Super rich masters of the world? Of course, if the data is always the same: in a single day a person belonging to the richest 0.1% of the planet produces more CO2 emissions than those generated in a year by the poorest 50% of the world’s population.
The cause is to be found in the standard of living and in its investments in polluting activities, which is why this is a trend that could soon lead us to the exhaustion of the “carbon budget”, i.e. the maximum amount of global CO2 emissions into the atmosphere, necessary to contain the increase in temperatures within 1.5°C compared to the pre-industrial era.
These are the data that emerge from the new Oxfam report in view of the COP30 on climate which will be held from 10 November in Belem, Brazil.
The Oxfam report
According to Oxfam data, on average, a billionaire, through his investments, is responsible for the emission of 1.9 million tonnes of CO2 per year. Furthermore, almost 60% of investments by global billionaires are made in sectors that have a devastating impact on the climate, such as oil or mining. The emissions from the investments of just 308 billionaires exceed those of 118 countries overall.
This real caste exercises a strong influence on international climate negotiations, often hindering ecological transition policies. At COP29 in Baku, for example, 1,773 lobbyists from the coal, oil and gas industries were accredited, more than there were delegates from the 10 countries most affected in the world by the climate crisis.
At the moment, climate policies are increasingly conditioned by the protection of private interests and by an economy that looks to the past, based on fossil extractivism, to the detriment of the common good – explains Oxfam spokesperson Francesco Petrelli. Polluting companies and the super-rich who control them have long carried out disinformation campaigns on the climate crisis and lawsuits against NGOs and governments that try to oppose it. To limit this power of conditioning climate policies, decisive action is needed at COP30 that leads to taxing large polluters more, banning lobbying activities in favor of fossil fuels, giving voice and space in the decision-making process to the countries that are most affected by the climate crisis, despite being the least responsible for it”.
Some data are enough to make clear the drift we are following: between now and the end of the century, the emissions alone caused by the richest 1% of the planet could cause 1.3 million victims due to rising temperatures and also economic damage of over 44 trillion dollars in low- and middle-income countries by 2050.
The campaign “Climate Justice Is Gender Justice”
The impact of the climate crisis has also been increasingly strong on women in recent years: 4 out of 5 climate migrants are women, who are, on average, 14 times more likely to become victims of natural disasters than men. For this reason, Oxfam, on the occasion of COP30, launched the awareness and activism campaign “Climate Justice Is Gender Justice“.
Promoted within the European ECOALITY project, which has the Tuscany Region as its leader and is financed by the DEAR Program of the European Union, the campaign is inspired by an ecofeminist and intersectional vision, which focuses on the link between environmental justice and social equality. The intersectional approach recognizes that inequalities do not act separately, but overlap: gender, class, geographical origin and ethnicity influence vulnerability in the face of the climate crisis differently.
A rural woman from the global South, for example, is exposed to far more serious environmental and social risks than a man living in an urban European context.
For this reason, truly effective climate policies must arise from the recognition and valorization of these differences.
