America’s wealthiest people are also some of the world’s biggest polluters – not only because of their massive homes and private jets, but because of the fossil fuels generated by the companies they invest their money in.
Every day we’re here just to learn billionaires & families should be crushed and their wealth redistributed amongst third world countries.
That would just make other billionaires somewhere else. The problem is the system not the people
He did not say “once”. I think they’re suggesting a systematic approach. I periodic Purge if you will. Like some shitty movie.
The moment they go above a certain amount and still act shitty, they are food.
I wouldn’t care about rich people if they just paid their workers, paid their taxes, looked at reducing the pollution of their companies, didn’t lobby against the public interests, and just were all around swell people.
The problem is that they aren’t, none of them are.
Either they become like that from being rich, or only awful people are moralless enough to become rich. But there isn’t a single good rich person.
MacKenzie Scott is the sole exception
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Yup, the problem is firmly the system, but suggesting a worldwide change to socialism/communism is less “palatable” and believable by the average person.
So “eat the rich” is a decent compromise for a comment not intended to approach any sort of complex answer, while still being a move in a better direction than suggesting things to continue as they are.
Suggesting a replacement system is infinitely more palatable to me than another Reign of Terror followed by (presumably) the same mistakes. Revolutionary defense is fine, but we don’t need bloody revenge.
Why advocate for structural changes when we can meme fedpost about a violent solution?
Redistributing the wealth of billionaires is already part of a good structural change, it’ll remove from them power they’d use to continue the exploitation of the people. You can substitute “crush” by destitute and incarcerate them if you’d prefer, as long as the wealth isn’t on the hands of the few anymore.
If anyone is asking how do we pay to solve the climate crisis. I think its pretty clear who should be paying.
This is true for almost anything. Major corporations, and the investors that profit off of them, pay so little in taxes compared to the average citizen. Instead, their money is devoted to lobbying and setting up careful corporate international glass houses so they don’t have to pay the taxes they should. We can push much harder on tackling social issues, but the top 10% don’t exist in society, they lord over it
the top 10% don’t exist in society, they lord over it
I think you mean they run it
How much money does the top 1% have and how much do you think it will cost to clean up the world? Those two numbers are not even within 3 years of global GDP dipshit.
Last year they increased their wealth by 8 trillion usd. Since 2021 their combined wealth is 42 trillion usd. (Thats twice as much as the rest 99% combined)
It is estimated that to fix the climate crisis it takes between 300 billion - 50 trillion usd. So they actually could do that.
And than there is the matter of comparing personal profit of a few. To the entire value produced by a country. Which is a really dumb comparison.
But you might know that the gdp of the us in 2021 was around 23 trillion.
So your the intellectual floor gymnast, dipshit.
China and India, but you won’t admit it.
Who are the factories of the west and emit co2 for our products.
The U.S. military is the largest single producer of emissions on the planet.
So fucking sick of billionaires
What do you even do when you exceed 100 Millions?
They must be mentally sick in some way “just one mooare billion pleaaase”
If you have over a billion dollars, you could spend every waking moment shovelling money into a fire and you would still have over a billion dollars when you die
Yep. They earn interest on their money often faster than they can spend it. It makes less than no sense.
I imagine its just a prick waving contest between the rich. They just compare the number in their account to the others and want to have a bigger number.
The US subsidizes fossil fuels to the tune of 600B per year. You pay for pollution with your taxes.
We need a 95% tax bracket for anyone that makes more than a few million/year.
And a wealth tax for people having more value than like 10 millions (or less actually).
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A few million/year is a reasonable amount of money for a (highly) successful person to make. A wealth tax for people making over a billion or just $100M per year is enough to fix a lot of the problems in this country without destroying the “American dream”
The way I see it, if you make enough money to buy a nice, moderate house in California or Hawaii once per year, you are already making too much money. My cutoff would probably be closer to $2-3M… though I’d be willing to go higher if paired with an annual “wealth tax”… say, if you have a value of over - for example - $20M (incl. stocks and any other non-liquid assets) you must pay 20% of any excess value in taxes annually. That would be on top of the 95% multimillionaire income tax.
TL;DR: one doesn’t become rich by respecting others.
Anyone else just feel like we should eat the rich?
I think it’s way overdue.
