Outcast_Searcher wrote:But Toecutter, you remind me of my dad, re frugality -- in the US, and the first world generally, you're pretty much in a league by yourself.
Not quite. I lived like a poor American when I had money, and still live like a poor American now that I don't have money. From the data available, there are easily tens of millions of Americans that consume even less than I do, so I'm not exactly at the extreme end of the bell curve.
Perhaps the above calculator's numbers are out of date or tallied a bit differently than what I'm posting below, but consider the following:
The bottom 10% of Americans account for 3.6 tonnes of CO2 per capita.
http://whygreeneconomy.org/reducing-inequality-and-carbon-footprints-within-countries/This is close to half the world average 6.2 tonnes CO2 per capita, according to page 28 of this study:
http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/ChancelPiketty2015.pdfWhich is a fair bit higher than the 4 tonnes per capita world average claimed in the calculator above. Another discrepancy is that the calculator claims 16 tonnes per capita for the average American, while the above links claim 22.5 tonnes.
Consider that the average North American emits 22.5 tonnes of CO2 per year. Compare this to the other chart in the whygreeneconomy.com link, and you will find that this average is between the 70th and 80th percentile American on the percentile wealth versus CO2 emissions chart. The very wealthiest skew the distribution greatly as they consume with a level of gluttony that the kings of the past could never dream of.
In fact, the 20th percentile American in terms of wealth, at 7.1 tonnes CO2, isn’t much more over this world average. The bottom 20% of Americans have a CO2 generation(and correlated resource consumption) similar to or lower than the lowest rungs of the global middle class!
A little bit of basic math in a spreadsheet using the data from the whygreeneconomy.org link, multiplying the population of each quantile by the average per capita emissions and putting that product in a new column, then creating a summation of the total of all of this new column, can show you that the CO2 emissions of America’s upper 1%, by itself, is as much as the bottom 40% of Americans put together. The upper 20% of Americans(which individually average out to something close in resource consumption levels to the world’s global 1%, given America’s percentage of the world’s population), comprising the mix of rich and upper middle class, generate more GHG emissions more than all other the Americans put together! THIS is where the bloat must be cut more than anywhere else, the upper middle class and wealthy.
Also consider there are wealthy Americans that are carbon neutral, because they were able to go off grid, produce their own food/electricity/water/ect., drive EVs, and negate their impact by planting trees, and generally enjoy good living standards with a little bit of consumerism here and there.
Also it must be noted that through planned obsolescence of consumer goods like tools, autos, homes, and the like, a large portion of the working classes' and middle classes’ CO2 emissions are non-essential to its standard of living, and can be somewhat decoupled from it through products built to conserve energy and to last a lifetime instead of ending up in a landfill.
Looking forward, there probably are enough resources for most Americans, or even the rest of the people on Earth, to live somewhat like those who are wealthy but live off grid, but access to said resources needs to be more equitably distributed to make this possible. If we get a collapse scenario where the existing aristocracy remains entrenched, that sort of transition won't happen.
The unnecessary felling of a tree, perhaps the old growth of centuries, seems to me a crime little short of murder. ~Thomas Jefferson