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Wealthiest 10% of US Households Responsible for 40% of Greenhouse Gas Emissions: Study (www.commondreams.org)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Every time I read about the ultra rich the exceed my negative expectations. 15 days = 1 lifetime is waaay more than I thought. My guess would have been like 1 year to build up that much. Wtf are they doing

[–] flames5123 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] flames5123 2 points 1 year ago

Yep. I’m barely in the top 10%, but I’m in a city and take transit and ride my bike, my wife uses the electric car to drive 5 mins uphill and gains about 60% back coming downhill. We eat local and do recycling and compost. The top 5% living in Texas or in suburbs driving trucks and SUVs are doing way more than me. I don’t think I’m an outlier in modern cities.