The world’s wealthiest 1% — those making more than $109,000 per year — are the biggest source of climate pollution by a substantial margin, according to a new report from the World Inequality Lab. The analysis, led by the Paris School of Economics and UC-Berkeley, finds recent decades’ wildly unequally distributed benefits of globalization have made personal wealth a better predictor of emissions than national wealth. The sources of growing emissions are different, however. In the developing world, growing middle classes’ increasingly meat-heavy diets account for a large part of emissions increases, while superyachts and private jets (and joyrides that barely make it to space) account for disproportionate amounts of climate pollution among the individually superrich. (Bloomberg $)
