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carbon budget
'Insatiable Greed': Richest 1% Have Already Burned Through Their Carbon Limit for 2025
"The super-rich continue to squander humanity's chances with their lavish lifestyles, polluting stock portfolios and pernicious political influence. This is theft—pure and simple."
Jan 10, 2025
An Oxfam analysis published Friday shows that the richest 1% of the global population has already blown through its global carbon budget for 2025—just 10 days into the New Year. The figures, which arrive amid catastrophic fires in Los Angeles that may turn out to be the costliest in U.S. history, highlight the disproportionate role of the ultra-wealthy in fueling a climate emergency that is causing devastation around the world.
Oxfam calculates that in order to keep critical climate goals in reach, each person on Earth must have a CO2 footprint of roughly 2.1 tons per year or less. On average, each person in the global 1% is burning through 76 tons of planet-warning carbon dioxide annually—or 0.209 per day—meaning it took them just over a week to reach their CO2 limit for the year.
By contrast, the average person in the poorest 50% of humanity has an annual carbon footprint of 0.7 tons per year—well within the 2.1-ton budget compatible with a livable future.
"The future of our planet is hanging by a thread," Nafkote Dabi, Oxfam International's climate change policy lead, said in a statement Friday. "The margin for action is razor-thin, yet the super-rich continue to squander humanity's chances with their lavish lifestyles, polluting stock portfolios and pernicious political influence."
"This is theft—pure and simple―a tiny few robbing billions of people of their future to feed their insatiable greed," Dabi added.
"Rich polluters must be made to pay for the havoc they're wreaking on our planet."
Oxfam's new analysis came as the Copernicus Climate Change Service confirmed that 2024 was the hottest year on record and "the first calendar year that the average global temperature exceeded 1.5°C above its pre-industrial level."
"All of the internationally produced global temperature datasets show that 2024 was the hottest year since records began in 1850," Copernicus director Carlo Buontempo said in a statement. "Humanity is in charge of its own destiny, but how we respond to the climate challenge should be based on evidence. The future is in our hands—swift and decisive action can still alter the trajectory of our future climate."
Oxfam called on governments to move urgently to curb the emissions of the rich, including by implementing wealth taxes, banning private jets and superyachts, and imposing strict new regulations on polluting companies.
"Governments need to stop pandering to the richest," Dabi said Friday. "Rich polluters must be made to pay for the havoc they're wreaking on our planet. Tax them, curb their emissions, and ban their excessive indulgences—private jets, superyachts, and the like. Leaders who fail to act are effectively choosing complicity in a crisis that threatens the lives of billions."
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'Wake Up Call': Climate-Warming Emissions Reached Record This Decade
"If we don't want to see the 1.5°C goal disappearing in our rearview mirror, the world must work much harder and urgently at bringing emissions down," one scientist behind the findings said.
Jun 08, 2023
Despite national promises, mounting protests, and ever more extreme weather events, greenhouse gas emissions have reached an "all-time high" of 54 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide per year over the last decade, a new study has found.
The research, published in the journal Earth System Science Data Thursday, concluded that the carbon budget—the amount of carbon dioxide that human societies can emit and still have a 50% chance of limiting global heating to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels—has shrunk by half since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) last calculated it three years ago.
"This is the critical decade for climate change," Piers Forster, lead author and director of the Priestley International Centre for Climate at the University of Leeds, said in a statement. "Decisions made now will have an impact on how much temperatures will rise and the degree and severity of impacts we will see as a result."
\u201cOur climate indicator paper is out, showing unprecedented rate of global warming -over 0.2\u00b0C per decade, with maximum land temps rising faster still. https://t.co/O3el0J00pI\u201d— Piers Forster (@Piers Forster) 1686204170
The new paper was released at U.N. climate talks ongoing in Bonn, Germany, from June 5 to 15, as the Financial Times reported. The talks are part of the lead-up to the COP28 U.N. climate conference in the UAE in December, which will feature the first global stocktake of progress towards meeting the 1.5°C goal by 2050.
In crafting climate plans, negotiators and policymakers rely on authoritative reports from the IPCC, but these are only released on average every six years, as AFP noted.
"The problem with the IPCC is that it comes once a decade & is outdated when it is published!" scientist and IPCC author Glen Peters observed on Twitter.
