UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak travelled to the COP28 Climate Conference by private jet.
‘Members of a super-rich elite who are super-heating the planet.’
As the 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP28) got underway in Dubai on November 30, the Prime Minister is facing fresh outrage from climate campaigners over his choice of transport to the meeting – private jet.
Downing Street confirmed that as well as Sunak, the new foreign secretary, David Cameron, and the King, were all taking separate private jets to a conference aimed at tackling climate change and cutting global emissions.
Defending the decision, the PM’s official spokesperson claimed there was nothing wrong with the UK’s leading representatives travelling to the crucial climate summit this way, as the government is ‘not anti-flying.’
“We are not anti-flying. We do not seek to restrict the public from doing so and it’s important the UK has strong attendance at COP28, given we continue to be a world leader in tackling climate change,” said the spokesperson.
No 10. also insisted that the plane Rishi Sunak was using operates on 30 percent sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), and carbon offsetting will be used to minimise its impact on the environment.
The announcement was not received well among climate campaigners and opposition parties.
Carla Denyer, co-leader of the Green Party, described Sunak and Cameron as members of a “super-rich elite who are super-heating the planet.”
“A short trip on a private jet will produce more carbon than the average person emits all year,” she continued.
Caroline Lucas said the “excessive climate-wrecking private flights amount to pumping jet fumes in the face of those on the frontline of this crisis.” The Green MP is also in support of a new levy on private jets to “make them think twice before hopping on the next one.”
As the COP28 climate talks begin today in Dubai, the Green Party has set out three key demands. They are to ‘keep 1.5 alive’; an agreement on the fair and managed phase-out of all fossil fuels; and measures to address ‘climate inequality.’ Greens are challenging the UK government to lead by example and put into practice policies that will help meet these demands.
Image of the Green Party’s Carla Denyer on BBC Question Time.
Co-leader of the Green Party, Carla Denyer, said:
“We need to hear a clear unambiguous commitment from the UK government to the 1.5C Paris Agreement target which was signed up to by 196 countries eight years ago at COP21. The government must agree to whatever it takes to get this target back on track. It’s going to require a hugely ambitious strategy, but the massive scaling up of climate action that is now necessary is because of dither and delay by countries like the UK in taking the bold action needed.
“Another vital outcome of COP28 must be the fair and managed phase-out of all fossil fuels. As one of the rich countries most responsible for the climate crisis, the UK must stand on the side of future generations and those on the front line of climate breakdown and agree to urgently move away from fossil fuels. The UK government must resist pressure from the petrostates and others at COP who wish to continue with business as usual and keep the world hooked on fossil fuels. At home this means leading by example with an immediate end to all new oil and gas licences and a rapid acceleration towards renewable energy.
“Thirdly, these climate talks must recognise that it is a super-rich elite who are super-heating the planet. The UK government must be willing to challenge the grotesque inequality driving climate breakdown and reform our tax system to make the polluter pay. This means taxing the wealth of the super-rich and introducing a carbon tax on the most polluting corporations and individuals. Such taxes, introduced globally, could generate the funds needed for a generous new Loss and Damage Fund to finance climate action in the poorest countries – those suffering the most from the impacts of climate breakdown but contributing the least to the crisis.”
Image of the Green Party’s Carla Denyer on BBC Question Time.
Co-leader of the Green Party, Carla Denyer, said:
“As the COP28 climate conference gets under way this week, governments can no longer ignore the very large elephant in the room – that it is a super-rich elite who are super-heating the planet.
“Private jets are the favoured form of transport by this super-rich elite and are the ultimate symbol of the ‘climate inequality’ that is not only leading to the breakdown of our climate but is also deeply unfair. A short trip on a private jet will produce more carbon than the average person emits all year.
“The Green Party wants the UK government to challenge the grotesque inequality driving climate breakdown. By pledging to impose a ban on all private jets taking off or landing at UK airports, the government would send a clear message to global leaders at COP28 that the super-rich cannot be allowed to continue with their lavish and destructive lifestyles at the expense of the rest of the global population.
“While the richest can use their vast wealth to cocoon themselves, the poorest have nowhere to hide from the impacts of climate chaos. COP28 needs to ensure those with the greatest responsibility for the climate crisis end their destructive ways. And we must redistribute the price paid by the heaviest polluters towards helping those on the front line of climate breakdown and to hasten the transition to a fairer, greener world.”
An Electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing (eVTOL) aircraft developed by Joby Aviation Inc. is seen outside the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) during the company’s initial public offering on August 11, 2021, in New York. (Photo: Liao Pan/China News Service via Getty Images)
The Future Can Do Better Than Air Taxis for the Super Rich
Just imagine if all the investments and expertise going into turning our skies into air-taxi lanes for the richest among us were instead going into air-speed services that actually meet real public needs.
Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane, it’s… Wall Street’s electric air-taxi future!
Earlier this month, a flying machine from the California-based Joby Aviation became the first “electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft—“eVTOL”—to go airborne from the Downtown Heliport that services Lower Manhattan’s financial district.
Joby is now expecting, by sometime in 2025, to be regularly ferrying high finance’s finest from Wall Street to JFK Airport in a mere seven minutes. Mere mortals taking autos and subways routinely spend well over an hour making the same trip.
We must not let ourselves treat climate and inequality as “separate issues,” environmental activist Greta Thunberg adds in her foreword to Oxfam’s latest appraisal of our world’s environmental and economic crises.
