First, they only track emissions that they can directly tie with consumption. The statement "fifty percent of the world’s carbon emissions are produced by the world’s richest 10%" is not supported by the study because it makes no attempt to track all of the world's carbon emissions.
Second, they assume that income == consumption == carbon emissions, which is a very bad assumption. The world's richest people do not spend their entire income every year, so using that as the basis for consumption is inaccurate. Also, assuming that every dollar spent, no matter where or by whom, has the exact same emissions associated with it is incorrect. Wealthy people are the people who can afford to put solar panels on their roofs and buy new electric cars, but by this study they are penalized for such consumption.
In general, I find that oxfam optimizes their studies for the headlines. When you dig into it, there are so many qualifiers and assumptions made that it seems clear the study was authored with an specific outcome in mind. "The top 10% earn 5x more money than average" is not as outrageous a headline as we are used to seeing. But by multiplying by a carbon emission factor of 1, they get to write "Top 10% emits half of world's carbon", which generates way more clicks.
[1]https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10...
I made no statement one way or the other, _and neither did OP's study_. I'm just pointing out that the linked paper is bogus.
FWIW, your statement is factually correct - rich countries pollute more per capita than poor countries. I think a more useful metric is emissions per dollar GDP[1]. This measure how carbon efficient an economy is.
We could drop carbon emissions to nearly zero by reverting all of human society to be hunter-gatherers who haven't discovered fire yet. Building a more efficient economy lets us get closer to zero emissions without losing all of our modern quality of life improvements.
[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PP.GD?most_...
I only meant to say that the reason poor countries have a low per-capita emissions is because they are very poor. It is not a very instructive or useful metric to look at. Per GDP emissions lets us look at a "lifestyle adjusted" carbon emissions. There are countries in all four quadrants of the poor v rich, efficient v inefficient graph. That gives us a lot more insight into how to structure an economy.
1) the word “tax” In carbon-tax terrifies people, especially in America. So we get a tragedy of the commons situation with the cost of carbon made into an externality.
2) massive FUD and manipulation of media and environmental efforts to stop awareness of climate change for decades.
Fox News destroyed scientists on TV to discredit global warming.
People have made this happen, and they have gleefully lived without any repercussions - which is why the model has been copied around the world.
Hilariously the oil firms are rebranding themselves as eco firms.
Reducing their quality of life and expectations is what terrifies people. People want their vacations to Tahiti, their SUV, their detached single family homes with backyards and front yards, more children etc.
People know the only way out of this is to reduce consumption - of everything. But obviously few want to, especially when they don’t believe others will chip in and reduce also.
Your final point is describing a collective action problem, but that is solved by simply exposing the full cost of a goods to people.
That is what markets do, very very well. Expose costs via pricing, and let people respond to that information.
If your skin care product packaged by X company is 30% more expensive because its cost of carbon is included, then people will buy the less expensive option and go on their merry way.
“People” meaning as a whole, with sufficient cooperation to enact political change, on a global level, such that the cost of pollution can be priced into products.
But that pricing in will also cause the cost of everything we use to go up, causing a decrease in the amount of consumption (which is the intended effect), but that is an immediate and easily visible “loss” to people.
That last part there is very important. I feel much like this, me personally going ascetic, while all my fellow humans don't give a damn, doesn't help anything. This needs to come from the top, the politicians, with rules, regulations, fees and fines. Thus, I vote for the greenest and most ascetic party there is. But I have little hope left.
Meanwhile, unbeknownst to me, the other bidder would _also_ prefer to work doing good in the world, but takes the highest paying job instead, so they can outbid me.
It’s like saying “my per hour pay rate went up” and assuming your annual take has also increased. That’s only true if your total hours didn’t drop enough to erode those rate gains.
To your point, GDP and efficiency are both increasing but hours per worker are generally decreasing.
The number two exporter? The United States, at 34.1%, the vast majority of this also goes to China, again, for pigs.
You can easily replace that with > Brazil burns down forest mainly because of the Chinese desire for soy beans to feed pigs
and the point still stands. Brazil is planting soy beans because a rich trading partner is paying them more than the ranforests attract with no future foresight, despite this being a devestating blow to the entire world. It's unreasonable to expect Brazil to stand up and say "hey we're done with this" while other powers are encouraging the practices.
I'm not saying America is blameless, or that it is all China's fault. I'm saying putting all of your effort and focus on America while ignoring the growth of the world's largest polluter will not solve the problem.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26464707
The USA can afford to emit less than it did 10 years ago precisely because it has emitted so much in the past and its economy is basically built. Any bemoaning about China or other currently-developing countries that doesn't also talk about how we should also be helping them bootstrap themselves with more advanced systems is just privilege at having gotten there first and pulling the ladder up behind us.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
Right now, the cheapest approach from scratch could maybe consist of:
1. Over-provisioned renewables,
2. connected to a large-area grid to mitigate local-scale negative impacts to renewable productivity,
3. with enough fossil fuel capacity to basically serve as "storage" and bridge large-scale negative impacts to renewable productivity.
But, of course, China is not building from scratch -- they've been at this for decades. And the inversion of prices between renewables and fossil fuels is a fairly recent one.
You can add US for comparison. China's emissions have been plateauing for the past 10 years, while the US is going down. Per-capita, China is still less than half of the US, so it'll take a long time before the US catches up, if ever.
[1] https://tradingeconomics.com/china/co2-emissions-kg-per-ppp-.... [2] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/co2-emissions-kg-....
The exact same argument is true for palm oil in indonesia; blaming indonesia for destroying borneo and sumatra isn't going to fix the problem when it's all being exported to the EU and india.
It is incumbent upon those with the power to stop degrading the environment to do so. Where the Amazon rainforest is concerned, that's Brazil.
Getting every nation which might want cheap soybeans (all of them, to a first approximation) to agree to stop buying from Brazil is a complex coordination problem with rewards for defection. Getting Brazil to stop cutting down the rainforest for the profit of agribusiness is coordinating the policy of a single nation; still difficult, just not completely intractable.
Brazilian soybeans rely on genetic modification to survive in the sweltering climate. Monsanto is perhaps the best target here.
Something I did not know, and definitely a really important consideration here.
In the UK at least, we seem to have palm oil in everything, and Indonesia and that part of the world are busily hacking down forests and killing orangutans in the process.
What's the sudden need for palm oil? We hardly used it in the 70s and 80s when I was a kid.
And because brazilians voted for president a man clearly hostile to science and environment conservation... with not surprising results. If you vote a man that calls himself Captain chainsaw you obtain exactly the prize what you asked for
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/feb/19/palm-oil-ingred...
Even so called 'ethical palm oil' just means that those that want it, and can't get it from an 'ethical supplier' because Western companies consume the supply, get it from "illegal" suppliers.
People have agency, there's no Coca Cola goons with guns to their heads this time.
Brazil burns down forest mainly because of the United State’s desire for think like soy beans to feed cows.
Poorer countries use coal because it’s cheap and global conditions don’t enrich them enough to get better sources.
The sad truth is we force countries to be poor and exploit their own resources so we don’t have to do it ourselves. And of course then we’ll all pay the price living on a dying planet.