Oxfam Australia Media Release
The richest 1 percent have burned through their share of the annual global carbon budget – the amount of CO2 that can be added to the atmosphere without pushing the world beyond 1.5°C of warming – within the first 10 days of 2025, reveals new Oxfam analysis.
In stark contrast, it would take someone from the poorest half of the global population nearly three years (1022 days) to use up their share of the annual global carbon budget.
This alarming milestone, dubbed “Pollutocrat Day” by Oxfam, underscores how climate breakdown is disproportionately driven by the super-rich, whose emissions far exceed those of ordinary people. The richest 1 percent are responsible for more than twice as much carbon pollution than the poorest half of humanity, with devastating consequences for vulnerable communities and efforts to tackle the climate emergency. To meet the 1.5°C goal, the richest 1 percent need to cut their emissions by 97 percent by 2030.
“The future of our planet is hanging by a thread. The margin for action is razor-thin, yet the super-rich continue to squander humanity’s chances with their lavish lifestyles, polluting stock portfolios and pernicious political influence. This is theft – pure and simple – a tiny few robbing billions of people of their future to feed their insatiable greed,” said Oxfam Australia’s Climate Justice Strategic Lead, Lyndsay Walsh.
Oxfam’s research shows that the emissions of the richest 1 percent since 1990 have caused – and will continue to cause – trillions of dollars in economic damage, extensive crop losses, and millions of excess deaths.
- The economic damage suffered by low- and lower-middle-income countries over the past 30 years is about three times greater than the total climate finance provided by rich countries to poorer ones.
- By 2050, the emissions of the richest 1 percent will cause crop losses that could have provided enough calories to feed at least 10 million people a year in Eastern and Southern Asia.
- Roughly eight in every 10 excess deaths due to heat will occur in low- and lower-middle-income countries. Around 40 percent of these deaths will occur in Southern Asia.
“Governments need to stop pandering to the richest. Rich polluters must be made to pay for the havoc they’re wreaking on our planet. Tax them, curb their emissions, and ban their excessive indulgences – private jets, superyachts, and the like. Leaders who fail to act are effectively choosing complicity in a crisis that threatens the lives of billions,” said Ms Walsh.
Oxfam calls on governments to:
- Reduce the emissions of the richest. Governments must introduce permanent income and wealth taxes on the top 1 percent, ban or punitively tax carbon-intensive luxury consumptions – starting with private jets and superyachts – and regulate corporations and investors to drastically and fairly reduce their emissions.
- Make rich polluters pay. Climate finance needs are growing rapidly, especially in Global South countries bearing the brunt of climate impacts. While rich countries agreed to mobilize $300 billion a year to help Global South countries cope with warming temperatures and switch to renewable energy, this amount falls drastically short from the $5 trillion climate the Global North owes in climate debt and reparations.
Also from Oxfam: Australian billionaires each made $67,000 an hour, 1300 times more than the average Australian
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Don’t tell them this; they’ll try to ramp it up even more.
Ten days.
Huh.
The rest of us are fortunate that the the filthy stinking rich, my apologies that might be defamatory, financially overly endowed, are still on their pre to post new year sabatical, otherwise the whole of Planet Earth would be in real deep shit.
But they are far, far more important than any one else. They keep the economy of the world going…… they need to check here and there that their yachts are in good order and condition, that the workers are not being overpaid… or paid at all, to visit their banks in various tax havens to make sure they are still doing the right thing, making more money just coz.
Yes, they are far, far too important to bother about ruining the planet when they can extract so much more wealth from it, bribing politicians to keep their cash flows going and growing.
The winds of change might be having some effect. The likes of the Santa Anna winds maybe igniting minds whilst rendering the wealthy of LA to hell, whilst the abnormal polar winds bring other states to a frozen standstill in the depths of winter. And of the oil cultures of the Middle East and East Asia, those on the Haj are welcomed to a new inferno that tradition has no answer for.
And in the midst of all that, still the pollutocrats squander energy and resources prosecuting stagnation, starvation and obliteration through wars in regions such as the Levant, North & Central Africa, the Sudan, Myanmar and Russia / Ukraine. These are not negotiations, but executions to steer the world’s wealth and assets towards the plutocrats and the oligarchs.
To that extent, the COP process and the UN assembles are now subverted and corrupted – instead of being meeting grounds for the furtherance of betterments and equity for all humankind and the environment, they have become marketplaces for competition in predation.
Do we have any choice? Other than rolling people’s revolutions, it appears not, as the greedy and narcissistic behavior of the wealthy and powerful is saturated in global systems. It seems their malign desires can only be curtailed by mother nature, and as such captured ordinary folk and the environment and its ecology increasingly become collateral damage and stranded assets.
Rather than living as disappointed, world weary, wretched old cronies oppressing and picking on them, the world ought pay attention to all its young, and whether and how they observe that the global system has reached its peak of ineffective diplomacy. Then heed what they say should be done about it – that might be an eye-opener.