this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2026
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Climate
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Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.
As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades:
How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world:
Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:
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Yes, I factored that into my calculations. 923m is 11.12% of 8.3b; 830m is 89.9% of 923m. Show me where I'm wrong.
Also, if the global median income is $3000, that means a person making $3001 is in the 50th percentile, not the 10th. Try again.
Nope, this is about the top 10% by wealth, not by income. Lots of people who make $3000 have zero or negative net worth. And most billionaires have very little measurable income because of the way they cook their books with legal loopholes.
Trying to make this about income instead of wealth is fundamentally misguided and misinformed.
Wealth vs income is an irrelevant distinction when you are talking about the top 10% globally. The point I'm making is that a middle class person in a developed country is likely to be in the top 10% globally by either measure. The problem is vastly larger than just what a couple billionaires are doing, no matter how much the rest of us want to pretend we aren't part of the problem.
No it's not.
That's the part that's not relevant to this discussion.
And yet the whole point of this post is that climate change is being disproportionally caused by the wealthiest people. A key part of the background to that is how the impetus to solve global warming has been placed on the consumers for decades.
"Recycle. Drive less. Use less A/C. Stop using disposable plastics. Take less baths." When in many places, modern life has been designed such that many of those things are unavoidable in modern society (by capitalist oligarchs, funny that).
Not that we shouldn't try to do those things to the best of our ability. We should. But for most of us, keeping a perfect track record is not only impossible, but it adds an enormous amount of stress which leads to burnout and callousness, and any given person's individual contribution to minimizing their contributions to global warming will be comparatively tiny, no matter how good they do it.
How much of a dent will it really make when you have corporate office buildings that run A/C on full blast even at night when nobody is there, or during the day with windows open because people can't control the temperatures in their offices and it gets too cold for some people? Likewise with heating in the winter.
The problem is systemic and needs to be addressed at the systemic level, starting with the biggest contributors (corporations and billionaires).
Pretending this is a middle class problem that the middle class needs to solve is only doing the billionaires' work of obfuscation, gaslighting, and manipulation for them.
I repeat, no individual working-class person's efforts to slow or reverse climate change will ever be enough to achieve it.