A report published on Monday by Oxfam claimed that “carbon inequality” – meaning “the emissions of the world’s super-rich 1%” – is “causing economic losses of trillions of dollars, contributing to huge crop losses, and leading to millions of excess deaths.” [emphasis, links added]
“As global temperatures continue to rise, risking the lives and livelihoods of people living in poverty and precarity, we must act now to curb the emissions of the super-rich and make rich polluters pay,” Oxfam declared.
The report is titled Carbon Inequality Kills: Why Curbing the Excessive Emissions of an Elite Few Can Create a Sustainable Planet for All.
Its central contention is that ‘One Percenters’ create far too many carbon emissions through both their lifestyles (yachts, private jets, mansions) and business investments.
The report is short on science, but very long on hyperbole, offering all sorts of media-friendly pull-quote anecdotes meant to show how awful the One Percenters are by comparing their carbon emissions to “everyone” else.
“If everyone began emitting as much carbon as those in the top 1%, the remaining carbon budget would be gone in fewer than five months,” said one example.
“If everyone emitted carbon at the same rate as the luxury transport emissions of 50 of the world’s richest billionaires, the remaining carbon budget would be gone in two days,” said another.
The bulk of the report consisted of estimates, projections, and measurements intended to demonstrate that the luxuries of the “pollutocrats” are unreasonable, and so are their “investments” in every industry Oxfam’s authors found unacceptable.
The report stumbled right out of the gate by admitting that only “23 of 50 of the world’s richest billionaires” even have private jets, but the authors proceeded to dutifully tally up how many metric tons of carbon they emit.
The report paid extra-special attention to the Left’s new most hated billionaire, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, whose two private jets produce “the equivalent of 834 years’ worth of emissions for the average person in the world.”
If Musk thought creating the only truly successful line of electric vehicles in the Western world was going to win him some affection from the Greens, he was sadly mistaken.
Another rich family despised by the Left, the Waltons of Walmart fame, came in for a beating over their “three superyachts,” which generate the equivalent of “the carbon emissions of around 1,700 Walmart shop workers.”
The report would have petered out with a sad trombone if it only fussed over the private planes and yachts owned by billionaires, since they collectively emit only a tiny fraction of humanity’s emissions, no matter how many alarming factoids are cooked up to make them seem outrageous.
To build the One Percent into a planet-raping menace that must be stopped at all costs, Oxfam threw in “the investment footprint of the super-rich” – in other words, holding them personally accountable for every puff of CO2 emitted by every industry they invest in.
This total was then used to calculate “the economic cost of the world’s super-rich” as $52.6 trillion – a hilariously misleading factoid that simply ignores all of the wealth generated by Western industry and totals up the estimated “cost” of their emissions.
Even the dollar figures tossed about in the report are a politicized flim-flam, as Oxfam’s authors grudgingly admitted they didn’t use actual dollars – they invented a new imaginary currency called “international dollars” that “adjusts for Purchasing Power Parity” between rich and poor nations.
As for all the deaths supposedly inflicted by the super-rich grim reapers with their carbon sickles, Oxfam held the One Percenters responsible for people dying from heat stroke around the world by attributing every such death to global warming and holding the wealthy responsible for 90 percent of global warming:
The number of people exposed to extreme heat is growing exponentially, and various studies predict a drastic increase of excess deaths due to heat. Based on a recent study, Oxfam has estimated the numbers of deaths attributable to the emissions of the super-rich. Our findings show that even in an optimistic climate change scenario, just four years of the emissions of the world’s richest people are driving up global temperatures enough to contribute to a shocking number of excess deaths.
The Oxfam report mentions the world’s worst polluter, China, only twice – and it’s not to hold the Communist country responsible for its titanic emissions, which dwarf those of every “super-rich” Western tycoon who has ever lived combined, but to portray the Chinese as a victim of capitalist climate change, because China will supposedly have trouble importing enough soybeans to feed its population.
The report did not mention the carbon emissions the Left doesn’t want to talk about: the fact that huge numbers of people are eagerly migrating from very low-carbon societies to rich Western countries, which will magnify their carbon footprints enormously.
No one in the climate movement seems interested [in the extent to which] moving millions of subsistence farmers into [North America and Europe’s wealthy and industrialized economies will increase carbon emissions].
Oxfam was also serenely unconcerned with the gigantic carbon emissions of powerful politicians, including those who make a point of using fleets of carbon-spewing private jets to attend climate conferences.
Instead, the report urged making socialist politicians even richer and more powerful by helping them confiscate wealth from the capitalists who create it.
Top image created with DALL-E
Read rest at Breitbart
Well, let’s just replace Capitalism with Marxism. We know how well that worked out for Stalin in the USSR and Mao in China. Just ask Trofim Lysenko.
This assumes there is global warming, which there isn’t any other than that caused by the sun. And that has been negligible for centuries.
Oxfam just more leftists Propaganda like the rest of them the NYT’s WP and the Major News Outlets NBC,ABC,CBS and CNN leads the way