Text version
Everything as text
The same stops, steps and facts as in the experience, with the sources under each passage.
1. Sweden: Who emits most here?
Everything we buy causes emissions, here and in the countries where things are made. How are they shared between Swedes with different incomes?
Question: A person in Sweden’s richest 0.1%, one in about 10,000. How many times more carbon dioxide do they cause per year than a person in the poorer half? Answer: About 45 times, according to the model: 198 tonnes against 4.4. But no one has measured what the richest buy. The figure is their share of income converted into carbon dioxide, and it has swung between 130 and 290 tonnes since 1990.
The higher the income, the taller the stack.
Each cube is one tonne of carbon dioxide caused by one person’s consumption in a year. The poorest tenth are at just over 3 tonnes, the middle at 7 and the richest tenth at 15. On the far right stands the richest 0.1%, with almost 200 tonnes each. The figures come from the Stockholm Environment Institute and rest on the assumption that emissions follow income. Studies of what households actually buy give a flatter staircase, but it slopes the same way.
Everyone stands above the line.
The blue line shows what every person on Earth could emit in 2030 if the room left for 1.5 °C of warming were shared equally: just under 3 tonnes of carbon dioxide. Every Swedish group is above the line, even the poorest tenth.
Some of it no one can opt out of.
About 40% of Swedes’ consumption emissions do not come from what households buy in shops. They come from public consumption, such as hospitals and schools (9%), and from investment in roads, buildings and machinery (29%). Shared equally, that is just under 3 tonnes of greenhouse gases per person per year, about three quarters of everyone’s equal share counted in greenhouse gases. Some of the investment is new housing that households choose themselves, but most of it is decided by companies, municipalities and the state.
The top moves with the stock market.
In the same model the figure for the richest 0.1% has swung widely: 291 tonnes in 2006, 175 tonnes in 2009, 128 tonnes in 2016 and 207 tonnes in 2021. That is not because the richest change their habits from year to year, but because the model recalculates their share of income, and that follows the stock market. Per person, the poorer half’s emissions have fallen by 44% since 1990, while those of the richest 1% have risen by 1%.
Good to know
Counting everything consumed in Sweden, including by hospitals, schools and road building, each Swede caused on average about 7.5 tonnes of greenhouse gases in 2024. That is about 26% less per person than in 2008.
2. The world: Half of all emissions
Imagine the world’s population as a hundred people, lined up by income. How are the world’s emissions shared between them?
Question: What share of the world’s emissions does the richest tenth of the world’s population cause? Answer: About half. Four independent estimates land at 45–52%. The poorest half, nearly four billion people, account for about a tenth.
Ten figures, almost half the cubes.
The ten figures on the far right are the world’s richest tenth. The stack above them is their share of emissions: 48%. Above the fifty teal figures on the left, the poorer half, stands 11.5%. The figures come from the economist Lucas Chancel and refer to 2019. Other researchers get 45–52% for the top and 8–12% for the poorer half.
One figure, one sixth.
The orange figure on the far right is the world’s richest 1%, about 77 million people. It accounts for about 17% of emissions, more than the whole poorer half. How much more depends on the model: in Chancel’s estimate about one and a half times as much, in SEI’s as much as two thirds of humanity.
Where does a Swede stand?
By the income measure in these estimates, about two in three Swedes belong to the world’s richest tenth, and all Swedes to the richest fifth. But Swedes emit less than others in the same income group. An ordinary Swede is at around 6 tonnes of carbon dioxide, a quarter of the group’s average, largely thanks to fossil-free electricity. Rank people by emissions instead of income, and about one in three Swedes is among the world’s top 10% of emitters.
Nature, land and water.
The same pattern holds for other environmental harm, but more weakly. In a study in Nature, the tenth of the world with the highest consumption causes 43% of carbon dioxide emissions, 37% of biodiversity loss, 26% of nitrogen emissions, 23% of land use and 18.5% of water withdrawal. Food and land are also needed to live, so they are shared more evenly than luxury.
