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Cool, now adjust it for the populations that are represented.

Our World in Data is heavily funded by billionaires, generally they're not really trustworthy

Plus this graph is just not that informative, what defines these brackets..?

If you're high income, you can easily use one of your companies to handle the private jet, Lamborghini and 5 residences.

Now it's not your CO2 emissions, it's corporate CO2 emissions.

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Quite a bad graph without any knowledge of how these groups are divided and how these change over the years. There are just less ultra-rich than upper-class.

Poor people and Billionaires agree: Fuck the middle class!

I'm guessing this isn't per capita right?

High income here means like $30k per year.

Ah yes, so we see that the good(rich) people having less CO2-Emissions, but this greedy middle-Class just dosen´t know when to stop... /s

What do you mean by adjust it? How much each group contributes to CO2 emissions if they were represented equally in the population? I think this graph is interesting! But imo. you are right, an adjustment like this would be cool to see as a comparison.

Bill gets gets 12$ income per year to avoid income tax, so income is in heneral not representative for all super rich.

High income on global scale is lower-middle-income in my country. Those guys don’t own companies or Ferraris

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In a sense, the planet does care about the total emission. Also, very low emissions per capita might be a sign of very low economic activity. Of course, if we want to assess "people behaviour" per capita is the right way, but then we should account for different areas in each country

I guess groups composition change over time (e.g. Argentina in the early 1900 or US/India in late 1700.). The purpose of this chart is to give a very aggregate view.

BTW from 1750 to 1840, 99% of high-income share is Britain.

For the ig-nant here, high income means you. "We are the 99% locally but the 1% globally". Widen your perspective.

Uhh... Brought to you by High Income Class!

I hate that the key isn't in order. Data not beautiful.

can OP or anyone who knows please explain how and why this trend is occurring? Specifically I mean the premise that high income emission is plummeting, and middle income is growing quickly? I am going to guess that some of the high income group is faster to get super high efficient houses and appliances, but what about the super fast spending, world travelling, high powered sportscar and yacht owning, large living subset? Also why would middle income be increasing their footprint?

I believe the graph expresses CO2 emissions of each income level as a percentage of the total.

On a global scale it means that more poor people are starting to live in industrialized nations. As opposed to living on a farm without electricity.

It doesn't mean that the rich are producing less CO2. They can be producing more, but a larger part of the total is made by other income levels.

Also, given that the rich can hide their income with tax evading tricks, and that a lot more CO2 is produced by industry than individuals anyway, that whole graph isn't particularly useful.

The issue is that this graph might give a wrong idea..

For example, it shows that now in total upper-middle income people consume more CO2 than upper income ones.. but what does that mean?

If there is just 10 guys in the upper group, and 100k in the upper-middle one, is a very different story than if they are the same size

A few suggestions:

1. Organize your key to be in order of income bracket, not alphabetical.

2. Overlay total CO2 emissions over the same period for context. Or better yet use a different visualization like an animated bar chart over time showing total contribution per population.

3. It’s percent, not per cent.

Also to everyone questioning the validity of the data because it doesn’t fit your world view - go to a different sub. Early Industrial Revolution, the factories covering London and other major cities in pollution were owned by the richest people. As time moves on, CO2 emissions become the Everyman’s contribution via personal vehicles and the like. That’s why total emissions over the same period would add context to this graph.

That said, another possible context could be car ownership or population size within each subgroup over the same period. Or use per capita info as others have suggested. Overall this chart just doesn’t contain enough data to provide any real insights.

The funny part is that you probably classify as a high income class in this graph.. if you are European or American it’s almost guaranteed

It also might just be caused by an increase in the number of high-mid income individuals in the planet

Looking at the years, my first thought driving this is vehicle ownership. In general though I’d guess the relative nature of poverty and the increasing population sizes in the middle brackets worldwide. I really think it’s major problem is not accounting for population size changes or total CO2 output changes.

That’s what it is

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Gobal - (adj.) of, or pertaining to the gob.

Two suggestions:

1. Organize your key to be in order of income bracket, not alphabetical.

2. Overlay total CO2 emissions over the same period for context. (Or better yet use a different visualization like an animated bar chart over time with total contribution per population group.)

3. It’s percent, not per cent.

Also to everyone questioning the validity of the data because it doesn’t fit your world view - go to a different sub. Early Industrial Revolution, the factories covering London and other major cities in pollution were owned by the richest people. As time moves on, CO2 emissions become the Everyman’s contribution via personal vehicles and the like. That’s why total emissions over the same period would add context to this graph.

That said, another possible context could be car ownership per capita.

I thought the most CO2 was emitted by industrial manufacturing, not private citizens.

Does this exclude private jets and helicopters?

Maybe the green is falling because there's less high income earners and they became more middle income earners...I don't know, this graph is missing a lot of information.

This does not mean that the richest produce less co2. Just that the other income groups started producing some too.

This is about countries. People in the comments think it's about people. Bad communication

graph is about countries

It's misleading. The total co2 emissions keep increasing, it's only the share produced by high income that decreases. But in value all income classes keep increasing.

it's about countries

dirty production goes to the poorer countries? and becomes less dirty, while they build up their dirty

graph isn't about classes

als Deutscher bist du einer dieser global Reichen

I agree. There should be a flair called dataisugly for submissions like this.

Solution: All people should have "Low-income".

Oh wait: Then these have 100%.

-> The graph is pretty awful.

Kind of works if the income groups are based on percentiles, but it doesn't say so we don't know if this is behavioural change or just a growing middle class.