On one hand, yes, on the other, eating shit isn’t very appealing.
Won’t stop the meat producing companies or the oil companies from existing - that just moves the emissions of them to their heirs.
That metric is really bad - as long as there’s demand for gas or meat those emissions need to be attached to someone - and attaching them to the owner just takes away all responsibility from everyone and tells them that they don’t have to change anything.
If BP would Stop producing oil tomorrow the price would probably jump but then other companies would step in and fill that gap and nothing would’ve changed pollution wise.
There’s a steep cliff between the 95% and the .01%. I wonder what proportion is just the .01
The income of the top 1% alone – households making more than $550,000 – was linked to 15% to 17% of this pollution.
The report also identified “super-emitters.” They are almost exclusively among the wealthiest top 0.1% of Americans, concentrated in industries such as finance, insurance and mining, and produce around 3,000 tons of carbon pollution a year. To put that in perspective, it’s estimated people should limit their carbon footprint to around 2.3 tons a year to tackle climate change.
Thank you for finding that for me
The picture they paint in this article, of the ultra rich with their private jets and yachts, does not align with the statistic presented in the title.
the wealthiest 10% in the US, households making more than about $178,000
I’m sure many of you know people in this group. Two adults each making 90k a year is enough to break into the 10%. And clearly they’re not flying around in private jets.
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Nobody said the “it ain’t much” part. What they said is that 180k isn’t enough to be chartering private jets. It doesn’t make you “ultra wealthy”. Upper-middle class? Yes. But people making that are waaaaay closer to a line cook than to Jeff Bezos.
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That’s true, but most of my social group fits into this definition and the majority fly commercial 6 - 12+ times a year, all around the globe, either for vacation or business travel. They almost all own personal vehicles, replaced every 5 - 10 years, well before the end of life of the vehicle. I live in Colorado and it’s common for this class to own/rent a second home or condo in the mountains and take multi-hour drives to those places on the weekend. Those lifestyle choices produce massive amounts of CO2 relative to individuals who otherwise live generally identical lives.
It doesn’t take extravagances like private jets to contribute outsized emissions.
Got it. Eating the rich for protecting humanity by protecting the climate.
CO² tax on oil and fuel production i say.
40% seems low.
Probably because not all of the CEOs all of the enormous corporations, or leaders of the top polluting nations, are in that top 10‰. 10% is just a nice number to use, and I expect that if they went with 15 or 20% then the corresponding amount of pollution they’re responsible for would jump up significantly.
That makes sense. I apparently can’t do math this morning.
Jesus Christ. Do you know how much the US outputs compared to China and India? Educate yourself instead of following the group think. Seriously, the US is the only country on the planet that is actually going to achieve the Kyoto Agreement and we didn’t even fucking sign up for it. The US literally leads the entire fucking world in reduction of greenhouse gasses and development of green tech and you fucking clowns just sit here and bag on the rich… what a sad bunch of morons you are.
Not even the rich. Apparently workers earning $90k per year is enough to qualify as enemies to these people.
The rich aren’t people who work for a living. The rich are the bourgeousie who live parasitically off the rest of us. The people who can buy citizenship to nearly any country they desire. The people with multimillion dollars doomsday bunker communities.
They are pulling up the entire average they have 40% of. They are emitting 6x more than the bottom 90% per capita, so that 6x figure should have been the metric to focus on
They may as well be polluting methane gas because they’re so full of shit
As much as I understand the hate towards rich people governments are just as much at fault for subsidising, directly funding and giving land to those companies in the first place for people to be able to make money off them.
Yeah, governments are totally just giving this shit out with no compulsion from the rich.
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Because capitalist governments serve the capitalist class
but because of the fossil fuels generated by the companies they invest their money in.
Lemme go ahead and roll my eyes here. Yes, American Airlines produces a significant percentage of the world’s greenhouse emissions. But they burn that fuel for the passengers, not just for the benefit of shareholders. Same with ExxonMobil, BP, etc.
Consumption is what drives pollution. Investments to profit off of that consumption is secondary.
Their biggest success is convincing common folks it’s out fault.
Consumption driven by advertising based on Edward Bernays work, which explicitly intends to create fissures within people and then sell them cures to the fissures they created,m. Just disallowing advertising would have a substantial effect on consumption.
