Recent studies show that the United Kingdom’s top 1% of ‘rich’ emit the same amount of carbon dioxide in a single year as the bottom 10% do over the course of more than two decades.
The report’s findings highlight the vast discrepancies in carbon footprints between the majority of people, even in industrialised countries, and ‘the polluting elite,’ whose high-carbon lifestyles are thought to be contributing to the climate catastrophe.
The Guardian reported that according to the Autonomy’s research of income and greenhouse gas statistics from 1998 to 2018, those in the UK making £170,000 or more were responsible for a significant amount higher greenhouse gas emissions than the 30% of those making $21,500 or less in the same year. It would take a low earner 26 years to produce as much carbon dioxide as the richest do in a year.
The report noted that the time period covered by the dataset ended in 2018, before the coronavirus (COVID-19) epidemic and lockdowns, which prohibited high-carbon activities like flying.
According to Autonomy, the UK could have earned roughly £126 billion by now by taxing carbon emissions from just the top one per cent of income categories, which could have been used to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in an equitable manner, such as by insulating homes for lower-income people.
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