Text version

Method

No one measures how much carbon dioxide an individual emits. Every figure about the emissions of the richest is a calculation, and the answer depends on what you decide to count. Here are the choices, and how we chose the figures.

Three ways to count the same tonne

Where it is emitted. A country’s official emissions are what comes out of chimneys and exhaust pipes within its borders. That is how countries report to the UN. It says nothing about who bought what was made.

Whoever consumes. Consumption-based emissions count everything emitted to make and transport what we buy, wherever in the world that happens, and subtract what we make for others. That is how most researchers count when they divide emissions between income groups.

Whoever owns. A third way puts a company’s emissions on its owners, by ownership share. Someone who owns a large part of a polluting company then gets a far larger footprint than anyone can get through their own consumption.

All three are defensible, but they count the same tonne more than once: the tonne emitted when a car is made belongs to the factory’s country, to the person who buys the car and to the factory’s owner. That is why they cannot be added together, and why one person’s ownership emissions cannot be compared with another person’s consumption emissions as if they were the same thing. That is why we keep them apart.

How an income group’s emissions are calculated

The starting point is a country’s total consumption emissions. They are then divided between income groups with an assumption about how emissions grow with income. That assumption decides almost everything: if emissions are assumed to grow almost in step with income, the richest get a large share; if they are assumed to grow more slowly, the differences shrink. For the very richest, a thousandth of the population, there are rarely any measurements at all. There the figures are an extension of the model, not observations.

How we choose figures

The content rests on research and official statistics. Where several research groups have estimated the same thing, we show the range, not just one figure. Many figures about the emissions of the richest are spread by organisations with a position, such as aid organisations and think tanks. We started with the most quoted, Oxfam’s among them, read the reports and their methodology notes and followed each footnote to the study or dataset behind it. Only what holds is here, with the study or the statistics as its source. Where we have only seen a figure in a summary, we mark the source as second-hand.

The same standard applies whichever side a figure helps. No individual is singled out, even where a source does so.

Languages

The site was written in Swedish and translated into English without changing a figure. Sources in Swedish say so beside the link.

Every stop, step and fact is in the text version, and every source in the list of sources.