Rich People Are Bad For The Planet Studies Show

The richest 1% of people in the world create more than double the carbon emissions of the poorest, says a new report which calls for taxes targeting excessive luxury.

Studying the quarter century from 1990 to 2015, Oxfam and the Stockholm Environment Institute found that the richest 1% were responsible for 15% of emissions. The poorest half accounted for 7%.

Travel was the biggest culprit. In the E.U. “air travel” of the 1% accounted for nearly half of all their emissions. “Land travel” was next, followed by housing.

The richer you are the more you travel, and the more you travel privately. While the affluent drive their own cars and take holidays abroad, the even more flush buy mega-polluters like private jets and superyachts (which burn an average of 500 litres (110 gallons) of fuel an hour). Meanwhile poorer people mostly travel on public transport if at all.

Oxfam says taxes must be levied against such luxuries to avoid things getting even worse. “Governments must curb the emissions of the wealthy through taxes and bans on luxury carbon such as SUVs and frequent flights,” says Tim Gore, head of Climate Policy at Oxfam and author of the report.

But it is not just carbon emissions that are becoming more unequal. A separate report by Leeds University looking at energy usage found that the richest tenth of people in the world consume 20 times more energy than the bottom ten.

Again, travel was mainly to blame: “The top 10% consume 56% of vehicle fuel, 70% of vehicle purchases, 76% of package holidays,” says study, which was published in March. Though it noted that many other areas of energy consumption cannot be compared “because the poor consume too little.”

Even essential expenditures increase the richer somebody is, the study found. “The consumption of every product we observe increases with income, so the rich consume more heat and electric as their incomes grow,” says the paper published in Nature Energy.

Yannick Oswald, one of its authors, says taxes should be more targeted. “You need to take into account there are a vast amount of poor people in the world that still need to increase their energy use because they still don’t have everything they need in order to live a good life. So you can’t just blanket tax energy and just say, ‘Nobody produce more energy anymore.'”

Instead highly targeted levies should discourage excessive transport as well as luxury goods such as high jewellery and electronics, says Oswald.

Technology Is Not The Solution

Many wealthy defend their lifestyle with the old adage that efficiency will improve with technology. Tesla cars are now the vehicle of choice for the concious-millionaire, smart homes require less heating and even superyachts are turning to hydrogen.

However, the Leeds University study says this argument doesn’t stack up. Using economic growth projections drawn up by the OECD, the authors found that “even with energy efficiency improvements, total footprints would double by 2050, with transport an ever larger share of consumption.”

On the plus side, those economic predictions have already been slashed this year. That should mean those emissions should also decline. But the initiative needs to be taken now, says Gore: “Simply rebooting our outdated, unfair, and polluting pre-Covid economies is no longer a viable option. Governments must seize this opportunity to reshape our economies and build a better tomorrow for us all.”