wife works at a financial institution. Also I’m drinking so Google it ontop of it or something.
Edit* Also totally shouldn’t count.
One of the high-growth sectors in most american’s 401k’s is “Energy”. This is a euphemism for fossil fuel companies, such as Shell, BP, and the various supporting industries. Another high-growth sector is “home construction,” which is literally an industry that exist to pave over paradises and put in parking lots creating sprawling suburbs in it’s wake that are owned by companies like Blackrock.
To be fair, you can’t really get away from that, especially since you don’t really have the ability to manage your 401k that way. But passive growing investments absolutely feed Capitalism and directly contribute to the massive polluters.
If you invest in companies that emit GHGs, then you are helping finance their pollution, and profiting from that.
If you keep your money at a bank that does business with major polluters, your funds are being used by the bank to back loans to those polluters to help them pollute.
Spare change invested in GHGs contributes to climate change.
I’d like to see it divided up even more on the top 10%. To be in the top 10% of household income in the US, you would need to earn $184,000/year. That’s just two people earning $92k/year, which is reasonable for mid career or early mid career in or near a city.
TIL I’m in the top 10%. Yeah I can’t believe I pollute any more than the other 90%. I work 100% from home, only my wife commutes 3 days a week. House is a modest 2200 sq ft. I don’t have a boat or RV or plane or anything. I have some modest investment in hotels, cruise lines, and airlines (like under $5k all in). So yeah, this study leaves a lot to be desired.
EDIT: I guess my 401k or other managed investment accounts may have money in fossil fuels, but I’m not sure how I would know that or what exactly I would do about it. I have zero choice for the 401k as it’s through my company. Other accounts maybe but how would one even track down managed investment accounts that don’t include the largest pollution contributors?
Like lots of data, it’s an average. There are lots of people, similar to you, who are not absolute gas guzzlers I’m the top 10%. The top 10% also includes the 1% and the .1%, which will greatly increase the average for the entire category.
Similarly to how an average doesn’t tell the whole story, neither does how you invest. Assumptions have to be made to come up with these articles, such as how much carbon emissions are created through investments, which isn’t exactly cut and dry.
TL;DR just because an article says that a group of people are the cause of something, it doesn’t mean that everyone in the group is causing it.
It also depends on how the data is being used. For this study source of wages is being heavily weighted as well as what companies an individual chooses to invest in. So while household is the focus of the headline companies are more the focus, since by the metric used it seems as though someone who lives a green life style on paper living in a tent and biking but invests majority of their money and sees it grow would be a heavier polluter than someone who makes less but lives in a big house, drives suvs and pick ups, but doesn’t see their net worth increase with most money not being used towards investments but paying off debt.
What I got from the study is source of your wage and investments have more to do with how much of a high polluter you are than what you choose to do individually. So you could be a high wage earner who lives in a tent and bikes and invests a majority of their money that grows in profit, and that because of the growing investments and employer make you a higher polluter than someone who lives in a huge house and drives suvs and pick ups and doesn’t see their net worth grow due to so much of their stuff being financed.
With the money source being weighted this kind of feels more like an industry analysis despite the individual focus with how indirect it is, and based on some of comments here I guess people didn’t read the article either not realizing it has less to do with individual efforts like solar or private jets. At least that’s what I got from my attempt to understand the study.
Conclusion seems to be more that companies that pollute pay higher wages than a study of direct household pollution.
I’d like to see it divided up even more on the top 10%.
Well the boy howdy do I have good news for you! If you read the article linked (and even better, the open access Journal article linked) you may find some cool nuggets like:
“Among the highest-earning 1% of households (whose income is linked to 15-17% of national emissions), investment holdings account for 38-43% of their emissions,”
And
Then there were “super-emitters” with extremely high overall greenhouse gas emissions, corresponding to about the top 0.1% of households. About 15 days of emissions from a super-emitter was equal to a lifetime of emissions for someone in the poorest 10% in America.
Clicking into the journal article you may even find cool figures like this one, showing breakdown of emissions by category for each income group:
https://journals.plos.org/climate/article/figure?id=10.1371/journal.pclm.0000190.g001
Or this table showing the share of national emissions for each percentile:
https://journals.plos.org/climate/article/figure?id=10.1371/journal.pclm.0000190.t001
Yea I read that. I said divided even more. I should have been clearer on that. I’d really like a top 7.5, top 5, top 2.5 and then top 1 and 0.1. There’s a HUGE gap between top 10 and top 1. Like 3-4 times more income.
I’d love for a statistician (or someone that remembers way more about statistics than I do) to give us an equation which allows us to more easily assign blame. My intuition tells me that the yacht-owning class would be a significant portion.
Kind of confusing study. I thought it would outline how specifically those 10% are emitting that many gasses, so doing breakdowns like how much it costs to operate their homes and breakdowns of their methods of travel.
But, it is taking into consideration stuff like company they work for so like someone who lives without electricity in a tent and bikes but gets a high wages from a petroleum factory while investing most of their money as an engineer would be considered to be a higher gas emitter than someone who works in insurance while driving suvs and pickup trucks and living in a huge house.
It’s pretty abstract. Makes for a catchy headline, but not the direct picture I was hoping for when it comes to a household because it’s more an industry revenue analysis.
For those that want to skip straight to the study here it is
https://journals.plos.org/climate/article?id=10.1371/journal.pclm.0000190
Yeah and if the head of an oil company decides to just stop producing then the price will jump for a bit but then others will fill it’s place since demand didn’t change.
I feel as if this study is only trying to make people angry and have a scapegoat while making them not change anything relevant.
Sure the use of jets and yachts by the richest is a huge asshole move but the biggest leverage is when everyone would stop eating meat or using bikes instead of cars whenever possible
Yeah, because of the revenue and investment source focus of the study what I found interesting is that two people who work at the same place and earns the same salary could lead to the one who invests the money becoming the higher polluter according to the study. Even though the other person is the stereotypical polluter eating meat, mortgage on a huge house, and driving huge cars in contrast to the more minimalistic lifestyle of the other person being the stereotypical green individual who doesn’t eat meat and opts for public transport and a modest home.
Like this study is formulated in a way where the numbers are more appropriate for industry analysis than individual household analysis. Data is set in a way that it could be said it’s better in the long run to drive suvs than it is to invest, or high polluting companies pay more livable wages. Or if you have million dollars it’s less damaging to the environment in the long run to spend that money buying Suvs for your neighbors over investing it with the risk of the assets increasing in valuation leading to bigger polluter stats.
something something eating the rich shold be considered vegan
The people will die of thirst and starvation, to ensure the perpetual growth and gluttony privilege of the rich is protected at all costs.
