Die reichste Bevölkerung der Welt kostet die Erde Billionen. Die Studie kommt zu dem Schluss, dass die oberen 10 % der globalen Verbraucher überproportional dafür verantwortlich sind, die Grenzen unseres Planeten zu überschreiten und Schäden zu verursachen, für die die Gesellschaft im Allgemeinen die Kosten trägt.
https://www.sciencealert.com/worlds-richest-10-are-costing-earth-trillions-study-finds
34 Kommentare
>We’ve heard that the world’s wealthiest 10 percent are disproportionately responsible for environmental damage.
>Now, scientists have estimated just how much, in cold hard cash, those damages are worth.
>It’s difficult to put a price on the environment, and some scientists even argue it’s beside the point: that nature has intrinsic value, beyond the services it provides to us.
>But in some situations, it helps to try to put it in economic terms: especially when those are the terms the world’s wealthiest are used to dealing in.
>That’s what environmental scientists Inge Schrijver, Rutger Hoekstra, and Paul Behrens, all from Leiden University in the Netherlands, have done.
>The world’s top 10 percent of consumers, they calculate, owe society trillions for their environmental impact.
>That’s a pertinent finding when, for instance, Elon Musk has just been named the world’s first trillionaire.
>“We aim to highlight the differentiated responsibility of society’s top decile and illustrate this with the potential revenue if they would pay their environmental bill,“ Schrijver and team explain in a new peer-reviewed [paper](https://www.nature.com/articles/s44458-026-00079-x).
>“We find annual damages owed by the global 10 percent to be $1.7–$5.7 trillion, equivalent to $2.3k–$7.5k per person (in 2017 US dollars).“
>“This surpasses international climate and biodiversity financing gaps.“
And if you eat meat everyday and own a car, you are in the top 10% worst polluters, by the way.
part of the problem is the top 10% doesn’t mean billionaires.
It means the upper middle class Americans who hold multi millions in assets and have extraordinary spending power.
very good chance somebody comments in this topic agreeing with the research without realizing it’s talking about them and not the billionaires.
If you are reading this article you are most likely in that top 10%
Makes sense since most wealth on this planet has been generated by externalizing costs rather than reducing them.
If you live in the US or other wealthy western nations this almost certainly includes you btw
Nobody wants to talk about how many flights the ultra rich and corporate execs are taking every day? Or the pollution they force on us by increasing the transit distance between consumer and manufacturer as materials becomes increasingly outsourced? Or how demands for in-office work exacerbates gas consumption and emissions? How businesses bear no responsibility in the life cycle of the products they mass produce with planned obsolescence to generate ongoing sales?
Or are we back to lumping everyone in with the oligarchy so we feel ashamed rather than furious?
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So how much damage is the top 1% doing vs the other 9%?
I don’t own a business or a private jet…I also can’t afford organic groceries, yes.
Do you know what’s genuinely insane to me?
There are solutions to the problems. Many of them.
Many that could probably be put in place with a couple hundred million, let alone billion.
Yet, it would require some of the people on the top giving up just a modicum of power to achieve. And that is something they refuse to do.
Which I guess makes sense, you can really only get to billionaire status by either total dumb luck, or like almost all of them, being a selfish psychopath.
And yes, I do realize this isn’t strictly about billionaires. Still, feeling like you need to even strive for *that* level of wealth in your life is a mental disease and needs to be treated as such.
This is why we had governments to ensure equity and ensured that people followed regulations.
I think Americans have a very skewed perception of what wealthy or top 10% globally means.
Even ‘poor’ Americans are on average significantly wealthier than the majority of people globally. To most people in the world $40k a year makes you rich.
Yes cost of living varies drastically and even if you earn that much you may not feel that way but statistically if you earn $45k or above you are in the group spoken about in this article.
We can demand to hold uber rich responsible (and should) but also hold space in our hearts to recognize that North Americans and Europeans have more creature comforts and wealth than the global south.
try to live simply, so that others may simply live.
So… what are we going to do about it?
Thos is the case throughout history. Not every rich person is this way but most.
Reminds me of when Mr. Burns blocked out the sun.
If only there were signs
Yeah, we definitely need change. This whole materialistic society we live in is exhausting and it seems we are racing to the bottom as a society. Time to get back to basics.
Climate change was quite literally a solved problem in the 60s with nuclear power. Then the environmental lobby pushed to regulate it out of existence.
Yeah no kidding.
My parents clothes were made at textile miles in the USA. Heck, a lot of them were made in the state they lived in.
My clothes are made in Vietnam, China, and maybe Mexico. Just getting clothed means I’m participating in the release of tons of emissions and pollutants.
That’s not counting my food. I can buy some from local farmers markets but realistically I can’t buy all my food there cuz it’s way more expensive than the grocery store. Luckily, my local grocery sources a lot of fruits and veggies locally in my state, but meats are very frequently sourced at best out of state.
This isn’t taking into account the fact that I need to travel to work every day (more emissions), furnish my house (TV from China, couch from Vietnam, table from somewhere else in SE Asia, etc).
Globalization has been great for keeping stuff cheap, but it’s changed local economies, and increases our damage to the planet.
**“The woodworm eats the house that shelters it.“** *(Eastern European proverb highlights the self-destructive nature of parasites who ruin the very entity supporting them).*
Rich people suck. Got it!
time to rise up eh..
its too bad the very people wealthy and connected enough to make meaningful change are too narcissistic and comfortable to actually do it
I’m in this picture and I don’t like it
I think taxing them is a good idea for the world, they fly too high, treat the world as a toy.
> The top 10 percent of US consumers, who make up the largest share of the global top decile, were assigned bills ranging from $19k to $63k, which is just 6–20 percent of their income, or 0.8–3 percent of their wealth […….]
> In practice, **environmental taxation may not be a cure-all for the serious global disasters we face when it comes to climate change and biodiversity loss**.
I imagine proposing a $19-63k tax on the American middle class is about the most dead-in-the-water policy prescription you could come up with.
in our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations.
I’ll take „things we already knew, and didnt require data analysis“ for $1200, Alex
„THE TOP 10%!!!!“
And if you look into it, its mostly USA and China. And the proposed solution… a tax that the wealthy enough can avoid and the rest bear the burden. Meanwhile nobody would touch private jets which are an insane polluter. Noooo, can’t do that.
How about they start doing something about the private jets and mega yachts? We can’t even tackle the low hanging fruit.
This is why I donate the equivalent of 10x my annual carbon footprint to CATF Rainforest Trust and One Tree Planted (roughly 4-5k/yr). That covers me my family and close friends who I know won’t donate to offset their carbon footprint. Makes me feel a bit better about traveling and whatnot
People constantly speaking about eating the rich would be very upset if they knew they are part of the global rich simply by being born in the US and not being homeless.
If you are an average person in eh western world you are part of the 10%.
That’s 800 million, more than Western Europe and North combined