Fortune: "‘Setting the planet on fire’: Richest 0.1% emit more carbon than poorest 3.5 billion, Oxfam says"
by Tatiana Sataua
Oxfam calls private aviation one of the clearest examples of that inequality: all of the world’s private jets combined emit more carbon pollution in two seconds than someone in the poorest half of humanity does in a year. It estimates private jets emitted 16 million tons of CO2 in 2025. “It’s basically all about plane travel,” Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia Business School, told Fortune.
What happens in a disaster
A disaster can strike a whole city and leave people in very different places.
Wagner pointed to how a blackout like the one Hurricane Sandy caused in Lower Manhattan in 2012 could send someone to a shelter, while a wealthier person could hop on a private jet and leave the city.
“The rich are always going to adapt. It’s the poor who suffer,” he told Fortune.
For households with less to spare, the damage lasts well beyond the emergency. Rachel Carle, senior advisor on climate justice at Oxfam America, pointed to food supply disruptions and the struggle to find affordable insurance in exposed communities. The poorest fifth of U.S. households already spend a third of their income on food, she noted.
“Those shocks hit the poorest in our communities the hardest,” she told Fortune.
Wagner said those costs reach household budgets in more than one way. Fossil fuel prices have driven much of this year’s inflation, he said, and the same fuels are heating the planet, while extreme weather adds its own pressure by disrupting production and pushing prices higher.
Oxfam is calling for taxes on wealthy polluters, fossil fuel companies, and high-emitting luxuries such as private jets, and for more funding to help poorer countries adapt. Wagner said the design of these policies matters because the size of a tax and what it covers determine the incentive to change behavior.
“Will we solve climate change simply by taxing private jets? Of course not,” he said. “But would that be an obvious starting point? Yes, I’d like to think so.”
