This essay, as is usual for my unstructured and impulsive writing, goes places I didn't intend to go but meant to explore in far less words. It's maybe a 10 minute read, I'm past the point of being cognitively capable of editing it down and I know factually that I won't be able to do it tomorrow either.
Please enjoy my rambling disasterpiece exploring the interweaving web of lies, misrepresentations, and politics at the center of an article by the Guardian that involves their coverage of a non-academic, politically motivated NGO being passed as an objective, low-bias/ no-bias fact reporter.
Morons will say "Statistics are Damn lies" without comprehending what the actual spirit of the law is in regards to how we interpret statistical findings. Without trying to demonstrate mathematical competencies in Statistics (let's face it, I don't remember how to even start doing ANOVA/ANCOVA on my own and used software to do it professionally for 5 years), we can at least discuss the theory of statistical science and how it informs our findings more broadly. Many of us who are science-minded but undergraduates/ have bachelor's degrees will gladly broadcast our stupid peabrained hot takes (my own included) based on literature we've read reasonably well but are not intimately familiar with. The line that separates me and someone with a PHD from a respectable research-oriented university is very significant. We invalidate that line a lot because of human failures industrial and individual in nature (EG, the same system that produces Jordan Peterson produces 'more respectable' public intellectuals like Niel Degrasse Tyson; and both make errors of opinionated lectures stated as factual findings). I think my succinctest take here would be that you should be critical of every opinion and if you're like me that takes at least 600mg of caffeine, 20mg adderall, and 150mg bupropion to even begin at a surface level. Being aware of the cliff and that there is a long fall into that rabbit hole is at the start of defeating your own Dunning-Kruger effect prone psychology; not the conclusion of it. Today, I read an article published by the Guardian that cited a NGO called Oxfam, and immediately investigated the publisher's credentials, finding them, and the article itself, lacking.
Because I have more stuff going on at this exact moment (5pm when I started writing is a busy time for me, I'm awake and everyone has gotten off work and wants to socialize) I will spare you the full literature review particulars and just go into this contemporary example of a political stunt interpreted unironically as an academic finding. Peer review requires a publication not to be in house, it requires people external to the research to do a read-over and approve of it from methods to conclusions. No one, and I mean no one, will put you under a microscope like a Dissertation panel, and that's including the professional research scene which often has many social connections between Researchers, Grant Writers, and Publishers. Bias is everywhere, and unless you account as best as you are able to for everything you choose to accept as factual or resembling factual findings, you're gonna live in a world of false construction. My boss liked my approach to literature review a lot, an acceptance-neutral read of claims and an impulse to trust but verify even the most air-tight of statements I "know" to be true. It wasn't just mere ego-stroking, we got out of a lot of trouble pre-emptively because I didn't trust my own memory and would data-clean or hypothesis test basic shit constantly in controlled environments. Important to take that time and make compromises to your output so-as to keep your methodological integrity, and I wish that my Narcolepsy would let me think about things more than a few minutes before I get dizzy or lose the plot. It takes a lot of stimulants to be this focused, and what count as 'focused' for me isn't focused.
Let me finally discuss Oxfam and their report. I am not intimately familiar with the literature cited by Oxfam, but I know bad report writing when I see it, and the citation of this Article published by the Guardian on November 19th interprets a lot of findings that are VERY hard to verify within the source text itself. I've seen far more studious, academic sources of information report on the phenomena of the Global West as one of the key agents of climate change -- anyone with a functional understanding of emissions and greenhouse gas related hypotheses about Global Warming and related phenomena knows this. The industrialized world's most concentrated resource and power centers are almost all within the so-called Global West, which really is more The U.S., Canada, and the countries of the European Union; they are seconded by rising economies such as those in BRICS, which are increasingly where actual direct emissions producing industrialization is happening. What is a problem is that we are so ready to dunk on the ultrawealthy (rightfully so) for a problem that is much more complicated than the simple take of "rich people bad". I don't want people to read this as a 'defense' of the most powerful, wealthy, and influential people of human society -- they have plenty of others to do that. I want to instead focus on some consequences of over-estimating influence or favorably interpreting results that are a lot more frustrating to comprehend.