\u201cThough, you do have to stomach some bad news...\n\nThe Remaining Carbon Budget for 1.5\u00b0C has gone from 500 GtCO\u2082 to 250 GtCO\u2082 in three years: we emitted an extra 3*40=120 GtCO\u2082 & the science was updated... Oops...\u201d— Glen Peters (@Glen Peters) 1686213279
The last major IPCC report on the physical science of climate change was released in 2021 based on data from 2019, according to the Financial Times. This information then fed into the Sixth Synthesis Report published in March, the University of Leeds noted.
The new study is part of a larger attempt to provide world leaders with the latest science through the Indicators of Global Climate Change and website, which will update important climate indicators each year.
According to Thursday's updates, the burning of fossil fuels and destruction of forests caused an average 1.14°C of warming between 2013 and 2022, an increase from the average 1.07°C of warming between 2010 and 2019.
"Over the 2013–2022 period, human-induced warming has been increasing at an unprecedented rate of over 0.2 ∘C per decade," the study authors wrote.
"Even though we are not yet at 1.5°C warming, the carbon budget will likely be exhausted in only a few years as we have a triple whammy of heating from very high CO2 emissions, heating from increases in other GHG emissions, and heating from reductions in pollution."
Unfortunately, the progress that has been made in cutting down on coal use has helped boost warming in the short term by removing cooling aerosols from the atmosphere.
"This robust update shows intensifying heating of our climate driven by human activities," study co-author Dr. Valérie Masson-Delmotte, from the Université Paris Saclay, who also co-chaired Working Group 1 of the IPCC's Sixth Assessment report, said in a statement. "It is a timely wake up call for the 2023 global stocktake of the Paris Agreement—the pace and scale of climate action is not sufficient to limit the escalation of climate-related risks."
While there is some evidence that the yearly uptick in the pace of emissions is slowing down—the International Energy Agency found that energy emissions had risen less in 2022 than 2021—the increase needs to not only stall, but reverse, as The Guardianexplained:
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change calculated in 2018 that the world must nearly halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, compared with 2010 levels, in order to stay within the 1.5C threshold, and reach net zero emissions by 2050. But that calculation rested on an assumption that the world would reduce emissions by about 7% a year during the 2020s.
As emissions have continued to rise, the annual rate of decline for emissions will now have to be much steeper to stay within the 1.5C limit.
The IPCC put the global carbon budget at around 500 metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2020; it is now at around 250.
"Even though we are not yet at 1.5°C warming, the carbon budget will likely be exhausted in only a few years as we have a triple whammy of heating from very high CO2 emissions, heating from increases in other GHG emissions, and heating from reductions in pollution," Forster said. "If we don't want to see the 1.5°C goal disappearing in our rearview mirror, the world must work much harder and urgently at bringing emissions down."
\u201cNEW: This week's climate graphic looks at new data from climate scientists @piersforster et al, which shows that the carbon budget remaining to limit global warming to 1.5C has halved in just 3 years.\n\nRead @CamillaHodgson's excellent report\nhttps://t.co/xTMGPZPzq5\n#dataviz\u201d— Steven Bernard (@Steven Bernard) 1686209361
The new study isn't the only alarming climate data released this week. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported Monday that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels had reached a peak of 424 parts per million in May, levels not seen in millions of years. Scientists said Tuesday that the loss of summer Arctic sea ice is now inevitable. And the EU's Copernicus Climate Change Service announced Wednesday that air and sea-surface temperatures over non-ice-covered oceans were the highest for any May on record.
At the same time, wildfire smoke from unprecedented fires in Canada has smothered the eastern U.S. while record heat bakes the Caribbean.
\u201cLife-threatening heat today in Puerto Rico so hot that some meteorologists are astonished. And more of the same to come this week. Heat index numbers as high as 115-125 today!! So what is going on? There are many factors, so let's dig in... thread 1/\u201d— Jeff Berardelli (@Jeff Berardelli) 1686016817
Climate groups are launching a week of action in the U.S. Thursday calling on the Biden administration to declare a climate emergency and reverse the approval of major fossil fuel projects. In Bonn, demonstrators greeted the arrival of COP28 president and UAE state oil company head Sultan Ahmed al-Jaber with a banner drop.
\u201cToday as oil executive and #COP28 president Sultan Al Jaber of UAE arrives at the UN #BonnClimateConference, #ClimateJustice leaders drop a banner and demand countries put an end to fossil fuels. "Keep the coal in the hole, keep the oil in the soil, keep the gas in the ground!"\u201d— Adrien Salazar (@Adrien Salazar) 1686233871
"Keep the coal in the hole, keep the oil in the soil, keep the gas in the ground!" the activists demanded.
