The World’s Richest 1% Used Their Annual Carbon Budget in Just 10 Days

The climate collapse is not a shared responsibility. It has names, figures, and clear culprits.

According to Climate Plunder (2025), a report by Oxfam based on data from the Stockholm Environment Institute, the richest 1% of the global population consumed their entire annual carbon budget in less than ten days.

Translated into everyday terms: a superyacht or a private jet emits in a single week what a working person produces over an entire lifetime. The report—Climate Plunder: How a Powerful Few Are Driving the World Toward Disaster—exposes an environmental inequality as brutal as it is deadly.

The “safe” emissions threshold to keep global warming below 1.5°C is calculated by accounting for more than 8 billion people. Yet while most of humanity maintains a relatively small footprint, elites sustain lifestyles and investments that shatter any notion of sustainability.

The consequences are stark: emissions from this group alone are expected to cause 1.3 million heat-related deaths before the end of the 21st century, along with €44 trillion in accumulated economic losses in the world’s poorest countries by 2050. Climate change does not only heat the planet—it deepens injustice.Source: Stockholm Environment Institute / Oxfam