Joby’s new one-pilot, four-passenger eVTOL figures to be only the first of many corporate efforts to speed New York’s deepest pockets on their electric way to destinations both lucrative and exotic. A host of corporations—from China’s eHang to Germany’s Volocopter—already have big plans underway for zipping the world’s richest up and over congested city streets.
But just imagine if all the investments and expertise going into turning our skies into air-taxi lanes for the richest among us were instead going into air-speed services that actually meet real public needs. Imagine air taxis, for instance, ferrying critically injured rural residents to distant emergency care.
Those sorts of efforts will have to wait. The vast wealth of our wealthiest is instead bending innovation and expertise to servicing the already rich. And that bending, new research out of Oxfam details, is keeping our planet’s richest entertained at a vast environmental cost.
The world’s wealthiest 1%, Oxfam’s latest research reveals, are now generating more carbon emissions than all the world’s poorest 66% combined. The carbon emissions from this 1% will—between 2020 and 2030—“cause 1.3 million heat-related deaths” worldwide.
The world’s bottom 99%, Oxfam adds, would have to consume away for 1,500 years to match the carbon output that billionaires now produce in a single year.
But, even so, the political impact of the super rich actually outpaces the impact of their personal energy consumption. Only our richest “have the wealth, power, and influence to protect themselves.” And that same “wealth, power, and influence,” the new Oxfam study lays out, is keeping governments worldwide doing no more than “incentivizing incremental change” in energy policy instead of phasing out fossil fuels and investing massively in renewable energy.
We must not let ourselves treat climate and inequality as “separate issues,” environmental activist Greta Thunberg adds in her foreword to Oxfam’s latest appraisal of our world’s environmental and economic crises.
“Either we safeguard living conditions for all future generations,” she relates, “or we let a few very rich people maintain their destructive lifestyles and preserve an economic system geared towards short-term economic growth and shareholder profit.”
The “twin crises of climate and inequality,” Oxfam’s Climate Equality: A planet for the 99% report goes on to spell out, are “driving one another”—and only “a radical new approach” stands any chance of “overcoming the catastrophe unfolding before us.”
That “radical new approach” must take on “the disproportionate role that the richest individuals play in the climate crisis through their emissions, investments, and capture of politics.”
How can we best realize this badly needed “new approach”? We would need, argues Oxfam, to start aggressively taxing our super rich and the corporations that fuel their fortunes “to help pay for the transition to renewable energy.”
Just one example: Some 45 major oil and gas corporations averaged annual windfall profits of $237 billion in 2021 and 2022, dollars that overwhelmingly funneled straight into rich shareholder pockets. Governments worldwide, Oxfam notes, could have increased global investments in renewable energy by 31% had they taxed this windfall profit at 90%.
The new Oxfam study surveys a wide range of other options the world’s nations could pursue to subject the rich to serious taxation. Govrnments could, for instance, levy “steep and progressive” tax increases on the incomes of the ultra rich—as well as on their property, land, and inheritances. They could raise taxes on corporate profits, fossil fuels, and financial transactions—or levy entirely new taxes on “high-emitting luxury travel.”
The world, in other words, could have plenty of money for social and climate spending “if rich-country governments were willing to implement bold and progressive tax reforms.”
“We cannot allow the richest countries to claim that they cannot afford to raise the trillions needed,” Oxfam ends up concluding. “Mobilizing this money simply takes political will.”
Tesla CEO Elon Musk boards his private jet before departing from Beijing Capital International Airport on May 31, 2023.
Who are the polluter elite and why do they matter?
The richest 1% of people are responsible for as much carbon output as the poorest 66%, research from Oxfam shows. Luxury lifestyles including frequent flying, driving large cars, owning many houses, and a rich diet, are among the reasons for the huge imbalance.
Jason Hickel, an economist, argues: “We have to think about the rich in terms of how much they are depleting the remaining carbon budget. Right now, millionaires alone are on track to burn 72% of the remaining carbon budget for 1.5C. The purchasing power of the very rich needs to be curtailed. We are devoting huge amounts of energy to facilitate the excess consumption of the ruling class – in the midst of a climate emergency, that is totally irrational.”
The problem goes far beyond the greenhouse gas emissions arising from these lifestyles, substantial though they are. The polluting elite have an outsized influence on the climate in many ways. Hickel notes: “While personal consumption-related emissions are important, what matters most is control over investible assets. When we account for investments in polluting industries, we find that each billionaire is responsible for a million times more emissions than the average person in the bottom 90%. Who is making the decisions about investment and production in the world economy? About energy systems? When it comes to the question of responsibility, that’s what we need to be focusing on.”
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It is simply impossible to have a polluting elite and a livable climate, argues Farhana Sultana, professor at Syracuse University and fellow at the International Centre for Climate Change and Development in Bangladesh. Along with many developing country economists, she regards the high emissions of rich people in industrialised countries in terms of colonialism. “Carbon inequality is effectively a colonisation of the atmosphere by the capitalist elite of the planet through hyper-consumption and pollution, while the cost of that climate coloniality is borne disproportionately by the marginalised and vulnerable communities in developing countries.”
The culture of rich people, and rich countries, built on use and discard cannot continue in a world of finite resources and planetary boundaries. “What the 1% do is overuse the earth’s resources through extraction, hyperconsumption, a discard culture that produces enormous amounts of waste and pollution – all these processes together create significant strains to planetary systems,” she says.
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One of the many occasions climate change denier and UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak uses a private jet.