You can look at the report Oxfam put out directly and come away with effectively no understanding of the specific model of action the ultra wealthy have in regards to global climate change, because the paper provides data that are so carefully curated and cleaned that it is obviously motivated by their political stances, rather than a preponderence of evidence. Instead of spending their first moments establishing functional definitions and numeric anchors to contextualize finding, it focuses on story telling, emotional appeals, and select findings-as-facts almost universally represented as contextless "percentages". Assessing ownership of carbon emitting industry in the abstract, the distinction of assets vs wealth vs income, the idea of Policy as macro-organic mechanisms of promotion, or that our own understanding of the precise physical and chemical mechanisms of climate change is evolving and perpetually inadequate is not what this paper communicates. Unfortunately our favorite wealth-inheritor Greta Thumburg is yet again being puppeted around as an authority of climate change, writing a foreward that reads at best as "I am an authority because of my publicity, and I say this is important". Look, it shouldn't be hard for the educated and motivated public to find in the direct publication, the "primary source" of the claim, what the fuck they mean by "richness" in any definitive manner. By what metrics are the "richest 1%" determined for this paper? Says the Guardian, it's income of >140,000usd/yr... that's not exactly what I expected, considering how "we are the 99%" is thrown around in my domestic political scene. 140k/yr is a high number, don't get me wrong... but it's not that abnormal, that's the top end of middle America, honey.
I'll go ahead with a direct citation and page number for your reference:
You'll have to download the full English Copy 9mb version of the report, which is 136 pages. You can find the following section on Page 16, in Part 1 "Inequality of Emissions".
Box 1.5. Categories of consumption-based emissions
There is limited global data on the specific consumption categories that induce the carbon footprints presented in this chapter. Carbon emissions from consumption vary greatly depending on the context. For instance, the level of renewable energy in the national grid makes certain consumption categories less carbon intensive. Furthermore, people living in less densely populated areas are likely to have higher emissions from road transport.
Regardless of differences between high- and low-income countries, spending on housing, energy, travel and meat accounts for most carbon emissions. Generally, household heating and electricity consumption are the most uniform across income groups, while personal transportation is the most unequal.139
The largest share of emissions among high-income groups is from transport. Other research shows that car journeys, and even more so flights, distinguish the emissions levels of the top 1% and 10% of income earners.140 According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), 90% of the global population flies only once a year or not at all, whereas around 6% fly more than twice a year, and just 1% fly more than five times a year.141
For low-income groups in lower-income countries, housing, energy and staple foods represent a larger relative share of individuals’ consumption emissions.142
Billionaires’ consumption emissions run to thousands of tonnes per year, with transportation, including private jets and yachts, being by far the biggest contributor.143
Their bibliography for these sections:
- 139 IEA. (2023). The World’s Top 1% of Emitters Produce Over 1000 Times More CO2 Than the Bottom 1%. https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-world-s-top-1-of-emitters-produce-over-1000-times-more-co2-than-the-bottom-1; H. Zheng et al. (2023). Rising Carbon Inequality and its Driving Factors From 2005 to 2015. Global Environmental Change, 82. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378023000705?via%3Dihub#ab005
- 140 D. Ivanova and R. Wood. (2020). The Unequal Distribution of Household Carbon Footprints in Europe and its Link to Sustainability. Global Sustainability, 3. https://doi.org/10.1017/sus.2020.12 Direct link here
- 141 IEA. (2023). The World’s Top 1% of Emitters Produce Over 1000 Times More CO2 Than the Bottom 1%. Redundant Citation of the same source as 139
- 142 Zheng et al. (2023). Rising Carbon Inequality and its Driving Factors From 2005 to 2015. Direct link here
- 143 Barros and Wilk. (2021). The Outsized Carbon Footprints of the Super-Rich. Somewhat direct-ish link
So of these, two, maybe three of them are verifiably academic from a publication that seems to be actually peer reviewed. I've seen Zheng by name cited in a few different places, they seem to be an actual researcher so I do not doubt the veracity of their work even when published by what seems to be other not peer reviewed NGO's. What kills me though is that the annotations and the lack of definitions in the base Oxfam report itself here really sabotages what should be a pretty cut and dry claim: Hey, Air travel is REALLY bad for the planet's current climate crisis. What is missed though is what the fuck they mean by "flies once a year". Is that an individual airplane flight from point A to point B (that has a measurable contribution in tons of CO2) or do they mean a full trip from A to B to C to D (the average trip by plane to a destination in the U.S. IIRC is around 2-3 flights)? By this article's metrics above, my mean income of a stellar <20k/yr for the last decade makes me part of the top earners on the planet in terms of raw air-travel contribution, because my relationship with a Canadian has seen me travel by plane multiple times per year (at least 4 flights per year, minimum two from Arizona to British Columbia, and two back). Note how that isn't exactly... income oriented. It has more to do with fucking geography and the luck of the draw of being born here in the U.S., I never earned more than 38k/year, I own nothing in property, I don't even fucking own a car anymore!
