The high carbon emissions of the world’s richest 1% are worsening hunger, poverty and excess deaths, a has found. 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 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.
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. The Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s two private jets spent nearly 25 days in the a.