551
Twelve billionaires’ climate emissions outpollute 2.1m homes, analysis finds
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2023
551 points (97.7% liked)
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This is not a billionaire's climate emissions.
If the car I own tallies onto my carbon footprint, surely the corporations owned by the billionaires enjoy the same designation.
They're no different because of what they own.
You would have to take a look at who the stakeholders are at each company. Corporate "ownership" isn't the same as sole proprietorship.
Did you read the article at all?
They all get to enjoy the responsibility (as they all shared the benefits).
If you lend your car to your cousin for a cross- country road trip, does your cousin's road trip count as his emissions, yours, or should it be double counted?
Similarly, my 401k has an S&P 500 fund in it, which contains some fossil fuel stocks. Does my carbon footprint go up every month by whatever fraction of a percent of Exxon my retirement fund buys each month?
When you eat a steak, whose emissions are the methane the cow burped? Yours? The ranchers? Cargills? Walmart's?
Honestly, consumption-based accounting makes way more sense to me.
Double count that shit. We're not going to get out of this hole if we split hairs semantically.
Triple count it if you have a fleet of vehicles over 10.
Double count it for dual axles and ANY truck driving while not hauling a load greater than a passenger vehicle is capable of moving.
Consumption accounting is impossible when the only options available to the consumer fuck them over completely.
Cheap subsidized beef means I'm going to buy it to feed my family.
Cheap subsidized gas means I can keep polluting with little cost.
CAFE laws making vehicles fucking gigantic make it impossible to consume less fuel.
Companies and laws dictate our consumption not the other way around. Tax or kill the wealthy, then we can talk.
It should be double counted since we need to do something about it. Cousin could pay the carbon tax on gas for usage, and owner could pay a carbon tax for milage usage at the end of the year.
I'm aware that this is a non-starter, but it would be a good start for getting overall emissions down. The billionaires should also pay a carbon tax above and beyond what the corporations pay, as a double incentive to stop polluting the planet for profit. Take away the profit, and companies will change.
Going to disagree with pure consumption based accounting.
Think there needs to be something about decision influence basis, otherwise the companies won't have pressure to change as the "bill" is accounted for elsewhere
This kind of accounting is about generating clicks, ultimately.
We know the actual fixes for this.
Cap and trade fixed acid rain. Pigouvian taxes like a carbon tax work. Even a revenue-neutral carbon tax and dividend where you split the taxed money evenly among everyone works; it literally pays people to not pollute.
The Green New Deal is a fix.
Novel accounting schemes that generate headlines like this are explicitly not a fix because literally all they do is generate bad publicity for billionaires and ad revenue for the paper. There's nothing real here.
Yeah - at best they are morally responsible for not choosing to invest in something else but in the end as long as there's capitalism and people are creating demand for whatever polluting thing they procude someone else will step in
The Demand has to be slashed by making those products less profitable if the general public is not acting in their own interest because polluting is cheaper and more comfortable
Especially if people are just going directly to "eat the rich" after articles like this I really wonder what they think will happen if the oil-production is stopped completely from one day to the next? And that even assumes that noone will step up to continue the production - what if the state takes over the oil-company and spreads the emissions evenly among every citizen - would that solve the problem of climate change in their minds?
Capitalism is not why people like electricity, food, and entertainment. All of those things predate capitalism. The USSR contributed to climate change.
Anyone trying to make climate change a leftist issue is a moron. Every economic policy would contribute to climate change becaus every economic policy needs to guarantee heat, food, transport, etc.
I think there’s one big difference here: the capital holding class has fought tooth and nail against making solutions viable. They’ve pushed pro fossil fuel propaganda into everything from our commutes to schools. They’ve fought against acknowledgement of the realities of climate change and done nothing to try to move towards a more sustainable future, instead choosing to invest in lobbying against solutions to reduce demand such as carbon taxes, reduction of oil subsidies, increases in clean energy subsidies, and mass transit.
Capital is all-in on green investment right now so I'm not sure what you're talking about.
Oh you mean now after knowing about it for decades? They waited until it was too late.
Who is "they," here?
Oh, look... an "enlightened centrist" has shown up to whitesplain that capitalist parasitism is actually poor people's fault.
Yawn.
I'm as left as you can get without being straight up communist - I despise neoliberalism and think that countries should to a lot more to make billionaires nonexistent via redistribution of money and higher wealth- and inheritance-tax but for this issue it's just not enough if everyone washes their hands in innocence and only points to them
sure their personal lifestyle is much shittier than the one from the average person but pinning the emissions from companies they own on them is just making things far too easy on the average person
People need to vote for a green transition and not for some shortsighted utopia of "if we just remove the billionaires climate change will be fixed" - that's not the case as long as demand is still there
No. You don't. If you did, you wouldn't literally be regurgitating one of the fundamental tenets of neoliberal ideology - individual responsibility. Need to be reminded of this?
See that part up there? You know, the part where you blame capitalist parasitism on poor people?
Riiiiight... how is this whole "voting harder" thing going for you?
I don't say the single person is responsible - I say the population as a whole is - and for that to happen there needs to be a massive shift on the individual level as politicians won't vote against most of their population.
It's less about the individual responsibility for climate change but about a motivation to become politically active and get more people on board - leading by example is just a very low-level approach that everyone can do.
I'm not pinning anything on poor people - I'm just saying that pointing fingers will do literally nothing and I think we should work within the current democratic systems which in turn means that everyone is at least a bit responsible for who they vote for. And voting and advocating for a party that promises to cut down emissions of everyone is the most logical thing as just removing the billionaires won't fix a thing if polluting isn't made more expensive which definitely WILL influence everyone.
It just seems very immature to use this thing as a "get out of jail card" to continue flying every year and doing the shortest possible trips via car instead of taking the bike for a change or advocating for more bike infrastructure in cities.
It's not going well because a lot of people seem to think they are not affected and want to ignore the whole issue until it's too late and nature forces them to change - and it's frustrating. Everyone should've started adapting to a more ecological lifestyle yesterday but that obviously didn't happen. If it did it would be much easier to actually get politicians to change something
Well, that's just fine and dandy... but that all depends on whether you actually have anything that can be called a "democratic" system with a straight face now does it?
Sooo... do you?
But it does make a title that gets clicks.
Yes. It is.