America’s wealthiest people are also some of the world’s biggest polluters – not only because of their massive homes and private jets, but because of the fossil fuels generated by the companies they invest their money in.
Surprise, surprise
We need to recycle more efficiently to compensate them.
Fuck no, there need to be laws in place to force more environmentally friendly behavior, especially on companies. The CO2 footprint was invented by the oil industry to shift the blame to the people.
Unless you are talking about recycling the richest 10%, in that case, godspeed.
I don’t know if eliminating every doctor in the country would be a great idea.
But tell me again how it’s the straws.
No climate scientist or activist has ever said that straws have anything significant to do greenhouse gasses; this really isn’t the clever retort you think it is.
The point of shifting away from plastic straws is because they get everywhere, never break down, and pollute the ground environment. It’s critically important that we stop heating the planet. We should also stop covering it in tiny pieces of disposable plastic. These two things have little to do with each other.
Are you aware that more than one thing can be bad at the same time and for different reasons?
Yeah, everyone needs a superyacht and a personal jet. I suppose that they always turn off the lights when they leave the room. For a bit of light relief you can alway follow elonmusksjet as he burns through the fuel and spews out the CO2.
This is factoring in the fossil fuel impact of investments, which isn’t unreasonable, but is also a very different matter than private jets and yachts. The tenth percentile of household incomes in the US is $191,406, which is of course a pretty hefty sum, but not enough to have a jet and yacht habit. It is, however, enough to travel a fair bit and have some non-trivial investments and retirement savings. Given that your average American has very little savings, let alone retirement investments, I’d expect that to be a pretty big factor in this.
Anyone who has a 401k or IRA and invests in even vaguely general funds is going to be at least partially invested in fossil fuel companies and contributing to this. Something like a carbon tax would go a long way to making people actually pay the true costs that these investments and things like travel and large homes actually incur.
