To Slow the Climate Crisis, Decarbonize Billionaires Burning Through the Carbon Budget, Advocates Say

The world’s richest billionaires emit more carbon in 90 minutes than you or I will over the course of our entire lives, according to research from the anti-poverty organization Oxfam. While we’re using paper straws, they’re accruing superyachts, flying in private jets and investing in pollution-heavy industries. As governments around the world work to decarbonize, they’re essentially throwing gasoline on our burning planet.

Unlike the energy transition, which requires a shift in worldwide infrastructure that will take time and money to build — neither of which we have in abundance — billionaires could make a sizable dent in total planetary emissions by simply reigning in their excessive lifestyles and irresponsible investments. In 2019, the wealthiest 1 percent of the global population were responsible for the same amount of emissions as the poorest two-thirds, or 5 billion people. The world’s richest 1 percent blew through their annual carbon budget in just 10 days this year, with devastating implications for vulnerable people globally who bear the brunt of climate impacts while contributing least to the emissions that cause them, Oxfam found.

Leaders at the nonprofit say as long as the billionaire class has the funds to do as they wish, they will continue to shift the burden of responsibility onto average people even as they emit more carbon than the majority of the world combined. They say new taxes on billionaire excess could offset some of the ultra-wealthy’s impact by generating trillions of dollars to help vulnerable communities reduce emissions and cope with climate change.

“Ultimately we feel they shouldn’t actually be billionaires,” said Dr. Ashfaq Khalfan, director of climate justice at Oxfam America and one of the authors of the research. “We are proposing significant taxes on wealth and income.”

Oxfam isn’t alone. Economist Gabriel Zucman presented a plan for a global wealth tax at a meeting of G20 nations last summer. It calls for taxing the world’s 2,800 wealthiest people — whose current rate of taxation amounts to a piddly 0.3 percent of their total wealth — at an annual rate equivalent to 2 percent of their wealth instead. This would create roughly $250 billion in annual revenue that could be used to counteract the negative effects of excessive emissions.

“We actually felt that it should be higher than that,” Khalfan said. A yearly, progressive tax of 2 percent on people with $1 million to $50 million in assets, 3 percent on those with over $50 million, and 5 percent on billionaires could generate $1.7 trillion in new tax revenue — enough to make a real difference for the world’s poorest who suffer the worst effects of the climate crisis, Oxfam says. 

The nonprofit also proposed a series of taxes on windfall profits, investments in pollution-heavy industries, and a 60 percent income tax on the richest 1 percent of the population. It estimates the 60 percent income tax alone could generate $6.4 trillion in annual revenue.

Khalfan said taxes on certain luxuries could also encourage the world’s wealthiest to reign in their extravagant lifestyles. “This should be a steep levy that would dissuade the use of these jets and superyachts,” he said. “For many of these billionaires … they may still go ahead even if you did have a very steep levy. But it would be a source of revenue.”

For example, in 2022 Canada added a 10 percent luxury tax to boats that sold for over CAD$250,000. Instead of raising the expected revenue, sales and inventory plummeted — making a strong case for the use of luxury taxes as a way to dissuade carbon-intense consumption. In another example from Canada, the province of British Columbia saw revenue declines from increased taxes on luxury vehicles, suggesting that the excess taxes did change behavior. 

Ideally, the taxes proposed by Oxfam would curb billionaire behavior as luxury taxes did in Canada. But if they don’t, the revenue could be used to mitigate that behavior, the nonprofit says.

“Climate finance needs are enormous and escalating, especially in Global South countries that are bearing the brunt of the impact of climate changes. High-income countries not only have the greatest ability to pay the climate bill, they also have a responsibility to compensate for their historic carbon emissions,” Oxfam’s report reads. “The argument that ‘there is no money’ does not hold water. If governments were willing to make rich high-polluting individuals and corporations pay, they could start raising the scale of financing truly needed.”