By now, it’s a well-known and established fact that billionaires are overwhelmingly responsible for driving the climate crisis.
In November 2024, an Oxfam report exposed how the super rich have inordinately outsized carbon footprints compared to rest of us. Notably, this revealed that the world’s richest billionaires emit more carbon pollution in an average hour and a half, than a person on an average income does their entire lives.
Now, a new study has proved what was already blatantly obvious about the staggering scale of their climate impact. This is the simple reality that: rich people simply don’t care.
Billionaires and the climate crisis: two sides of the same coin
Researchers at the University of Bath conducted a survey of wealthy individuals versus those on a lower income.
It defined wealthy participants as those with an average gross household income topping £150,000. The threshold matched up with the top income decile – that is, the wealthiest 10% – in the UK. Additionally, recognising assets as a mark of wealth, the research authors also included home-owners with more than two cars earning over £100,000 a year in the analysis.
Out of a pool of 1,036 respondents, 43 fell into this group.
The main upshot? Rich people have bigger carbon footprints because they consume more resources. Notably, the survey highlighted how they would consume more in all key sources of emissions, including food, energy, transport, and shopping.
For instance, wealthy respondents were significantly more likely to spend over £50 a month on new clothes. They’d also purchase disposable items at least once a week more often than non-wealthy individuals.
Add to that that they’d flown for leisure or business in the past year – and were unsurprisingly more likely to be frequent flyers – and you have a recipe for soaring emissions right there.
The study didn’t quantify and compare the two groups carbon emissions specifically. However, it was patently clear from the survey how the wealthiest’s lifestyles differed in a climate destructive sense.
Predictably then, what the researchers found tracked with previous research on the climate crisis and wealth.
All in the entitled attitude
However, a novel focus in this research was its emphasis on the rich’s attitudes to changing their climate-wrecking ways. And it will come as little surprise that they were more than a little reticent.
On the one hand, the survey showed that, naturally, the wealthiest individuals don’t face cost as a barrier to reducing their carbon footprints. However, their luxurious lifestyles would mean more sacrifices – and the rich respondents knew this.
The problem is however, the survey revealed that they were less willing to make them, and their awareness had “not translated into meaningful change.”
On air travel for instance, wealthy respondents didn’t acknowledge their responsibility to shift away from it. Specifically, the research noted that:
Although wealthy people described their global networks as a given, this is the exception amongst the general public, not the norm; 50% of the UK population does not participate in any air travel and 15% of the population accounts for 70% of all flights
Of course, in an age of global internet connection, it’s undoubtedly a choice to travel internationally. One survey response summed up the glaring lack of recognition for that fact:
There’s no way to cross the Atlantic without flying. I’m not Greta Thunberg- I don’t have enough time to cross it by boat.
Overall then, the research showed that rich people:
lock in carbon intensive behaviours by normalising high-carbon practices.
Therefore it observed that:
The group underestimate the environmental impacts associated with their consumption and employ narratives to justify and normalise excessive consumption. Our wealthy participants also reported a perceived lack of disposable time with which to carry out low-carbon lifestyle changes. Combined, these traits create a reluctance to enact the necessary behavioural changes required to reduce the emissions contribution of the group: our sample of wealthy people neither desire nor feel motivated to enact truly low-carbon lifestyles.
In other words, rich people are excusing their planet jeopardising lifestyles, because don’t you know, everyone lives like this? Setting aside that it’s patently not the case, it’s worse when you factor in that as the survey demonstrated, they also have more means to make these changes than most. At the same time, wealthy respondents show little motivation to act on climate – even as they acknowledged they shoulder more culpability for it.
Tax the rich out of existence to stop the climate crisis
UK campaigner at 350.org Matilda Borgström said on the research:
This study shows that despite understanding more about the climate crisis than most people, and having the ability to accelerate climate action through their investments and businesses, the super-rich ‘show little motivation’ to do so. This is why they must be forced, by the government, to account for their carbon intensive behaviour through strong wealth taxes. A wealth tax on just 0.1% of the UK’s richest could raise over £130 billion in five years, enough to insulate millions of homes, provide support with energy bills for the most vulnerable households, retrain workers in the fossil fuel sector and much more. The question of who pays to fix the climate crisis is a no-brainer: it is time for those responsible for most pollution with staggering wealth to pay what they owe, it is time to tax their billions.
And while the richest Britons seem to show little interest in curbing the climate crisis, there is growing appetite to hold these climate-wreckers to account.
Since rich people aren’t going to step up, it’s high-time that states make them. As Borgström noted, a wealth tax is one key way in which to do this. Plenty have already been calling for it:
- More than 100,000 people have signed a petition demanding that governments tax extreme wealth.
- A survey of 22,000 citizens in the world’s largest economies by Earth4All revealed an overwhelming 68% of G20 respondents are supportive of higher taxes on the wealthy to finance significant economic and lifestyle changes.
- An alliance of over 50 civil society organisations has been established. It is urging governments to #TaxTheSuperRich and end extreme inequality.
This March, the groundswell to tax the rich out of existence culminated in an action against one of the most profligate personifications of extreme wealth. Activists occupied a Tesla showroom in London to call out the epitome of billionaire tech bro oligarchy that is Elon Musk.
Notably, they demanded a 100% wealth tax on assets over £10m to fund public services and climate action. More than half of Brits believe that billionaires should not exist, and three-quarters support a wealth tax. Therefore, there’s a clear desire for this. Of course, that’s not so much from the greedy wealth hoarders themselves – just 370 millionaires and billionaires have called for governments to tax their gargantuan wealth. When there’s close to 3,000 billionaires globally, that’s not a huge turn out.
Now, this latest study shows without a shadow of a doubt that the rich capitalist class aren’t going to do anything about the climate crisis – unless the rest of us make them. But then, what’s new?
Feature image via 350.org