Good to know
If you have about SEK 17,000 a month to live on after tax, counted per person in the household, you are among the world’s richest tenth. For a family of four that is about SEK 68,000 together. The world’s richest 1% starts at about SEK 51,000 a month per person. In 2023 prices.
In 2024, 46% of the world’s population, about 3.8 billion people, lived on less than 8.30 dollars a day in purchasing power. About 1 in 10 lived in extreme poverty, on under 3 dollars a day (2022).
3. The heat: Warming and harm
Emissions are only the first link. How much warmer have they made the Earth, and what does that cost in human lives? Here the figures become both more certain and less certain.
Question: The Earth warmed by about 0.6 °C between 1990 and 2020. How much of that can be linked to the world’s richest 1%? Answer: About a fifth: 0.12 of 0.61 °C, with an uncertainty range of 0.09–0.17 °C. It is one of the most solid figures about the richest. It has been peer-reviewed, and two different datasets give the same answer.
Per person: 20 times the average.
The stacks show how much a person in each group contributed to warming in 1990–2020, compared with an average person: the richest tenth 6.5 times, the richest 1% 20 times and the richest 0.1% 77 times. The study counts emissions both from what people buy and from their investments.
More extremely hot months.
The same study looks at heat extremes that used to come once in a hundred years. The richest 1% have contributed 26 times more than the average to making them more frequent. The study covers heat, and drought in the Amazon, not storms or floods.
The same tonnes, different death tolls.
A study in Nature Communications calculates how many extra deaths from changed temperatures up to 2100 an emission can be expected to cause. The answer depends on how warm the world gets: 226 per million tonnes if the Earth warms by 4.1 °C, 107 if it stops at 2.4 °C. The uncertainty is large, and the range includes zero. In the model most of the deaths come late in the century.
What has already happened.
For 2023, researchers estimate that just under 180,000 deaths worldwide can be linked to heatwaves, and that just over half of them would not have happened without climate change. That too is a model estimate, not a count of the dead. The models point the same way: most deaths from warming occur in hot, poor countries, while cold, rich countries see fewer cold-related deaths.
Good to know
The World Bank estimates that climate change could push between 32 and 132 million people into extreme poverty by 2030. The range depends on how the world economy and the climate develop.
In the summer of 2022 an estimated 62,000 people in Europe died from the heat, with an uncertainty range of 38,000–87,000. It is a model estimate, not a count of the dead.
4. Flying: One trip, one year
Private jets are the luxury consumption that is easiest to measure: every flight shows up in flight-tracking data. How much does a single departure weigh?
Question: A private jet takes off from Sweden. How many tonnes of carbon dioxide does an average departure emit? Answer: Around 4 tonnes: on average 4.2 tonnes per departure from Sweden in 2022. That is almost as much as a low-income Swede causes in a whole year.
One trip, almost a year.
The middle stack is an average private flight from Sweden in 2022: 4.2 tonnes of carbon dioxide. On the left is a Swede in the poorer half over a whole year, on the right an average Swede over a whole year. That year 10,285 private flights took off from Sweden. About a third of them were air ambulances.
Four million flights.
In 2023 there were 4.3 million private jet flights worldwide. They emitted 15.6 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, 46% more than in 2019. Almost half were shorter than 500 km, distances where a train or a car often works. The high-altitude effect is not included, so the real climate impact is larger.
Good to know
Only about 11% of the world’s population flew at all in 2018, and at most 4% flew internationally. The one per cent of people who fly most probably account for more than half of the emissions from passenger flights.
A single person who flies a lot by private jet can cause up to 7,500 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year. That is more than a thousand times as much as an average Swede.
5. Ownership: Two ways of counting
So far we have counted emissions by what people buy. They can also be counted by who owns the companies that emit them. Then the top looks completely different.
Question: If each company’s emissions are put on the people who own it, how much larger does the richest 1%’s share become than the poorest half’s, per person? Answer: Several hundred times: about 165 tonnes per person per year against 0.2 tonnes. The poorest half of the world’s population own almost no companies.
Whoever owns, carries the count.
Here each company’s emissions are put on its owners according to how much of it they own. If you own one per cent of a company, you get one per cent of its emissions. The method is established and used by companies and banks. Counted this way, the world’s richest 1% by wealth account for about 165 tonnes per person per year, and the poorest half for 0.2 tonnes.
