Altogether, the worlds billionairessaw their wealth surgeover $1.9 trillion in 2020, according to Forbes.
Those are astronomical numbers, and its hard to get ones head around them without some context.
It’s free, every week, in your inbox.
CC BY-NC-ND
To pick a sample of billionaires, we started with the 2020Forbes Listof 2,095 billionaires.
This excluded most of the superrich inAsia and the Middle East.
We combed 82 databases of public records to document billionaires houses, vehicles, aircraft, and yachts.
We have submitted our paper for peer review but plan to continue adding it to our list.
We then used a wide range of sources, such as theU.S.
For example, we didnt calculate the emissions of Tesla or Amazon when calculating Musks or Bezos footprints.
In other words, these are all likely conservative estimates of how much they emit.
Residents of the U.S., including billionaires,emitted about 15 tons of CO2 per personin 2018.
The global average footprint is smaller, at just about 5 tons per person.
But some produced far more greenhouse gases than others.
Outside of Russia, he is probably best known as theheadline-grabbingowner of Londons Chelsea Football Club.
And he hops the globe on acustom-designed Boeing 767, which boasts a 30-seat dining room.
We estimated his annual footprint at 7,493 metric tons of carbon, mostly from a lot of flying.
He doesnt own a superyacht andsays he doesnt even take vacations.
His estimated footprint from the assets we looked at was 2,084 tons in 2018.
Candidate in Anthropology,Indiana University, is republished fromThe Conversationunder a Creative Commons license.
Also tagged with
