To be a member of the richest 1% of the world you need a net worth of about $800k – so while the billionaire class is still a massive problem, an even larger problem ecologically is that tens of millions of moderately wealthy people from wealthy nations have massively outsized carbon footprints.
This can not be correct. My wife inherited her parent’s house when the last one died when she was 17 or so (guardianship until 18, whatever, not the point) - but we’re poor af. I mean we’re not lining up at the food bank, but no way we’re top 1%. It’s worth $800k easy (CAD, but still, throw in some other ‘things’ we own and we’re there).
In most of the world, $800,000 is enough money that you and your wife would never have to work another day in your lives. Even in Canada that’s 20-ish years of the median household income.
It’s a little different when much of that net worth is tied up in your house. You can leverage that for cash to an extent, but you can’t simply subside on it for decades the way you could $800k in the bank.
But the larger point remains regardless of where exactly the line is drawn: “wealthy” in global terms includes people in developed countries who are not multimillionaires. These people have massively outsized carbon footprints, even if they aren’t as damaging as people and organizations far wealthier than they are. It’s fair to expect them to cut back on things like air travel and meat consumption.