The same tonne, twice.
A ship carrying cars emits carbon dioxide. In the ownership count, that tonne lands with the shipping company’s owners. In the consumption count, the same tonne lands with the people who buy the cars. Both counts are reasonable, and each adds up to the world’s total emissions on its own. But they cannot be added together, and a billionaire’s ownership emissions cannot be compared with an ordinary person’s consumption as if they were the same thing.
Whoever owns decides.
The argument for the ownership count is power. Someone who owns a large part of a company can influence what it invests in. A consumer can stop buying a product, but a major owner can close a factory or build a new one. The two counts therefore answer different questions: who uses the emissions, and who decides over them.
Good to know
If an owner sells their shares in a shipping company, the ships keep sailing. In ownership accounting the emissions simply move to the buyer. What reduces emissions is what the company does, and owners can influence that.
6. Wealth: The 46 and the rest
Sweden has some 40 dollar billionaires. How many ordinary Swedes’ fortunes does it take to match theirs?
Question: Sweden’s 46 richest people: how large a share of the population owns as much as they do, put together? Answer: More than half, however you count: between six and eight in ten Swedes. Exactly how many depends on how debts are counted.
Eight in ten, if debts count.
If wealth is counted as assets minus debts, more than a third of Swedes have less than nothing in the data, for example young people with student loans and new mortgages. Then the 46 own more than the poorest 77% put together, the teal figures.
Just over six in ten without them.
If everything below zero is set to zero, it comes to about 65%. How debts are counted thus moves the figure by just over twelve percentage points, about 1.2 million people.
Six in ten with the latest measurements.
Sweden has had no wealth register since 2007, so today’s distribution is an estimate. With the 2007 distribution and without negative wealth, the 46 own as much as about 60% of the population. In every version it is more than half.
Inherited or built?
When researchers went through the 2014 Forbes list, 63% of the Swedish dollar billionaires had inherited their wealth, against 29% in the US. The measure is broad: someone who took over a family firm counts as an heir even if they made it grow.
Meanwhile, at the bottom.
In 2025, 729,000 Swedes could not afford at least 5 of 13 ordinary things, such as replacing worn-out clothes or paying an unexpected bill. Statistics Sweden calls this material and social deprivation. The number has roughly doubled since 2021.
Good to know
The richest tenth own about two thirds of all wealth in Sweden: 68% in 2024 according to the World Inequality Database. It is an estimate. When wealth was last registered, in 2007, the share was 61%.
7. Power: Who sways the decisions?
Money can become power in many ways: through gifts to parties, through lobbying and through owning companies. What can be measured in Sweden?
Question: In the 2022 election year, the Swedish parties, local branches included, had an income of SEK 1.8 billion. How much of it came from large gifts from individuals? Answer: Under 1%: SEK 11.9 million of 1,812 million. Many of the gifts were, moreover, politicians paying part of their salary to the party. About half of the money came from public party funding.
Parties here are not bought with gifts.
The first stack is public party funding, about half of the parties’ income. The small orange cube on the far right is all large gifts from individuals in the 2022 election year put together. In 2024 and 2025 too they were at 1–2%. But the data, which parties report to the state agency Kammarkollegiet, cover only the parties themselves, not think tanks, campaigns or lobbying.
A small but persistent edge.
When researchers compared about 3,000 policy proposals in 30 European countries, Sweden included, decisions matched what the richest fifth wanted in 57% of cases and what the poorest fifth wanted in 54%. The difference is small but found almost everywhere. In Swedish data from 1960–2012, changes mainly followed what people with high incomes wanted, and the skew was smaller under left-wing governments. No study has measured this specifically for Swedish climate policy.
Ten times more.
The UN climate panel, the IPCC, finds that the ability of established industries to influence governments has slowed climate policy, and that organised counter-movements have spread misinformation about climate science, particularly in the US. There, more than 2 billion dollars was spent on lobbying over climate legislation in Congress in 2000–2016. Fossil fuel, transport and utility companies spent about ten times more than the environmental movement and renewable energy.
