How Your Idols Are Burning Your Home: The Emission Gap Between Rich And Poor
“Who would have predicted the climate crisis and its spectacular impact on our country this summer?”
This isn’t a quote from a decades-old science-fiction novel or a Holywood production.
The year is 2023, and this is an excerpt from French President Macron’s New Year’s Eve address.
To his surprise, this has been a long time coming.
Alexander von Humboldt predicted anthropogenic climate change over 200 years ago.
Academics started linking carbon emissions to rising temperatures as early as 1896.
Newspapers were discussing coal use and its link with the climate crisis back in 1912.
President Macron’s compatriot, Jacques Cousteau, started talking about it in 1971, while over 20 years ago, Jacques Chirac warned that “our house is burning down,” and we are collectively looking away.
The world’s leading scientists from groups like the IPCC, the World Weather Attribution initiative and many more have been ringing the alarm for decades, issuing studies left, right and centre, each more damning than the previous. But after 27 COPs and dozens of scientific reports, the climate crisis still comes as a surprise to some.
While President Macron’s question might have been just a wrong choice of words, it reminds us of an overarching problem that we aren’t talking about enough — the widespread ignorance of those at the top regarding climate change — not only political leaders but also corporations and influential public figures.
As a community, we have a massive, inherent problem — the most surprised or ignorant of the climate crisis are the most responsible for it.
The Gap Between the Emissions of the Poorest and the Richest
According to Oxfam, the world’s richest 1% generate more than double the emissions of the poorest 3.1 billion.
What’s worse, this gap is widening. For example, in 2010, the 10% wealthiest households emitted 34% of global CO₂, compared to 15% for the 50% of the lower income bracket population. By 2015, the share of the wealthiest 10% jumped to 49% against just 7% for the poorest half of the population.
Today, in the UK, it would take 26 years for a low earner to produce as much CO₂ as the richest do in a year.
According to the World Inequality Report 2022, some of the reasons behind the widening emission gap include electricity consumption, diet, and, most importantly — transportation methods.
There is this odd, cringy, borderline-upsetting feeling watching videos of famous film and sports celebrities jumping happily in a circle, celebrating New Year’s Eve, on the board of a megayacht, with Antarctica’s melting glaciers in the background.
And, while critics may argue that Antarctica is heating three times the global average, there is no need to worry — the yacht in question is said to have a limited environmental footprint!
While superyachts, the single most-polluting assets, saw a 77% surge in sales in 2021, private jets remain the preferred transportation method for the wealthiest.
However, in just four hours, a private jet generates as much CO₂ as an average person in the EU for an entire year. While 80% of the global population has never gotten on a plane in their entire lifetime, the richest use planes on a daily basis. After the 2022 Super Bowl, for example, when over 140 private jets left LA just within the first five hours after the game. In fact, private jet flights have tripled since before the pandemic, while their carbon emissions have quadrupled.
Yard Digital has recently unveiled the scope of celebrities’ emissions by analysing their private jet travels. The analysis estimated that some have had 0.85 flights per day between January 1st 2022 and July 19th 2022. More disturbingly, some of these trips were over a distance of… 25 km.
Overall, celebrities are found to be emitting around 3,300 metric tons of CO₂ annually, compared to just seven metric tons for the average person.
But this isn’t just a practice of certain individuals. In fact, it is a glaring and widespread problem, and the football industry is its epitome.
Just after extending its partnership with the energy firm E.ON in a bid to “drive climate awareness”, Nottingham Forest took a 20-minute flight for its match against Blackpool.
In 2021, Manchester United’s flight to Leicester took just 10 minutes.
In Spain, Real Madrid’s team took a 15-minute flight to get back from Valladolid — a city a mere 210 km away.
In September 2022, Paris Saint-Germain’s team took a flight from Paris to Nantes.
At a press conference in 2022, a reporter’s question about whether PSG’s team should consider train trips to help fight climate change made the team’s star burst into laughter while also prompting the manager to sarcastically respond that the club was considering “sand yachts” instead.
