Oxfam used to be a worthy charity through which donors in wealthy countries could help fund famine relief in developing countries over-run by natural disasters. That was before it evolved into a left-wing pressure group sandwiched somewhere between Extinction Rebellion and Black Lives Matter. It’s latest report, Climate Equality: a Planet for the 99 per cent, is a real eye-opener.
The chief claim in the report is that the richest 1 per cent of the global population are responsible for as many carbon emissions as the poorest 66 per cent. This sounds very dramatic until you read the small print and realise that both groups are responsible for 16 per cent of global emissions each. The remaining 68 per cent of emissions are produced by people who nestle between the 67th and 99th percentile on the global scale of wealth.
The only solution Oxfam seems to be proposing is wealth taxes to take away the private jets
But never mind, it is the 1 per cent who have attracted Oxfam’s ire. In a foreword, Greta Thunberg writes: ‘They have stolen our planet’s resources to fuel their lavish lifestyles… they are sacrificing us at the altar of their greed.’
And it is not just any old billionaires who are to blame – it is white, male ones. According to a second foreword penned by Njoki Njehu, described as a Nigerian feminist activist, ‘young people and future generations will face the worst consequences of any failure to tackle while white, male billionaires are the big winners’. What about African dictators who have impoverished their countries while flying around the world on their own private jets – don’t they have carbon footprints too?
The report obsesses about private yachts and jets, but sadly being in the top one per cent of wealthy individuals won’t quite afford you those luxuries. Just try running a private jet on an annual income of $140,000 (£112,000) – which an appendix claims is the threshold for qualifying for the top one percent of global ‘super rich’.
The report is riven with bizarre assertions such as there is ‘no such thing as a natural disaster’ – which presumably means even the meteorite which wiped out the dinosaurs can be blamed on Bill Gates – and what appear to be blatantly untrue claims about the climate. It states, for example, that ‘chronically lower crop yields’ have ‘already become a reality’. In its methodology Oxfam refers to a number of theoretical modelling studies. Yet real world data published by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation shows crop yields increasing strongly over the past decade, as they had for the preceding 50 years.
But there is one claim in particular which can’t be left unchallenged: that ‘the emissions of the super-rich 1 per cent in 2019 are enough to cause 1.3 million deaths due to heat’. Oxfam says it has calculated this from a concept called the ‘social cost of carbon’ used by the United States Environmental Protection Agency. This measure attempts to link predictions of increased deaths from high temperatures over the course of the 21st century with quantities of released carbon, for the purpose of cost-benefit analyses.
What Oxfam doesn’t tell you, needless to say, is that deaths due to high temperatures are only one side of the ledger: as the world warms, fewer people are dying from extreme cold temperatures. A more dispassionate analysis was provided in a study by Monash University, Australia, in 2021 which found that nine tenths of deaths from extreme temperatures around the world are caused by extreme cold rather than extreme heat – something that is true even in Africa. Moreover, while there is a slight upwards trend in deaths from extreme heat, there is a more pronounced downwards trend in deaths from extreme cold. In other words you could – if you were really minded to – argue that the world’s white, male billionaires are helping to save lives every time they take to the skies in their private jets.
I know that the super-rich can be dreadful hypocrites, turning up to Davos in their private jets to lecture us on climate change. But do they really deserve to be accused of trying to lock humanity into the continued use of fossil fuels and trying to ‘promote and support overconsumption and a carbon-based economy’.
Surely there are at least some billionaires, like Bill Gates and Elon Musk, whom Oxfam might just credit with investing in efforts to try to reduce emissions. By contrast, the only solution Oxfam seems to be proposing through this report is wealth taxes to take away the private jets.
It would be interesting to see a breakdown of Oxfam’s donors. Might some of them possibly be among the world’s wealthy? They might be a little less inclined to donate once they read what can best be described as a diatribe against white, male billionaires (or rather anyone earning more than £112,000 a year). The charity has already lost funding from the UK government among others following the scandal of its aid workers involved in sexual exploitation in Haiti. It might soon find itself singing for its supper.
Comments