The story this graph tells me is that of the increasing ability of income groups other than high-income to generate CO2, rather than a decrease in CO2 generation of high-income people.

But it's all still rather ambiguous.

As overall CO2 emissions have changed so much (and non-linearly) over the graph's timespan, this graph doesn't provide much useful information on its own.

Also, without information on the income divisions themselves (are they quartiles by income or by population, or some other division?), it's difficult to interpret.

So the lower classes never used cooking or heating fires? I don’t think this data is accurate.

I also find it interesting how it basically just villainizes the middle class and praises the high-income group. From what I’ve seen of private jets, yachts, huge houses, lavish vacations and unsustainable lifestyles, this graph just doesn’t ring true to me.

The trick here is that high income people can purchase emission credits by dumping their emissions responsibility onto someone that produces little to no, or even negative emissions, which lowers their responsible emissions.

Many companies do this. In tech, vehicle manufacturing, oil refineries. Hell, even entire countries does this. It doesn't lower the total emissions, just dumps the responsibility for the emissions onto someone that produces very little emissions, which lowers the purchaser's emission responsibility and increases the seller's responsibility. Usually the seller of the credits only buy up so and so much to avoid paying emissions taxes or getting sanctioned and taxed in other ways.

99% of emissions? Because they were the fist to industrialize?

Pretty sure that's the implication.

Yes it seems, but still not very clear...

Britain didn't have 99% of the world wealth/high income people, but produced 99% of it's emissions... So the graph by income is irrelevant?

Were they burning their dollars in the 1900s

Yes, and there were extreme levels of pollution in Britain at the time.

You should add a graph with per capita numbers.

Can we please remix this with the order of the different data series in order?

Show me the private jet income group in this data set.

This needs some sources or definitions, people in income groups produce household / travel CO2 emissions. Industry makes up 60/70% of global emissions so how is that represented in the graph? For example world shipping emissions make up 3% so which income group would that fall into as it’s likely pensions own most of them which is owned by a lot of different people

Chill bro. Here have a drink.

I meant it's about countries.

So basically the average first world countryman is dropping below the average developing countryman?

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Both graphs are necessary to understand the whole problem. The suggested one and this one. A third one with income distribution over the world would aso be good.

The thing that gives a wrong picture is not necessarily the graph itself. It's just context that's missing.

There is one misleading part of the graph though. For Years before at least 1920 there is no clear data on carbon footprint. So this data is speculative and falsely accentuates the change in caron footprint that's happening now.

Das weiß ich. Wird zeit das sich diese Chinesen und Inder ein bisschen zurückhalten in ihrem Konsum /s

Yea also that.. what were rich people doing in the 1750s that caused so much CO2 emissions? I assume back the most emissions were from fires, and fires were not only from rich people

>Both graphs are necessary to understand the whole problem. The suggested one and this one. A third one with income distribution over the world would aso be good.

Exactly. People need to understand both relative (per capita) and absolute shares of emissions. They also need to understand, you cant compare things exactly 1:1, but that relative and absolute shares are useful to look at on national and income group basis.

After that one can ponder as to the reasons for discrepancies, often they are related to energy/economic trajectories. Countries with a lot of fossil fuels stand separately for example. Not the only, but maybe the biggest separator when it comes to relative shares. Then we have a lot of cultural factors.

It's a bad implication though.

Wood burning causes CO2. As does burning coal, which occurred in individual homes, not just factories. Low income people had access to fires long before industrialization. Obviously that's not reflected in the graph - likely because it's hard to track that - so the data is suspect.

In 1750 everybody burned wood, not just the wealthy. Total emissions were minor but spread across the populations.

The source OP used for this data actually has a nice visual that shows both total emissions and emissions per capita for each income group.

https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions#global-inequalities-in-co2-emissions

This one.

No way this is per capita. Insanely misleading graph

Kind of garbage data pre 1900 or so - most of the world was burning wood all winter long, all over the world. The premise that the wealthy were creating 99% of carbon emissions during that time is just idiotic.

Ugly chart because it's using obviously bad data. Ez down vote, should be in r/dataismisleading, not this sub.

> Our World in Data is heavily funded by billionaires

So is Reddit

Apparently the traces in the graph are fit high/mid/low countries, not individuals

I think a lot more detail needs to be given here.

First off, what is being measured? Wood burning emits C02. If you were to specify that this is for *nonrenewable* emissions then it would be better.

Second, are the income groups static? Or do they change over time? And at what point in time are they composed from? High income as of 2023? High Income as of 1990?

Third, how large are each of these groups?

No, wood burning only releases the CO2 that the tree absorbed from the air during its lifetime, which was mostly going back into the air anyway if it rots. It's the carbon cycle, whereas if you dig up coal that's carbon captured by plants that got buried long ago, so it adds to the carbon in the atmosphere now. If you want trees to sequester more carbon you can cut them down and build stuff that will last a long time, and that leaves room for a new tree and carbon stored in a useful form.

They figured out how to use coal to get even richer, lower class people mostly burned wood, which is similar enough to the natural carbon cycle that it doesn't add net CO2 to the atmosphere. Like breathing, not a big deal.

...? Not only is the content on reddit not funded by those Billionaires, but who would use reddit as a source to begin with?

While coal for heating was used for thousands of years, and was not necessarily exclusive to very wealthy people, the cosa usage by rich people started really to take off during the Industrial Revolution, around the mid 19th century..

Ya, apparently people have burned coal for longer than I realized, but the industrial revolution was when fossil fuel usage took off.