The case was followed by criticism from public figures, including the French Sports Minister and the Mayor of Paris. As of December 2022, flights like this are banned in France.
If anything, examples like these perfectly illustrate how detached from reality the world’s elite can be when it comes to the collective mission to slow climate change down.
From Warnings to Real-Life Suffering
Climate Trends’ “No Place to Hide” report is a sobering reflection of the climate change-induced losses worldwide. The 14 extreme weather events studied have turned 2022 into one of the most ferocious years on record regarding the climate crisis. From the US and China to India and the Mediterranean, climate change proved it knows no borders.
In a nutshell:
- The US went through the worst megadrought in 1,200 years.
- Europe suffered the worst drought in over 500 years, while the UK experienced its first recorded temperature above 40°C — an event so rare that meteorologists classified the heat as “exceptional”.
- Over 900 million people in 17 Chinese provinces experienced one of the longest and most devastating heatwaves, with temperatures reaching 40°C and lasting over 70 days.
- South Korea saw the worst flooding in 80 years, with a month’s worth of rainfall occurring over just a few days.
- Central Tokyo experienced the longest streak of days with temperatures above 35°C since record-keeping began in 1875.
- An extreme flooding event submerged over a third of Pakistan and displaced over 33 million people. The floods came shortly after the country broke its temperature records in March.
- India suffered from temperatures of 49°C in the spring and experienced its hottest March since records began 122 years ago.
- Some Brazilian states saw over 70% of the rain that usually falls in May fall in just 24 hours.
Furthermore, climate change’s impacts are found to affect people disproportionately, hitting the poorest the hardest.
Countries with a lower GDP per capita are at greater risk of permanent loss and damage caused by climate change. On top of that, the population in low and lower-middle-income countries is around five times more likely than the people in high-income countries to be displaced by sudden extreme weather events. In the next ten years, climate change can push an additional 130 million people into poverty.
Nowadays, up to 3.6 billion people live in highly vulnerable regions to climate change. Scientists estimate that they are 15 times more likely to die due to floods, droughts, and storms compared to people living in regions with very low vulnerability. Studies reveal that some vulnerable countries have been hit by nearly eight times as many natural disasters relative to the 1980s.
Currently, the world’s poorest countries, including many highly-vulnerable low-lying island nations, home to around 1 billion people, are responsible for less than 1% of humanity’s global warming contribution. The World Bank finds that 74 of the world’s poorest countries account for less than 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
While being the least responsible, the poorest countries are the most affected by climate change and have the least capacity to adapt.
We Are on the Last Grains in the Hourglass
In a recent report, the IPCC warned that climate change’s impacts are heading towards catastrophic proportions, affecting the world way faster than anticipated.
The scientific group considers the 1.5°C target on “life support.” At the current rate of emissions, the world has approximately nine years until hitting the critical warming threshold and triggering catastrophic climate impacts, including extreme and more frequent weather anomalies, disease spread, hunger, and collapse of vital ecosystems. In a nutshell, climate disasters will become so extreme that people won’t be able to adapt.
What’s worse, the world is currently on a trajectory towards 2.7°C or more of global warming by 2100. As a result, scientists argue that the chance of having a liveable future on a habitable planet is hanging by a thread, as the consequences will get worse with every fraction of a degree of warming.
Meanwhile, the ignorance of the richest is reeking from every corner — from the USD 100 billion annual financial aid to the most vulnerable countries promised in 2009 but not once delivered to celebrities’ everyday life choices.
Regarding the latter, academics argue that taxing the wealthiest will fix the problem. But this, alone, won’t be enough. The key is for the top 0.001% to realize that their decisions can have the same climate impact as nationwide policy interventions.
They have the power, the ability and the moral responsibility to be that much-needed lifeline that will tame the world’s fall into the depths of a climate disaster. So far, however, they have been a part of the weight, pulling it down.
The world is in the dying minutes of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to prevent a catastrophe and secure a livable future. Considering what’s at stake, the hour or two saved by hopping on the private jet doesn’t seem worth it, right? Or is it just me?
