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carbon budget
'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."
Jan 10, 2025
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."
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'Wake Up Call': Climate-Warming Emissions Reached Record This Decade
"If we don't want to see the 1.5°C goal disappearing in our rearview mirror, the world must work much harder and urgently at bringing emissions down," one scientist behind the findings said.
Jun 08, 2023
Despite national promises, mounting protests, and ever more extreme weather events, greenhouse gas emissions have reached an "all-time high" of 54 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide per year over the last decade, a new study has found.
The research, published in the journal Earth System Science Data Thursday, concluded that the carbon budget—the amount of carbon dioxide that human societies can emit and still have a 50% chance of limiting global heating to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels—has shrunk by half since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) last calculated it three years ago.
"This is the critical decade for climate change," Piers Forster, lead author and director of the Priestley International Centre for Climate at the University of Leeds, said in a statement. "Decisions made now will have an impact on how much temperatures will rise and the degree and severity of impacts we will see as a result."
\u201cOur climate indicator paper is out, showing unprecedented rate of global warming -over 0.2\u00b0C per decade, with maximum land temps rising faster still. https://t.co/O3el0J00pI\u201d— Piers Forster (@Piers Forster) 1686204170
The new paper was released at U.N. climate talks ongoing in Bonn, Germany, from June 5 to 15, as the Financial Times reported. The talks are part of the lead-up to the COP28 U.N. climate conference in the UAE in December, which will feature the first global stocktake of progress towards meeting the 1.5°C goal by 2050.
In crafting climate plans, negotiators and policymakers rely on authoritative reports from the IPCC, but these are only released on average every six years, as AFP noted.
"The problem with the IPCC is that it comes once a decade & is outdated when it is published!" scientist and IPCC author Glen Peters observed on Twitter.
\u201cThough, you do have to stomach some bad news...\n\nThe Remaining Carbon Budget for 1.5\u00b0C has gone from 500 GtCO\u2082 to 250 GtCO\u2082 in three years: we emitted an extra 3*40=120 GtCO\u2082 & the science was updated... Oops...\u201d— Glen Peters (@Glen Peters) 1686213279
The last major IPCC report on the physical science of climate change was released in 2021 based on data from 2019, according to the Financial Times. This information then fed into the Sixth Synthesis Report published in March, the University of Leeds noted.
The new study is part of a larger attempt to provide world leaders with the latest science through the Indicators of Global Climate Change and website, which will update important climate indicators each year.
According to Thursday's updates, the burning of fossil fuels and destruction of forests caused an average 1.14°C of warming between 2013 and 2022, an increase from the average 1.07°C of warming between 2010 and 2019.
"Over the 2013–2022 period, human-induced warming has been increasing at an unprecedented rate of over 0.2 ∘C per decade," the study authors wrote.
"Even though we are not yet at 1.5°C warming, the carbon budget will likely be exhausted in only a few years as we have a triple whammy of heating from very high CO2 emissions, heating from increases in other GHG emissions, and heating from reductions in pollution."
Unfortunately, the progress that has been made in cutting down on coal use has helped boost warming in the short term by removing cooling aerosols from the atmosphere.
"This robust update shows intensifying heating of our climate driven by human activities," study co-author Dr. Valérie Masson-Delmotte, from the Université Paris Saclay, who also co-chaired Working Group 1 of the IPCC's Sixth Assessment report, said in a statement. "It is a timely wake up call for the 2023 global stocktake of the Paris Agreement—the pace and scale of climate action is not sufficient to limit the escalation of climate-related risks."
While there is some evidence that the yearly uptick in the pace of emissions is slowing down—the International Energy Agency found that energy emissions had risen less in 2022 than 2021—the increase needs to not only stall, but reverse, as The Guardianexplained:
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change calculated in 2018 that the world must nearly halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, compared with 2010 levels, in order to stay within the 1.5C threshold, and reach net zero emissions by 2050. But that calculation rested on an assumption that the world would reduce emissions by about 7% a year during the 2020s.
As emissions have continued to rise, the annual rate of decline for emissions will now have to be much steeper to stay within the 1.5C limit.
The IPCC put the global carbon budget at around 500 metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2020; it is now at around 250.
