I'm sceptical, you can assign blame to any social group if you want to. Usually it depends on who funded or approved the research.

As a fairly hard core enviromentalist, and long term dedicated climate/ weather junky, who was born and raised in a socialy aware and progresive family, I cant quite agree with the title, and bunch like it floating around like it tight now. The basic fact is that humans primary extraction of raw materials is now in the,(say it out load, for the thump) hundreds of billions of tons per anum range, this represents everything we do, and the unstopable momentum of our species to get some stuff, the stuff per capita that we are getting, keeps going up, and the population keeps going up, and any attempt to limit the other 8~9 billion people from getting stuff, will make them very very angry....it makes them mad, makes me mad. So this looks like an attemp to use populist anger at the elites, to squeeze the poor.

Greater income causes greater consumption which causes a greater environmental impact.

How is this not a statement of the obvious? Its good analyse the data to check for surprises, but any other result would be a huge surprise.

Bill Gates is among them and has a fleet of four private jets. He uses them to make regular flights around the world - so he can give talks on how it's the rest of us who need to change.

There’s a clear ideological current running through this article, but it’s not in the data. The data is straightforward: high-income groups emit more and consume more. That’s expected.

The leap happens when the authors label this disparity an "injustice". That’s the normative leap: a moral framing imposed on the empirical data. Then they take it further, using that framing to justify a global wealth tax and polluter-pays schemes. That’s political activism under the guise of science. These scientists are operating far outside their domain of expertise when they weigh in on global tax policy, especially when they give credence to a wealth tax, whic has been rejected by many economists as hard to enforce, easy to game, and extremely likely to do far more harm than good.

This ideological current also shows up in the lack of balance. You won’t find parallel studies quantifying the benefits high-income groups have generated — foreign investment, export demand, capital formation, innovation, and philanthropy. These forces have driven the most dramatic poverty reduction in human history and unprecedented gains in life expectancy and infant survival. But those facts don’t fit the narrative.

The same asymmetry shows up in how CO₂ is treated. NASA’s 2016 satellite study found that elevated CO₂ levels was the primary cause of global green cover increasing by 30% between 1982 and 2015 (source: https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/goddard/carbon-d...). That’s a massive, measurable fertilization effect, with huge positive implications for agricultural production and the fight against desertification. Yet it’s completely absent from the discussion.

The data is useful but the framing isn’t neutral.