This really feels like astroturfed propaganda.
Remember kids, the carbon footprint idea of personal responsibility was invented by oil giant BP!
People will always think the line where you are supposed to worry about your contribution is just to the right of where they are.
“Whataboutism” helps nobody. Pointing to a very large problem is legit, and saying “what about this over here” is also legit but extremely unhelpful at moving discussions forward.
Great, make poor people feel like shit even more then they already might for something they have 0 control over.
This graph is simply wrong. While there is a minor rise towards the 1% it steeply rises directly there.
Tell me who is flying private planes a lot and having a car lot for themselves and yacht possibilities? Exactly.
YEAH! It’s not the 1 percents fault that I live in a totally unwallkable area because of all the highways and strip malls and oooohh wait a minute…
Let’s talk about this shitty graph, what are the metrics? Show us the numbers, because I bet it will paint a very different picture.
Top 1% emit 50 tons of CO2 per year per person [1].
That’s 8 billion * 1% * 50 tons = 4 billion tons per year.
Total annual CO2 emissions are about 35 billion tons [2].
Share of total emissions:
Ultra-rich (top 1%): 11%
Middle class (top 50% excluding top 1%): 77%
Poor (bottom 50%): 11%
Graph looks about right.
I’m not saying the curve is wrong, but when you create a graph like that without putting values on the axis it’s inherently misleading. Compare the top 10% of that cohort against the rest and tell me what percent of pollution they create, the issue here is disproportionate impact from the minority.
Compare the top 10% of that cohort against the rest
Top 10% emit 22 tons of CO2 per year per person [1].
8 billion * (10% * 22 tons - 1% * 50 tons) = 14 billion tons of CO2 per year, excluding the top 1%.
Share of total emissions:
Upper middle class (top 10% excluding top 1%): 39%
Lower middle class (top 50% excluding top 10%): 38%
when you create a graph like that without putting values on the axis it’s inherently misleading
No, it’s a common way to present data in a popular scientific context.
the issue here is disproportionate impact from the minority.
No, as the graph shows, the issue is the disproportionate impact from the richest half of the population. Even without the top 1%, the remaining 50-99% percentiles emit far too much. Even without the top 10%, the 50-90% percentiles still emit far too much.
The downvotes on this post just goes to show that lemmy is overrun by a new generation of climate change deniers, denying not the phenomenon as such, but their own culpability in it.
But they’ll get what’s coming to them.