"Even though we are not yet at 1.5°C warming, the carbon budget will likely be exhausted in only a few years as we have a triple whammy of heating from very high CO2 emissions, heating from increases in other GHG emissions, and heating from reductions in pollution," Forster said. "If we don't want to see the 1.5°C goal disappearing in our rearview mirror, the world must work much harder and urgently at bringing emissions down."
\u201cNEW: This week's climate graphic looks at new data from climate scientists @piersforster et al, which shows that the carbon budget remaining to limit global warming to 1.5C has halved in just 3 years.\n\nRead @CamillaHodgson's excellent report\nhttps://t.co/xTMGPZPzq5\n#dataviz\u201d— Steven Bernard (@Steven Bernard) 1686209361
The new study isn't the only alarming climate data released this week. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported Monday that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels had reached a peak of 424 parts per million in May, levels not seen in millions of years. Scientists said Tuesday that the loss of summer Arctic sea ice is now inevitable. And the EU's Copernicus Climate Change Service announced Wednesday that air and sea-surface temperatures over non-ice-covered oceans were the highest for any May on record.
At the same time, wildfire smoke from unprecedented fires in Canada has smothered the eastern U.S. while record heat bakes the Caribbean.
\u201cLife-threatening heat today in Puerto Rico so hot that some meteorologists are astonished. And more of the same to come this week. Heat index numbers as high as 115-125 today!! So what is going on? There are many factors, so let's dig in... thread 1/\u201d— Jeff Berardelli (@Jeff Berardelli) 1686016817
Climate groups are launching a week of action in the U.S. Thursday calling on the Biden administration to declare a climate emergency and reverse the approval of major fossil fuel projects. In Bonn, demonstrators greeted the arrival of COP28 president and UAE state oil company head Sultan Ahmed al-Jaber with a banner drop.
\u201cToday as oil executive and #COP28 president Sultan Al Jaber of UAE arrives at the UN #BonnClimateConference, #ClimateJustice leaders drop a banner and demand countries put an end to fossil fuels. "Keep the coal in the hole, keep the oil in the soil, keep the gas in the ground!"\u201d— Adrien Salazar (@Adrien Salazar) 1686233871
"Keep the coal in the hole, keep the oil in the soil, keep the gas in the ground!" the activists demanded.
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Risk, Climate Change, and Black Swans
Aug 11, 2015
It's getting increasingly hard to make a case for the sanity of humanity.
"One of the most dangerous scenarios I can conceive of is having the world's countries agree to their woefully inadequate self-determined emission reduction goals, then walk away with the illusion of victory."
Incredibly, we are entering negotiations on the most important issue humanity has ever faced, knowing that the terms we collectively propose will not prevent the catastrophe we're trying to prevent.
The negotiations in question - the 21st Conference of Parties, or COP21 in UN parlance, are adopting the 2-degree Celsius limit on warming agreed to in Copenhagen, even though that figure has been controversial for many in the scientific community. Worse, the pre-agreements leading GHG emitting countries are bringing to the table a guarantee that we will blow even by that shaky limit.
It's as if we set out to negotiate a nuclear arms agreement that could only guarantee a slightly smaller nuclear war. Literally, the amount of energy we're trapping with greenhouse gasses is equivalent to setting off 400,000 Hiroshima-sized nuclear bombs per day, each day, 365 days per year.
What is the "Safe Limit" to Warming?
The short answer is, how much risk are you willing to tolerate?
In many ways, we've already passed a "safe limit" with the .85 C temperature increase our GHG emissions have caused to date. We're experiencing irreversible sea-level increases that will last thousands of years from the complete meltdown of Greenland and large parts of Antarctica. We also see mass extinctions, widespread desertification, record-setting droughts, and near-epochal forest fires across the globe. This, in turn, has triggered climate refugees, and they are becoming a major threat - perhaps the major threat - to our national security.
We'll examine the kinds of risks we're playing within a moment, but let's clear up a few things before we do.
Mitigating Global Warming Is Not About Jobs, the Economy, or Lack of Clean Technology
Contrary to what you hear from the Republican clown car, fossil fuel interests, and antediluvian neoclassical economists, this is not an economic or jobs issue. Tackling climate change is affordable and will have an enormous positive payback in the longer term. Clean energy investments create more jobs than investments in fossil fuels, so on net, they actually increase the number and quality of jobs in our economy.
