this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2024
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Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.

As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades: Graph of temperature as observed with significant warming, and simulated without added greenhouse gases and other anthropogentic changes, which shows no significant warming

How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world: IPCC AR6 Figure 2 - Thee bar charts: first chart: how much each gas has warmed the world. About 1C of total warming. Second chart: about 1.5C of total warming from well-mixed greenhouse gases, offset by 0.4C of cooling from aerosols and negligible influence from changes to solar output, volcanoes, and internal variability. Third chart: about 1.25C of warming from CO2, 0.5C from methane, and a bunch more in small quantities from other gases. About 0.5C of cooling with large error bars from SO2.

Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:

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Billionaires emit more carbon pollution in 90 minutes than the average person does in a lifetime. (www.oxfam.org)
submitted 2 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

It makes some sense to approportion to them the share of the negative externalities of their businesses that matches the share of the revenue they get as profit from those businesses (since the business has to have a higher level of activity to generate profit that it would to merelly break even).

However for the reason you pointed out it doesn't make sense to assigned to them the responsibility for the negative externalities of creating wealth which they did not themselves capture even if they own the businesses that did that wealth creation.

Of course, things can be quite a lot more complex than this - for example, if a billionaire choses to go with a disproportionally more poluting process in their business to get a small increase in profit, doesn't he or she have responsability for that extra polution which goes well beyond merelly the extra profit they got? - but as a rule of thumb it makes sense that people's responsability for the polution in wealth creation activities is proportional to how much of that created wealth ends up in their hands.