Whoever owns, votes.
Among Swedish households, share ownership is concentrated: the 5% with the largest share holdings own 65% of households’ shares. With A and B shares (dual-class shares), someone who owns about 9% of a company’s capital can hold more than half of the votes. A few owners can therefore decide what large companies invest in, and that is a bigger climate lever than anyone’s private jet.
Good to know
Almost every member of the Riksdag meets people who want to influence decisions. Of those who answered a survey, 79% were in contact with business or employer organisations at least once a month, and 61% with trade unions. Only about four in ten members answered.
8. The levers: Who can change it?
Emissions are shaped by what we buy, by what company owners invest in and by what politicians decide. How big are the levers, counted in tonnes?
Question: In 2024 the requirement to blend biofuel into diesel and petrol was lowered. How much did Sweden’s emissions rise that year? Answer: About 7%, from 44.8 to 48.1 million tonnes. It was the largest increase since 2010. The Swedish Environmental Protection Agency names the lowered reduction obligation (reduktionsplikten, the biofuel blending mandate) as the main cause. The government had itself expected about 3.9 million tonnes more from transport and off-road machinery, and that is almost exactly what happened.
One decision, almost four million tonnes.
The stack is the increase from transport and off-road machinery in 2024: 3.9 million tonnes, one cube per 100,000 tonnes. It was a single decision, and the government knew roughly how much it would add. When the requirement was raised again in July 2025, emissions fell by 1.3 million tonnes, mainly for that reason according to the Environmental Protection Agency’s preliminary figures. The lever works both ways: the carbon tax on fuel since 1991 has cut transport emissions by about 11%. The Swedish Climate Policy Council estimates that over the government’s term Sweden went from meeting its EU commitment for 2030 with a good margin to falling short.
Who profits from cheaper diesel?
According to the government’s own analysis, the relative gain from a lower reduction obligation was greatest for low-income earners with a car, and companies buy 73% of the diesel. The National Institute of Economic Research found that fuel use rises with income. The group that gains most, low-income earners with a diesel car outside the cities, is about 3% of households.
What one person can do.
Living without a car cuts a person’s emissions by about 2 tonnes a year, on average across the studies that have been done. That is a lot for one person. The blue stack is 100,000 car-free Swedes. To offset the 2024 increase, close to two million Swedes would have to stop driving. It is a worked example, but it shows the order of magnitude: most emissions are decided by how society is built.
Large per person, small in total.
All private flights that took off from Sweden in 2022 emitted about 43,000 tonnes, just under half a cube here. Worldwide, too, private aviation is small in total: 15.6 million tonnes, just under 2% of the emissions of commercial aviation. The government expects the scrapped aviation tax to add about 0.2 million tonnes a year to 2030, and says it mainly benefits people with higher incomes. The big levers of the richest are therefore others: what they own, and the influence they have.
What would a tax on the richest raise?
According to a research report to the G20, billionaires pay personal taxes equivalent to about 0.3% of their wealth a year on average, not counting corporate tax. A floor of 2% would raise about 200–250 billion dollars a year worldwide. The rich do move when taxes rise, but the effect is small: Swedish and Danish research shows about 2% fewer wealthy taxpayers per percentage point of higher tax. In Norway, at most about 100 people left the country after the tax rises of 2021–2024.
What Swedes think.
In the 2025 SOM survey (the University of Gothenburg’s annual survey of Swedish opinion), 59% thought a higher tax on luxury consumption was a good proposal, and 21% that it was a bad one. A wealth tax with the money going to the climate had 44% for and 30% against. Support for the wealth tax falls as income rises.
Good to know
The Swedish Climate Policy Council calculates that the decisions of this term of office mean Sweden will emit about 40 million tonnes more up to 2045. That is about one year’s emissions.
When the electric car bonus was removed in November 2022, private leasing of new electric cars fell by about 60%. Leasing was the way many lower-income households got an electric car.
Between 2010 and 2019 solar power became about 85% cheaper, wind power 55% and batteries 85%. According to the UN climate panel, the IPCC, public research and public support helped the technology grow.