Who is the average person? Is it the global average person? Is it the average American? I mean as an Australian I am responsible for far more emissions than the average Papuan.
this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2025
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The worst countries for energy use per capita are mostly middle-eastern oil and gas producers, and places that are very cold and energy producers (Iceland, Norway, Canada), and for some reason Singapore and Trinidad and Tobago.
If you look at just fossil fuel use per capita the picture is slightly different. Iceland drops way down the list. They use a lot of energy, but it's mostly geothermal and hydroelectric. After the middle east, Singapore and Trinidad and Tobago it's USA and Canada at the top. Canada is basically USA with cold winters. Then it's South Korea, Russia, Australia, etc.
I think what they mean in this case is "the average person", i.e. divide all the CO2 produced by 8.2 billion. Since half of those people live in massive poverty and have virtually no carbon footprint, the per-person number is much less than any Australian, Canadian, American, etc.
Yeah, i think separating billionaires from the rest goes some way to making working and middle class people feel like that we've done our bit. By that, I mean it may as well be a billionaire compared to some one in extreme poverty.
On a side note, I wonder if those maritime countries pay a penalty for all the fossil fueled powered shipping they need. Also Singapore is a major oil refiner which might be affecting them.
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damn, good efficiency for them considering they're about a billion times richer than me
my gasses per dollar are way higher! the problem is obviously with people like me
Well, you're probably spending somewhat over two dollars per day on your survival, so unless they're ALL blowing through half-a-billion dollars every year, their pollution-per-dollar is also greater than your's
1% and .1% are also drastically different.
A quick search told me the "poorest person" in the top 1% in the U.S. would have a net worth around 13.7 million.
Why? Don’t they use cardboard straws for their frappes?
No, they use a servant as a straw.
Centurii Chan is oddly focused on being allowed to say the N word
There are about 3000 billionaires. So their emissions account for 3 billion average persons. Its like the population of earth is 11 billion ppl instead of 8.
I was curious about the wording in the headline, which could be taken to mean that billionaires collectively equal the emissions of one million people.
But nope, the article does confirm in its first line that it's a million per billionaire. They go on to describe that lifestyle alone would leave billionaires at the "thousands of times more" level, but the proportional effects of the entities they have investments in is what takes them to a million.
I keep saying that the simple math is that it's about 8 billion of us vs about 2000 of them.
Listen. These people are a cancer, and they need to be fully removed from society. They are literally killing us.
And that was 2022 guys. Feels like different era.
This is why all the articles telling me to use paper straws feel like nothing but propaganda to me now. Stop telling me and the other poor people this shit is on us. All the recycling, cleanup and conservation i do in my life will be undone in one day by a billionaire. You want to lower emissions, start making heads roll
Then let's pressurize them and sequester them in a cave under the New Mexico scrubland.
Prison
Boxes
I don't like the methodology of the study (done by Oxfam if you want to look it up). It attributes emissions to a person when it is done by a company they're invested in. From the press release:
Billionaires’ lifestyle emissions dwarf those of ordinary people, but the emissions from their investments are dramatically higher still —the average investment emissions of 50 of the world’s richest billionaires are around 340 times their emissions from private jets and superyachts combined. Through these investments, billionaires have huge influence over some of the world’s biggest corporations and are driving us over the edge of climate disaster.
Nearly 40 percent of billionaire investments analyzed in Oxfam’s research are in highly polluting industries: oil, mining, shipping and cement. On average, a billionaire’s investment portfolio is almost twice as polluting as an investment in the S&P 500. However, if their investments were in a low-carbon-intensity investment fund, their investment emissions would be 13 times lower.
I'm of the opinion that we should look at people's consumption behavior rather than their production behavior. When Exxon Mobil or Delta Airlines pollute, they're doing it for their customers. Reducing the consumption from the customer point of view does reduce the overall emissions, so I'm gonna continue to reduce my own contributions to this crisis.
I'd argue industry is the primary culprit, but they ain't wrong that billionaires emit a massive amount of CO2 more that the average Joe/Jane
Who controls industry?
Ok yes, but my point is that the vast majority of pollution is happening in the execution of commerce, primarily shipping/transport, than is an individual or collective billionaire's leisure activities. Perhaps I just took the caption in a different light.
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Industry wouldn't be making anything if people weren't buying the goods and services they produce.
If you buy a huge firework that you use at a gender reveal party, who gets assigned the CO2 from the entire production pipeline of the item you bought? Is it the company that made the firework? Is it the company that dug up the raw materials that were refined to make the contents of the firework? Or is it you because you bought the firework? I'd say it should be you.
There are exceptions to this. For example, during COVID some of the airlines were flying empty planes around because they had deals with airports that to keep their slots in the system they had to be using them. In that case the company was polluting but no consumer was directly to blame. But, those are rare. And, you could argue that anybody who bought a flight on those airlines after that ended up paying them back for doing that and thus shares responsibility for it.
No one is holding a gun to the owners of industry and forcing them to over produce. People can only buy what is available to them. The onus of responsibility is on the producers to produce sustainability, not for consumers to not buy their products and hope that producers change. Especially under the current system where there is no alternative means for consumers to acquire their goods or services, as the means of production are currently privately owned by the bourgeois.
People need things. People will have to buy things that are available. Systemic forces dictate what they can afford and what is convenient for them. Asking people to go without is not a feasible request to ask of millions of individuals when the alternative is making a minority of a few hundred owners cut the bullshit.
Your position is incredibly ignorant to the systemic forces behind why industry is the way it is. Industry induces demand through public manipulation and media, as well as through infrastructure and other systemic forces that dictate people's lives. Industry will still create things because just being on a shelf is a chance for profit, even if people don't buy it. They KNOW most of their product gets trashed but they don't care because it is still profitable to do so and the system will always ensure that it is profitable at the expense of everyone else through the suppression of wages and working conditions if sales don't meet expectations.
You do know that, in the US alone, we throw away up to 40% of our food supply annually because it goes bad on store shelves? Been this way for decades but we still have egregious issues with the food production industry being a major contributor for the climate crisis. Your suggestion of forcing the responsibility onto consumer is just unreasonable and proven not to be effective.
So, to your question, who should be assigned the CO2 credits for the production of a product? Obviously, it should be the producers not the consumer.
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