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America’s jet-set, climate gala-attending elites appear to be responsible for 40 percent of the carbon emissions fueling climate change, despite their calls for climate activism.
In fact, just 15 days of income for a household in the top 0.1 percent, those earning more than $3.2 million a year, generate as much carbon pollution as a lifetime’s worth of income earned by a household in the bottom 10 percent, those those $15,700 or less a year, a new study has found.
The findings follow years of criticism directed at wealthy climate activists and celebrity environmentalists — including Microsoft founder Bill Gates, director Steven Spielberg, actor Leonardo DiCaprio and many others — for their excessive carbon footprint.
Last summer, pop icon Taylor Swift was named the “biggest celebrity carbon emitter of the year” after a study found that the musician had taken 170 private jet flights between January and July 2022 alone.
Bill Gates boards a private jet at Gillette-Campbell County Airport in Gillette, Wyoming in 2010. Gates has been accused of hypocrisy after making a bid to buy the world’s largest private jet operator just a month before releasing a book preaching about climate change
The new study, led by researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, found that the wealthiest Americans, whose incomes make them among the top 10% of earners, have fueled climate change in no small way through their passive equity investments in fossil fuels.
The study’s authors, led by a team from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, recommend introducing a new “shareholder-based carbon tax” targeting the fossil fuel investments of the wealthy as a solution to the climate hypocrisy.
“This study gives us insight into how revenues and investments obscure responsibility for emissions,” said the study’s lead author. Jared Starra sustainability scientist in the Department of Environmental Conservation at UMass Amherst.
Previous models of carbon containment, Starr noted, tend to focus on “carbon tax” initiatives targeting personal consumption, which can unfairly penalize workers such as truck drivers, who must burn gas to make a living .
“Consumption-based approaches to limit greenhouse gas emissions are regressive,” Starr said. “They disproportionately punish the poor while having little impact on the extremely wealthy, who tend to save and invest a large portion of their income.”
In collaboration with the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Starr’s UMass team has compiled 30 years of data, including more than 2.8 billion inter-industry financial transfers obtained from the Eora MRIO database.
That data helped Starr and his team distinguish between two categories of greenhouse gas emissions that can be linked to passive investment income.
The first they called “supplier-based emissions,” by which they mean the emissions that result from fossil fuel companies themselves and the profit they generate for their investors through the sale of oil, natural gas and other hydrocarbon fuels.
The second they called “producer-based emissions,” meaning emissions directly related to the operation of a publicly traded company owned by the shareholders, such as a coal-fired power plant.
Starr’s group was then able to compare that industrial financial data with a second database, that of the University of Minnesota Integrated public-use microdatasets (IPUMS)which contains demographic and income information on more than 5 million US citizens.
The IPUMS data helped determine how much Americans made money on wages and salaries compared to investment income, and the mixed demographics in between who made money on both.
“An income-based lens helps us focus on exactly who benefits most from climate-changing carbon pollution, and design policies to change their behavior,” said Starr, who published the new study in PLOS climate Thursday.
Private jets lined up at an airport in Sun Valley, Idaho in July 2021, where talks on climate change were held at the annual Sun Valley conference, nicknamed “billionaire summer camp”
The authors hope their findings will divert some of the environmental policy focus away from micromanaging ordinary people’s consumption habits, such as encouraging red meat to be replaced with plant-based proteins or encouraging upgrades to potentially overpriced electric vehicles.
“Consumption-based approaches are missing something important,” Starr said, “carbon pollution generates income, but when that income is reinvested in stocks, rather than being spent on necessities, it’s not subject to a consumption-based carbon tax.”
A carbon tax policy targeting those who benefit from carbon emissions – through their supplies of fossil fuels or other energy-intensive industries – would not only be fairer, but would also make global temperatures more likely to fall.
And it could also help fund needed government efforts to tackle climate change, the researchers say.
“Imagine how quickly corporate leaders, board members and major shareholders would decarbonise their industries if we did it in their financial interest,” Starr said.
“The tax revenue gained could help the nation invest significantly in efforts to decarbonise the economy.”