I am highlighting this edge case for your own edification: By merely existing in a Westernized Country, I am factually contributing more to climate change than someone who does not. The facts of the matter are that we are falling victim not only to the current reality of affairs involving the complex dance of industry pressures, stakeholders, and climate change consequences, but also our inability to comprehend these as systemic issues that even the ultrawealthy have limited avenues of control over (and limited motivation to care). These are macro-economic issues inherent to profit seeking, capitalism, industrialized societies, and power generation. POWER GENERATION. You know, the source of all electricity period, is probably THE KEY ISSUE and yet the particulars of how we actually fucking effect change on that particular industry is completely lost to the public and misrepresented as a Wealth Inequality conversation. We're talking about something far more significant than Wealth. This is about Power. This is about Economic Violence, and about the historical acclimation of Resource Extraction via long legacies of Colonialism, Imperialism, and now NeoColonialism and Split-Labor Market Exploitation. All of those terms have somewhat agreed upon definitions in various sociological texts, for reference, but as you can imagine each one overlaps and is not so easily distinguished.
To my knowledge, our best bet to deal with Power Generation is to completely alter our urban landscape, swap to nuclear power, and practice much more in the way of terrestrial travel and by extension, inconvenience and economic inefficiency. That's a fucking difficult sell to those of us who are motivated to make the change, can you imagine being restricted from taking the train to the next town for socializing/visiting family? That's what has to be done, we have to encourage dense energy efficient infrastructure that makes travel by foot much more viable to our comfortable living standards. I am no expert on climate change and wouldn't know shit about actual policy goals or industrial implementation science to reduce carbon/other emissions, but I can see my own biases making me numb here to some critical facts if I let them. If I just say "well the situation is completely out of my hands" and blame someone else, I fall for a different, but technically correct version of the Individual Action myth. Instead of my actions and reality of lifestyle being a symptom of a grander industrial, societal phenomena -- it is just the wealthy personally rolling up their sleeves and dumping carbon into the atmosphere. That take away is unspecific, it blames individuals who are frankly incapable of comprehending their own role at scale and then advocates for shaming them and we have done this for years and it has never worked. Elon Musk has no fucking concept of his personal accountability, does not react constructively to public shaming, and has an entire cult of personality and self-authored echochamber of yesmen to insulate him from the consequences of his contributions to climate change through the abstract ownership of his vast wealth and holdings. This is a problem that requires the State's Monopoly over all forms of Violence, it requires regulation and a fucking leash on the fiefdoms of the powerful, a rethink of responsible amounts of personal property and resource ownership.
Our fucking economic system produces Elon. Our economic system creates the conditions for climate change. Our economic system, our needs as biological creatures, our technology being so reliant on electricity... these are contributing factors we're missing because we are caught up in the politics of blame being leveraged for representative endorsement of political actors. I fucking hate the 'cold pragmatism' angle I have to advocate for, because the inhumanity of human societies is inherently a consequence of the perspective... but let me be clear: the parts of this paper that are factual, such as the ability to estimate a mathematical model of human fatalities per ton of CO2, undersell their import and the authors rely on a pretty partisan political message that is deliberately written imprecisely so-as to attribute to mere incompetence the personal authorship of action by the Ultra Wealthy. The Guardian and Oxfam are being unspecific about the very fucking nature of the phenomena they are reporting on to the point it is actually self-sabotaging since I have to dig through countless pages and references to find what they mean by "Rich" and "1%". Leftists and "truth-seekers" are really easy to defeat in detail by the industrialist and social conservative elements of the political spectrum because we can't even fucking avoid our own traps of ambiguity, our inability to claim self-authorship over the mechanism of harm we are critiquing.