Second, this is not about physics or technology. We have the technologies to cut GHG emissions to net zero; they're affordable, and we've had them for close to a decade now.
This is about a complete lack of political will. Because politicians are either owned by fossil fuel interests or lack the courage to discuss hard or complex topics, we are being exposed to enormous risks to our health and the health of the planet.
So, What Kind of Risks Are We Incurring?
One layer of risk comes from choosing 2C as an appropriate limit. It's too high. The title of Hansen et. al. recent paper says it all:
"Ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms: evidence from paleoclimate data, climate modeling, and modern observations that 2 *C global warming is highly dangerous."
There is a discrepancy between the geologic record's account of how damaging a 2 C rise was and the predictions of our models. Take sea levels, for example. As Hansen and others have noted, sea levels rose by 5 to 9 meters when the temperature was about 1 C warmer than today. And the seas rose considerably faster than our models forecast—as much as several meters in 50 years.
The way we operationalize the 2 C limit has risk built into it
The world settled on the 2 C limit at COP 15 in Copenhagen in 2009. To operationalize it, the IPCC developed a carbon budget in their Fifth Assessment Report, released in 2013 and recently updated. If you look at the budget for tons of carbon dioxide (not tons of carbon), by the end of this year, we can only emit about 800 billion more tons to have a "likely" chance of staying below 2C of warming. "Likely" means a 66% probability or, to make that concrete, that's like putting two bullets in the chamber of a six-gun, putting it to our temples, and taking our chances. The situation worsens if you throw in other GHGs, such as methane. According to an analysis by The Carbon Brief, we only have 20.9 years without significant reductions until we blow by even this risky limit.
To understand just how crazy this is, it might help to conduct a little thought experiment.
Imagine approaching a broad river and seeing two tollbooths, each serving a separate bridge. The one on the left -- which requires you to change lanes and make some other maneuvers - leads to a bridge with a huge margin of safety. It's been designed to handle stresses well beyond anything that could be anticipated. The one on the right allows you to continue on without pausing or maneuvering, but it leads to a bridge that has only a 66% chance of not collapsing. And just to see how completely crazy we are, imagine the price is about the same for either bridge.
Now consider this: We've chosen the second bridge.
Black Swans, positive feedback, and un-modeled disasters
Yet another layer of risk comes from the fact that we are assuming no surprises while ignoring known feedback. Just 3 of these feedbacks could, by themselves, increase the global temperature by nearly 2.5C.
The first results from decreases in sulfur aerosols from phytoplankton as the seas become more acidic and these critters die off. Sulfur aerosols are known to moderate solar gain and mitigate global warming. However, this could increase warming by close to 1F by 2100.
Extreme weather events could add another 1.5 F since they affect the Earth's ability to sequester human emissions and, in some cases, directly increase those emissions. Add these to the 2 F expected from methane releases—a conservative number if one compares the results of similar events in the geologic record—and these 3 feedbacks alone could add just under 4.5 F, or 2.5 C, to our worst-case projections for 2100.
Finally, with limited or no margin of safety, we leave the world vulnerable to what Nassim Taleb called Black Swans - unexpected and unanticipated events that create non-linear responses that overwhelm forecasts and predictions. Most of the profound events in human history have been shaped in whole or part by Black Swan events, and the more complex a system is, the more likely a Black Swan could emerge. The European "discovery" of the Americas, The Great Depression, the rise of Hitler, and the fall of the Soviet Union are among Black Swans that changed the course of history. No one called them. No one predicted them.
In a system as complex as our climate, the advent of a Black Swan is possible, and with no margin of safety, it could be devastating.
The Paris COP can be a start, but it is nothing more than that, and we have to acknowledge that beforehand.
One of the most dangerous scenarios I can imagine is for the world's countries to agree to their woefully inadequate self-determined emission reduction goals and then walk away with the illusion of victory. It would only be that much harder to achieve meaningful reductions in the future, and time is ebbing away.
About the only good outcome from COP 21 I can foresee is an admission that 2C is too high, and a commitment to build the same margin of safety we give to a bridge, into the preservation of our Planet.
But don't count on it.
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