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World's Carbon Budget is Only Half As Big As Thought
The days of producing electricity from fossil fuels may be drawing to an end.
Feb 26, 2016
Climate scientists have bad news for governments, energy companies, motorists, passengers and citizens everywhere in the world: to contain global warming to the limits agreed by 195 nations in Paris last December, they will have to cut fossil fuel combustion at an even faster rate than anybody had predicted.
Joeri Rogelj, a research scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria, and European and Canadian colleagues propose in Nature Climate Change that all previous estimates of the quantities of carbon dioxide that can be released into the atmosphere before the thermometer rises to potentially catastrophic levels are too generous.
Instead of a range of permissible emissions estimates of up to 2,390 billion tons from 2015 onwards, the very most humans could release would be 1,240 billion tons.
Available levels
In effect, that halves the levels of diesel and petrol available for petrol tanks, coal for power stations, and natural gas for central heating and cooking available to humankind before the global average temperature - already 1degC higher than it was at the start of the Industrial Revolution - reaches the notional 2degC mark long agreed internationally as being the point of no return for the planet.
In fact, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change summit in Paris agreed on a target "well below" 2degC in recognition of ominous projections - one of which was that, at such planetary temperatures, sea levels would rise high enough to submerge several small island states.
The Nature Climate Change paper is a restatement of a problem that has been clear for decades. Carbon dioxide proportions in the atmosphere are linked to planetary surface temperatures and, as they rise, so does average temperature. These proportions oscillated around 280 parts per million for most of human history.
The global exploitation, on a massive scale, of fossil fuels drove the expansion of agriculture, the growth of economies, a sevenfold growth in human population, a sea level rise of 14cms, and a temperature rise of, so far, 1degC.
To stop temperatures increasing another 3degC or more and sea levels rising by more than a metre, humans have to reduce fossil fuel emissions. By how much these must be reduced is difficult to calculate.
"We have been overestimating the budget by 50 to more than 200%. At the high end, this is a difference of more than 1,000 billion tons of carbon dioxide"
The global carbon budget is really the balance between what animals emit - in this context, the word animals includes humans with cars and aeroplanes and factories - and what plants and algae can absorb. So the calculations are bedeviled by uncertainties about forests, grasslands, and oceans.
To make things simpler, climate scientists translate the target into the billions of tons of carbon dioxide that, ideally, may be released into the atmosphere from 2015 onwards. Even these, however, are estimates.
There is general agreement that a limit of 590 billion tons would safely keep the world from overheating in ways that would impose ever greater strains on human society. The argument is about the upper limit of such estimates.
Dr Rogelj says: "In order to have a reasonable chance of keeping global warming below 2degC, we can only emit a certain amount of carbon dioxide, ever. That's our carbon budget.
"This has been understood for about a decade, and the physics behind this concept are well understood, but many different factors can lead to carbon budgets that are either slightly smaller or slightly larger. We wanted to understand these differences, and to provide clarity on the issue for policy-makers and the public.
"This study shows that, in some cases, we have been overestimating the budget by 50 to more than 200%. At the high end, this is a difference of more than 1,000 billion tons of carbon dioxide."
The same study looks at why estimates of the "safe" level of emissions have varied so widely.
One complicating factor has been uncertainty about what humans might do, and another has been about the other more transient greenhouse gases, such as methane and nitrogen oxides.
Although short-lived and released in smaller quantities, some of these are potentially far more potent than carbon dioxide as an influence on planetary temperatures.
Complex calculations
But Dr Rogelj and his colleagues found that a significant cause of variation was simply a consequence of the different assumptions and methodologies inherent in such complex calculations.
So the researchers have re-examined both the options and the approaches, and have worked out a global figure that, they suggest, could be relevant to "real-world policy".
It takes into account the consequences of all human activity, and it embraces detailed outlines of possible low-carbon choices. It also offers, they say, a 66% chance of staying within the internationally agreed limit.
"We now better understand the carbon budget for keeping global warming below 2degC," Dr Rogelj says. "This carbon budget is very important to know because it defines how much carbon dioxide we are allowed to release into the atmosphere, ever.
"We have figured out that this budget is at the low end of what studies indicated before, and if we don't start reducing our emissions immediately, we will blow it in a few decades."
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