Its reasons like the above that even supposedly self-critical works like White Fragility: Why it's so hard for white people to talk about racism fall into pitfalls of infantalizing the victims of the generations of socioeconomic violence that unequal policy has inflicted upon Black Americans, framing Whiteness as an impairment more psychological in origin than a historical legacy of systemic disenfranchisement and policy penned to exclude. It's an ironic publication, one that a number of Black scholars have criticized for utterly downplaying the impact of Civil Rights advocacy and pro-social attitudes. We can't just uncritically interpret this kind of data and then go about our lives as powerless without also feeling the cognitive dissonance inherent to comprehending these findings. This is why I rage at my own incompetence and soak in my own existential depression, I'm utterly horrified at myself as much as I am the rest of my society and spend my effort merely coping with my disorder. I have my own issues with over-emphasizing my own deficits and action potential, but I can at least verify their impact and relative lack of peers who are as disabled but as mentally flexible to consider if they're agreeing with a feeling or if they're agreeing with a verifiable fact.
To even get to the part where I can "save the planet" or advocate for change, I need complex pharmaceuticals; those don't happen without Fossil Fuels, period, that's why texts like The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels are such effective distractions from the reality of industry being discussed across the political spectrum. It's an easy messaging win in the political theater of moralizing to say "you're just suicidal" to leftists who see the peril of fossil fuels but cannot communicate effectively on just how complicated that peril is, and how we have many trade-offs we are making in favor of a select few compared to the Global population. There's also just a value judgement problem that many people can't agree on the fundamental value of human life, and that operating on a minimum value system that favors trying to save as many living humans as is possible means devaluing yourself. I don't think our Westernized society of individuals is equipped under the current societal conditions to grasp this perspective enough to influence Bob Joe swing voter, you need to attack our anti-social legacy at the policy level and problem solve methods to do so without enabling even more destructive forces to seize control. The unspecific writing of this report fails to grab people outside of the echochamber already constructed by being open to reading articles by the Guardian... a person like my mother doesn't read, and uncritically consumes Fox News, often giving verbal "hell yeah, preach" style responses to quips by Fox Anchors that validate her world view. I don't want to be like her and pass this article onto peers as factual when the report itself is so carefully constructed to assign blame really inadequately to a selection of individuals who do have major disproportionate contributions... but are ultimately enabled by a system that fails to restrict their capacity for acquisition of assets, power, and influence.
I'm already open to reading critically, and because this text is written for someone who is open to evidence based policy, but not academically literate, my above pseudo-academics are just another example of "self-owning libs". I'm a microcosm of the problem of communicating a favorable message badly to an audience that already fucking agrees, let alone reaching people neutral or even opposed to my stance. But by all means, please tell me how climate-conscious people in the West above 140k/yr salaries are the most critical demographic to influence, and that the grander system of power and resource consolidation has only a little bit to do with that. Certainly, the progressive working class whose votes are concentrated in a few specific cities on the U.S. West Coast are going to by themselves be shamed into repairing the planet. I'm sure their demographics cutting overwhelmingly into the 50+ age bracket will mean that little disabled, unemployed 31yo children like me are capable of being the exemplars of climate advocacy without sufficient supports to enable that advocacy. As I contort myself into increasingly exotic shapes to try to rationalize my outrage at the sheer ineptitude of the opening pages of a 136 page report, I continue to misrepresent the scale of the problem. The level of detail the above rambling disaster I've written so far isn't even the complete picture.
An actual TLDR:
My conclusion is that humans are very shitty at communicating and comprehending the scale and complexity of the present climate crises that objectively are causing mass fatalities across the world in populations where the slightest additional strain on living circumstances is fatal. Like plucking a spiderweb with a branch, you tug on one part and the whole thing comes with, meaning the structural weaknesses inherent to that spiderweb are exacerbated first before its strongest parts that are most resilient to your exertion of force begin to come with. In this analogy, we as individuals are the web, and human society is the Spider. We are not the spider, but this politically tuned, biased little paper by a NGO that is not peer reviewed is trying to tell me that Elon Musk and others like him are the Spider, and at best, they're one of joints in the Spider's legs helping work the Spinnerets that make the web. If the stick is our pending annihilation as a consequence of Climate Change making our planet uninhabitable within potentially only a few short decades or a century, the wielder of that stick is our complex reality. From the perspective of the spider, it can hardly comprehend the nature of the threat, and follows its existing behaviors it evolved to cope with threats. Those of us making up the Web are a mass noun, produced by that spider and voiceless at the level of influence we have as individuals. None the less, we are what breaks before the Spider has to try again and build a new web.
If we're lucky, the Spider will survive us to make a new web.
That's pretty terrifying.