Do your part and recycle your plastics, peasants!
Flies away in private jet
A valid critique, but also worth mentioning, as discussed in the article, much of the GHG emissions for the top 10% (which includes households down to ~$200k) comes from passive income.
Friendly reminder to check who you bank with and what’s in your 401k if you find yourself in that group.
are you claiming money is a gas
If you invest in companies that emit GHGs, then you are helping finance their pollution, and profiting from that.
If you keep your money at a bank that does business with major polluters, your funds are being used by the bank to back loans to those polluters to help them pollute.
Spare change invested in GHGs contributes to climate change.
I kind of dislike studies like this. Because something like 70% of global greenhouse emissions is because around 20000 specific people that have names and addresses are choosing wealth over sustainability, these are people who literally have the power to stop what they are doing tomorrow and make a larger difference then 100 million voters. When you make things abstract and use terms like 1% you are hiding the real villains of the story.
Also market-based solutions like this:
The study asserts that “results suggest an alternative income or shareholder-based carbon tax, focused on investments, may have equity advantages over traditional consumer-facing cap-and-trade or carbon tax options and be a useful policy tool to encourage decarbonization while raising revenue for climate finance.”
Will never provide a solution to climate change, because market based solutions are designed to help the rich, not save the planet.
