The US’s super-rich are burning through carbon emissions at 4,000 times the speed of the world’s poorest 10%, according to an analysis provided to the Guardian.
These billionaires and multimillionaires, who comprise the wealthiest 0.1% of the US population, are also running down our planet’s safe climate space at 183 times the rate of the global average.
The data, produced by Oxfam and the Stockholm Environment Institute ahead of the Cop30 climate summit, highlights the chasm between the carbon-guzzling rich, who are most responsible for the climate crisis, and the heat-vulnerable poor, who suffer the worst consequences.
At one end, the wealthiest 0.1% emit an average of 2.2 tonnes of CO2 every day, equivalent to the weight of a rhinoceros or an SUV.
At the other, a citizen of Somalia burns off just 82 grams of CO2 each day, barely the mass of a single tomato or half a cup of rice.
In between, the average for everyone on the planet is 12kg a day, about as heavy as a standard car tyre.
The analysis was provided for the launch of Oxfam’s annual report on carbon inequality, which underscores how lavish lifestyles of superyachts, private jets and vast mansions often combine with investments in polluting industries to create climate-destabilising individual footprints.
The study, which was released on Wednesday, found that 308 of the world’s billionaires had a combined CO2 tally that, if they were a country, would make them the 15th most polluting country in the world.
The great carbon divide has grown over the past 30 years. Since 1990, the share of emissions of the richest 0.1% has increased by 32%, while the share of the poorest 50% has fallen by 3%.
“The climate crisis is an inequality crisis,” said Amitabh Behar, the executive director of Oxfam International. “The very richest individuals in the world are funding and profiting from climate destruction, leaving the global majority to bear the fatal consequences of their unchecked power.”
The inequality creates dangerous feedbacks: the more wealth is accumulated in a few hands, the more responsibility for the climate crisis is concentrated among a small number of powerful individuals, who use their money and influence to deny, delay and distract from emissions reductions.
The report found that almost 60% of billionaire investments are in “high climate-impact sectors”, such as mining or oil and gas companies. This is 11 percentage points higher than the average investor.
A similar picture was painted by a separate report, also released on Thursday, by the World Inequality Lab, which revealed that the richest 1% have 2.8 times higher emissions associated with their capital than with their consumption.
In the US, the Oxfam report noted that corporations spend an average of $277,000 a year on anti-climate lobbying, led by petroleum and natural gas companies. At the last Cop climate summit in Baku, there were 1,773 coal, oil and gas lobbyists, a larger contingent than all but three countries. The group said this led to a watering down of penalties for big emitters, backtracking on international commitments to transition away from fossil fuels, and domestic challenges to carbon taxes and legislation designed to reduce emissions. More worrying still, Oxfam says, is the trend of wealthy donors funding far-right and racist movements that are the tip of the spear against net zero policies.
The consequences are deadly. The report calculates that the emissions of the richest 1% are enough to cause an estimated 1.3m heat-related deaths by the end of the century, as well as $44tn of economic damage to low- and lower-middle-income countries by 2050. The suffering is disproportionately high in the global south, which is the part of the world that is least to blame for climate breakdown.
The emissions of the super-rich are also pushing the world ever further away from the targets of the Paris climate agreement to hold temperature rises to between 1.5C and 2C above preindustrial levels. Since that 2015 global deal, the world’s richest 1% have burned through more than twice as much of the remaining carbon budget as the poorest half of humanity combined, says the report. The past decade has been the hottest in recorded history, pushing the world above the 1.5C mark in 2024.
Oxfam said governments needed to cut the emissions and influence of the super-rich with taxes on them and climate-destabilising industries.
“We must break the chokehold of the super-rich over climate policy by taxing their extreme wealth, banning their lobbying and instead put those most affected by the climate crisis in the front seat of climate decision-making,” Behar said.
