The world’s wealthiest 1 percent, Oxfam’s latest research reveals, are now generating more carbon emissions than all the world’s poorest 66 percent combined. The carbon emissions from this 1 percent will — between 2020 and 2030 — “cause 1.3 million heat-related deaths” worldwide.

The world’s bottom 99 percent, Oxfam adds, would have to consume away for 1,500 years to match the carbon output that billionaires now produce in a single year.

But, even so, the political impact of the super-rich actually outpaces the impact of their personal energy consumption. Only our richest “have the wealth, power, and influence to protect themselves.” And that same “wealth, power, and influence,” the new Oxfam study lays out, is keeping governments worldwide doing no more than “incentivizing incremental change” in energy policy instead of phasing out fossil fuels and investing massively in renewable energy.

We must not let ourselves treat climate and inequality as “separate issues,” environmental activist Greta Thunberg adds in her foreword to Oxfam’s latest appraisal of our world’s environmental and economic crises.

“Either we safeguard living conditions for all future generations,” she relates, “or we let a few very rich people maintain their destructive lifestyles and preserve an economic system geared towards short-term economic growth and shareholder profit.”

The “twin crises of climate and inequality,” Oxfam’s Climate Equality: A planet for the 99% report goes on to spell out, are “driving one another” — and only “a radical new approach” stands any chance of “overcoming the catastrophe unfolding before us.”

That “radical new approach” must take on “the disproportionate role that the richest individuals play in the climate crisis through their emissions, investments, and capture of politics.”

How can we best realize this badly needed “new approach”? We would need, argues Oxfam, to start aggressively taxing our super rich and the corporations that fuel their fortunes “to help pay for the transition to renewable energy.”

Just one example: Some 45 major oil and gas corporations averaged annual windfall profits of $237 billion in 2021 and 2022, dollars that overwhelmingly funneled straight into rich shareholder pockets. Governments worldwide, Oxfam notes, could have increased global investments in renewable energy by 31 percent had they taxed this windfall profit at 90 percent.

The new Oxfam study surveys a wide range of other options the world’s nations could pursue to subject the rich to serious taxation. Govrnments could, for instance, levy “steep and progressive” tax increases on the incomes of the ultra rich —  as well as on their property, land, and inheritances. They could raise taxes on corporate profits, fossil fuels, and financial transactions — or levy entirely new taxes on “high-emitting luxury travel.”

The world, in other words, could have plenty of money for social and climate spending “if rich-country governments were willing to implement bold and progressive tax reforms.”

“We cannot allow the richest countries to claim that they cannot afford to raise the trillions needed,” Oxfam concludes. “Mobilizing this money simply takes political will.”