So we could basically solve climate change just by killing a few thousand people?
Sounds like a fair trade for the billions of lives it would save.
this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2024
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It's a structural problem, merely killing those few thousand would accomplish very little since they would rapidly be replaced.
From the article:
The richest 1 percent (77 million people) were responsible for 16 percent of global consumption emissions in 2019 —more than all car and road transport emissions. The richest 10 percent accounted for half (50 percent) of emissions.
To be a member of the richest 1% of the world you need a net worth of about $800k -- so while the billionaire class is still a massive problem, an even larger problem ecologically is that tens of millions of moderately wealthy people from wealthy nations have massively outsized carbon footprints.
77 million people
This would include several members of my family and they can either give up their destructive lifestyles or get fucked too.
Do they live in NYC and just refuse to use public transit? If so, yea I agree, fuck'em. Do they live in the suburbs because they likely can't afford to live in a city where they wouldn't need their car? Well now you get into the actual problem that a competent, non-capitalist government would need to solve. Simply killing the petite-bourgeious will solve nothing and honestly would just cause their wealth to be sucked upward make the problem even worse for everyone else.
while the billionaire class is still a massive problem, an even larger problem ecologically is that tens of millions of moderately wealthy people from wealthy nations have massively outsized carbon footprints.
It is definitely false that that's a larger problem. The top corporations emit way more carbon than all the petite-bourgeois SUV drivers and so on. I think the number people constantly trot out is that the top 100 companies (a fraction of a fraction of a percent here) do 70% of the emitting.
To be a member of the richest 1% of the world you need a net worth of about $800k – so while the billionaire class is still a massive problem, an even larger problem ecologically is that tens of millions of moderately wealthy people from wealthy nations have massively outsized carbon footprints.
This can not be correct. My wife inherited her parent's house when the last one died when she was 17 or so (guardianship until 18, whatever, not the point) - but we're poor af. I mean we're not lining up at the food bank, but no way we're top 1%. It's worth $800k easy (CAD, but still, throw in some other 'things' we own and we're there).
In most of the world, $800,000 is enough money that you and your wife would never have to work another day in your lives. Even in Canada that's 20-ish years of the median household income.
It's a little different when much of that net worth is tied up in your house. You can leverage that for cash to an extent, but you can't simply subside on it for decades the way you could $800k in the bank.
But the larger point remains regardless of where exactly the line is drawn: "wealthy" in global terms includes people in developed countries who are not multimillionaires. These people have massively outsized carbon footprints, even if they aren't as damaging as people and organizations far wealthier than they are. It's fair to expect them to cut back on things like air travel and meat consumption.
The 1% in Canada and the US is not the same thing as the 1% worldwide.
1% of 8 billion is 80 million.
Yes, an increase in the guillotine business would help, but it's a systemic problem and only changing the system will solve it.
I think the idea of killing people to solve climate change is their plan.
more like a few million but we dont have to kill them just destroy the economic system that gives them unjust power and access to resources.
People confuse the richest 1% of America and the richest 1% of the world. The former is multimillionnaires, the latter is like, software engineers in America. This article concerns the latter.
The US is, give or take, 4% of the global population. So, the top income quintile ($153,000/yr and above) brings you to around 1% of the global population, with room for well-off people in other countries.
In case your math skills are rusty, the global 1% is 80 million people. That's the same size as Germany, the country. Yes it includes oil barons, multinational CEOs, and whatnot, but also like, professionals in expensive cost-of-living areas like Californian software engineers.
I'm fine with pushing anything within a 100km radius around San Francisco into the ocean. Who's free next tuesday?
These people run and own the largest polluting inustries in the world, removing them does not solve the problem. We must strip them of their power and additionally remove their destructive legacies.
