Who is the average person? Is it the global average person? Is it the average American? I mean as an Australian I am responsible for far more emissions than the average Papuan.
this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2025
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The worst countries for energy use per capita are mostly middle-eastern oil and gas producers, and places that are very cold and energy producers (Iceland, Norway, Canada), and for some reason Singapore and Trinidad and Tobago.
If you look at just fossil fuel use per capita the picture is slightly different. Iceland drops way down the list. They use a lot of energy, but it's mostly geothermal and hydroelectric. After the middle east, Singapore and Trinidad and Tobago it's USA and Canada at the top. Canada is basically USA with cold winters. Then it's South Korea, Russia, Australia, etc.
I think what they mean in this case is "the average person", i.e. divide all the CO2 produced by 8.2 billion. Since half of those people live in massive poverty and have virtually no carbon footprint, the per-person number is much less than any Australian, Canadian, American, etc.
Yeah, i think separating billionaires from the rest goes some way to making working and middle class people feel like that we've done our bit. By that, I mean it may as well be a billionaire compared to some one in extreme poverty.
On a side note, I wonder if those maritime countries pay a penalty for all the fossil fueled powered shipping they need. Also Singapore is a major oil refiner which might be affecting them.
Why? Don’t they use cardboard straws for their frappes?
No, they use a servant as a straw.
Centurii Chan is oddly focused on being allowed to say the N word
Listen. These people are a cancer, and they need to be fully removed from society. They are literally killing us.
The thing is, even if it's true that the average billionaire uses 1,000,000x as much energy as the average person, there are so few billionaires that most of the world's CO2 is still emitted by the other 8.2 billion.
We definitely should make it so there are no billionaires. Tax them out of existence, and if that doesn't work, axe them out of existence.
Having said that, we also need to take responsibility for our own wasteful lives. Just look at how inefficient cars are. In North America it's perfectly normal to jump into a vehicle and haul around multiple tons of steel just to go get coffee. Another major source of CO2 is electricity and heat. Thankfully solar cells are getting so cheap that within a few decades (if the oil lobby can be defeated) most electricity will probably be solar. But, should we really be living in places where the heat needs to be turned on for 6 months of the year?
Canada is bringing in hundreds of thousands of immigrants per year, and the total population is growing at something like 1 million more people per year. Each one of those people becomes one of the most energy-using people on the planet, partially because the North American lifestyle is wasteful, partially because Canada is insanely cold half the year and requires massive energy for heating. Every new Canadian, whether a birth or an immigrant makes the world's CO2 footprint much bigger. Maybe Canada should start shrinking and not growing, and the population should move to places where such a massively energy intensive lifestyle is not necessary.
Articles like this always seem like they're people looking for a way to shift the blame to someone else. This time it's the billionaires. Other times it has been corporations. People never take responsibility for their own lives.
Without billionaires the oil lobby wouldn't exist
Without the oil and motor lobby, normal people wouldn't drive a car every day.
Then let's pressurize them and sequester them in a cave under the New Mexico scrubland.
I'd argue industry is the primary culprit, but they ain't wrong that billionaires emit a massive amount of CO2 more that the average Joe/Jane
Who controls industry?
Ok yes, but my point is that the vast majority of pollution is happening in the execution of commerce, primarily shipping/transport, than is an individual or collective billionaire's leisure activities. Perhaps I just took the caption in a different light.
Billionaires and consumers worked together to burn all that oil. That's why we need to eat the rich AND ban cars.
Industry wouldn't be making anything if people weren't buying the goods and services they produce.
If you buy a huge firework that you use at a gender reveal party, who gets assigned the CO2 from the entire production pipeline of the item you bought? Is it the company that made the firework? Is it the company that dug up the raw materials that were refined to make the contents of the firework? Or is it you because you bought the firework? I'd say it should be you.
There are exceptions to this. For example, during COVID some of the airlines were flying empty planes around because they had deals with airports that to keep their slots in the system they had to be using them. In that case the company was polluting but no consumer was directly to blame. But, those are rare. And, you could argue that anybody who bought a flight on those airlines after that ended up paying them back for doing that and thus shares responsibility for it.
I think it should be counted an extra time for every entity involved. Everyone gets the blame. Everyone did bad stuff.