A report by Oxfam has found that the high carbon emissions of the world’s richest 1% are worsening hunger, poverty and excess deaths/
The report found that Owing to luxury yachts, private jets and investments in polluting industries, the consumption of the world’s wealthiest people is also making it increasingly difficult to limit global heating to 1.5C.
If everyone on Earth emitted planet-warming gases at the same rate as the average billionaire, the remaining carbon budget to stay within 1.5C would be gone in less than two days, the Oxfam analysis said, rather than current estimates of four years if carbon emissions remain as they are today.
Preceding a budget in the UK, a presidential election in the US and the Cop29 climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, the anti-poverty group’s examination of carbon inequality calls on governments to tax the super-rich in order to curtail excessive consumption and generate revenue for the transition to clean energy, and to compensate those worst affected by global heating.
Oxfam’s research found that the world’s fifty richest billionaires produce on average more carbon emissions in under three hours than the average British person does in their entire lifetime. On average, they take 184 private jet flights in a single year, spending 425 hours in the air. This produced as much carbon as the average person in the world would in 300 years. Their luxury yachts emitted as much carbon as the average person would in 860 years.
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The Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s two private jets spent nearly 25 days in the air over a 12-month period and released as much carbon as a US Amazon employee would emit in 207 years.
Two jets of Elon Musk, the second richest person in the world and Tesla chief, jointly discharged as much CO2 in the same period as 834 years’ worth of emissions generated by an average person.
Meanwhile, the three yachts of the Walton family, heirs of the Walmart retail chain, had a combined carbon footprint in one year of 18,000 tonnes – an amount similar to that of 1,714 Walmart shopworkers.
Ahead of the Labour government’s first budget statement on Wednesday, Oxfam is calling on the UK chancellor, Rachel Reeves, to increase taxes on “climate-polluting extreme wealth”, starting with private jets and superyachts, to raise funds which could be used to tackle the climate crisis.
In response, a UK Treasury spokesperson said “We do not comment on speculation around tax changes outside of fiscal events”.
The Oxfam researchers developed a methodology for calculating the emissions from yachts that included data on the size of the vessel, engine specifications, fuel type, hours at sea and even generators for hot tubs and air conditioning for helicopter hangars.
“One of the key findings for us is that superyachts are by far the most polluting toy that a billionaire can own, except perhaps for a rocket ship,” said Alex Maitland, one of the authors of the report.
Story was adapted from the Guardian.
