On the occasion of the mid-term of COP26*: Food for thought… and challenging calculations
According to a new Oxfam study presented at COP26 in Glasgow, the richest one percent – fewer people than the population of Germany – will be responsible for 16 percent of total global emissions by 2030.
The world’s super-rich produce umpteen times more climate-damaging greenhouse gases than the rest of humanity. By 2030, the per capita emissions of the richest ten percent of the world’s population are expected to exceed the target by a factor of nine, and the richest one percent by a factor of 30. By contrast, the per capita emissions of the poorer half of the world’s population will remain far below the targeted 1.5-degree limit for global warming in 2030.
The study also points out that the geographic distribution in greenhouse gas emissions is increasingly no longer composed mainly of traditional industrialised countries. Almost a quarter (23 percent) of the richest one percent will be Chinese and a tenth (eleven percent) will be Indian. (Already today, almost 30% of global CO2 emissions are emitted by China.)
The OXFAM study argues that climate policy should focus more on the super-rich.
In a single space flight, a billionaire produces more emissions than someone from the poorest billion people in an entire lifetime.
On a completely different note, there is a growing notion that “streaming is the new flying”, with estimates that “a cappuccino has the same CO2 footprint as two hours of Zoom”. And for processes as simple as sending an email on Gmail, a Whatsapp message, a Facebook emoji, uploading a video on Tiktok or a cat photo on Snapchat, massive resources are needed: the global digital industry consumes so much water, raw materials and energy that its ecological footprint is three times that of countries like France or the UK. Digital technologies now consume one-tenth of the world’s electricity and are responsible for nearly 4 percent of global CO2 emissions – almost twice as much as global civil aviation.
What can the average Chinese, Indian and all the other citizens of this world make out of this? And what does this mean for the poorer half of the world’s population? At closer look at the study, and some simple calculations may provide some answers.
*Yes, there were already 25 editions of the Conference of the Parties (COP) who have signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The first one took place in 1995 in Berlin. Since then, total global greenhouse gas emissions have further increased by around 40%.