Column and voice-over by Lee Camp, a human
By now you’ve seen the eye-bulge-invoking images or videos of the Nepal floods that have claimed at least 1,000 lives, with 4,500 more people missing. Walls of water washing away whole villages. Entire bridges of steel and cement thrown around like small twigs. The destruction is unfathomable.
And while some of the corporate media might mention climate change in their reports, they all carefully avoid the core reality. Yes, extreme climate change is the surface cause. The glaciers in Nepal are liquefying quickly, at times releasing walls of water. But the Nepalese people are not the ones heating the planet. Even the sociopaths at the World Bank recently wrote:
“…the country [of Nepal] is a negligible contributor to climate change – producing 0.1 percent of total global greenhouse gas emissions…”
Let me repeat that. Nepal produces one-tenth of 1% of the global greenhouse gas emissions, yet its people are being thrust into cataclysmic events.
On the other hand, some people are responsible for a great deal of greenhouse gas emissions. The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis noted:
“…the world’s wealthiest 10% are responsible for two-thirds of observed global warming since 1990 and the resulting increases in climate extremes such as heatwaves and droughts.”
Wow. Two-thirds of global warming emissions would not be a problem if just the wealthiest 10% of humans were defenestrated. Math doesn’t lie.
But it gets even worse for the richest of the rich. The same study found that the wealthiest 1% of humans around the world contributed 26 TIMES the global average to things like heat waves and Amazon droughts.
And then there’s the richest of the richest of the rich — people like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. Journalist Krstafer Pinkerton calculated the global warming emissions of just a fraction of Zuckerberg’s stupid emetic existence — his $500 million superyacht.
Even if Zuckerberg’s superyacht only roams the seas three months per year, that’s 8,511 metric tons of CO₂ annually — the equivalent of 560 average Americans’ total yearly carbon footprints. One man. One boat. Half a thousand lives’ worth of emissions, burned for personal recreation.
That’s only his yacht. That doesn’t include his personal jets, personal mansions, personal vehicles, or Meta’s nightmarish data centers. I wouldn’t be surprised if Zuckerberg’s emissions alone are greater than Nepal’s.
Yet the Nepalese are the ones losing their lives in catastrophic floods.
Sarah Schöngart, the lead author of last year’s study published in Nature, said,
“Our study shows that extreme climate impacts are not just the result of abstract global emissions, instead we can directly link them to our lifestyle and investment choices, which in turn are linked to wealth…”
Mind you, we can also slice up emissions by organization. The US military is the largest institutional cause of global warming emissions on the planet. That means that while we’re decimating countries like Syria, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, etc., we’re simultaneously destroying other areas of the world at which we weren’t even directing our unhinged sanpaku gaze.
But perhaps we should go easy on both the rich, who are disproportionately causing this global destruction, and the media, who refuse to report on the true causes. I mean, humans have only known that greenhouse gases warm the planet for roughly 170 years. In August 1856, Eunice Newton Foote first discovered the connection.
Furthermore, only 99.9% of the 88,125 peer-reviewed scientific studies agree that climate change is mainly caused by humans. Clearly, the verdict is still out.
Other folks who receive more of the brunt than their contribution to the problem are those living on low-lying islands and coastal regions.
"Wow. Two-thirds of global warming emissions would not be a problem if just the wealthiest 10% of humans were defenestrated. Math doesn’t lie."
Yeah, if we're really serious about doing something to make the climate more livable for the vast majority of humanity, we'll get rid of these horribly polluting 10%. Throw them out the windows of their yachts and then lock away their yachts, private jets, fancy cars, etc., so the rest of us may live in peace and safety.