Richest people in UK ‘use more energy flying’ than poorest do overall

29 comments
  1. >Car journeys and flights taken by the richest British people – especially “white, wealthy middle-aged men” – used more energy that year than 60% of the population got through in total.

  2. It seems like no surprise,
    It’s 4 litres per 100km per passenger, so a 10,000km flight is 400 litres, or 10 full tanks in a small car, which for me is ~20 weeks fuel and a lot of that driving has a passenger.

    Personally, i last went on a plane in 2008 – don’t want to be lectured by electric car owners who also go on numerous flights.

  3. Always frustrating when these articles don’t give an example of the £ salary this reflects.

    It’s quite likely it’s lower than people think.

  4. We know

    Maybe people should be shaming those people when they boast about flying somewhere on what is clearly a private jet

    Meanwhile we are being told that we need to pony up for a 30 grand heat pump and a 40 grand electric car or we’ll be green-shamed

  5. Just a reminder that globally aviation only accounts for 2% of all greenhouse gas emissions. Important to put things into perspective.

    The way some of these headlines are written you’d think it was more like 50%…

  6. What a Tory might say:

    The richest will make more for the economy by flying than the poorest do overall and the richest donate far more to the party than the poorest ever will.

  7. In other news, water is wet.

    I mean it’s kind of obvious that the wealthiest who won private jets, mega yachts, own multiple homes, multiple cars including fuel inefficient ones…

    With all these assets… Produce multiple times what poor people do.

    The fix is rather obvious too, tax private jets in a way that is proportional to their damage.

    Not sure what race, sex or age has to do with this, it’s clear a 65 year old Asian woman could be in this category or a Brazilian footballer in his 20s. It would be nice if wealth disparities stopped getting conflated with identity politics.

    Clearly Dave down the pub who bikes to work at Asda and hasn’t been on holiday abroad in 10 years isn’t part of the problem.

  8. Surely the point of capitalism is to allocated limited resources. Seems fair that emissions are allocated to those that can afford it…

  9. I thought individual carbon footprint was just a scam dreamt up by fossil fuel companies to prevent structural change?

    Anyway, the top 100 companies in the world produce like 90 percent of the worlds CO2 so why should I make changes.

    I am very smart.

  10. So a person that can afford to fly lots and lots and lots uses more energy than a person that can’t fly at all and is possibly choosing between heat or food.

    #fat&freezing.

  11. I dont know the science, but Ive always presumed that a life time of me recycling wouldnt even offset a single transatlantic flight, yet cost me probable days of combined time sorting and checking and dismantling packaging to recycle it properly. But of course we get fined and punished and guilt tripped for not recycling properly while billionaires are taking 5 minute private jet flights

  12. We need to copy what France has done and restrict domestic flights on private jets or outright ban it. No need for these rich people to burn all that oil hopping around the country on short flights

  13. The fact is the populations of the US, Canada, Europe, Australia, NZ, Japan and a few others, and the top 5% in most other countries cause 80% of global warming, if not directly then also as part of our consumer society. Of these the richest 10% in all societies but mostly those above cause between 40-50% of the total.

  14. Our boiler died tonight, engineer can’t come out til tomorrow morning so we spent a good hour driving around trying to get an electric heater just to get us and the pets through the night. My Mrs expressed some concern about the environmental impact of all this unnecessary driving but we spent a bare fraction of the CO2 trying to keep warm that a rich person would spend flying abroad.

    And we never even found a heater.

  15. No… It’s almost as if a top heavy system which favours maximum resources to a few to the cost of the planet is a shit system.

  16. On the topic of flying, I costs me less to fly home than to take the train, and that’s using a rail card.

  17. The war on commercial flights is an attack on the working class like most things. I think you’ll find private jets are a far bigger culprit.

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