'Insatiable Greed': Richest 1% Have Already Burned Through Their Carbon Limit for 2025
"The super-rich continue to squander humanity's chances with their lavish lifestyles, polluting stock portfolios and pernicious political influence. This is theft—pure and simple."
An Oxfam analysis published Friday shows that the richest 1% of the global population has already blown through its global carbon budget for 2025—just 10 days into the New Year. The figures, which arrive amid catastrophic fires in Los Angeles that may turn out to be the costliest in U.S. history, highlight the disproportionate role of the ultra-wealthy in fueling a climate emergency that is causing devastation around the world.
Oxfam calculates that in order to keep critical climate goals in reach, each person on Earth must have a CO2 footprint of roughly 2.1 tons per year or less. On average, each person in the global 1% is burning through 76 tons of planet-warning carbon dioxide annually—or 0.209 per day—meaning it took them just over a week to reach their CO2 limit for the year.
By contrast, the average person in the poorest 50% of humanity has an annual carbon footprint of 0.7 tons per year—well within the 2.1-ton budget compatible with a livable future.
"The future of our planet is hanging by a thread," Nafkote Dabi, Oxfam International's climate change policy lead, said in a statement Friday. "The margin for action is razor-thin, yet the super-rich continue to squander humanity's chances with their lavish lifestyles, polluting stock portfolios and pernicious political influence."
"This is theft—pure and simple―a tiny few robbing billions of people of their future to feed their insatiable greed," Dabi added.
"Rich polluters must be made to pay for the havoc they're wreaking on our planet."
Oxfam's new analysis came as the Copernicus Climate Change Service confirmed that 2024 was the hottest year on record and "the first calendar year that the average global temperature exceeded 1.5°C above its pre-industrial level."
"All of the internationally produced global temperature datasets show that 2024 was the hottest year since records began in 1850," Copernicus director Carlo Buontempo said in a statement. "Humanity is in charge of its own destiny, but how we respond to the climate challenge should be based on evidence. The future is in our hands—swift and decisive action can still alter the trajectory of our future climate."
Oxfam called on governments to move urgently to curb the emissions of the rich, including by implementing wealth taxes, banning private jets and superyachts, and imposing strict new regulations on polluting companies.
"Governments need to stop pandering to the richest," Dabi said Friday. "Rich polluters must be made to pay for the havoc they're wreaking on our planet. Tax them, curb their emissions, and ban their excessive indulgences—private jets, superyachts, and the like. Leaders who fail to act are effectively choosing complicity in a crisis that threatens the lives of billions."
