Your simplistic take is fundamentally wrong. It would take someone in the bottom 99% of the world's population more than 1,500 years to match the personal lifetime carbon footprint of a billionaire.
People in the top 1% can be attributed with 25% of emissions when you take their investments into account also.
But most importantly, they are the ones who actually "steer the boat". They are responsible for the utter lack of proper action against the pollution.
Your "arguments" are precisely the deflection they employ to steer public attention away from them. Notice the utter absurdity of asking the bottom 99% of humanity to take responsibility for what they have absolutely no control over.
> Notice the utter absurdity of asking the bottom 99% of humanity to take responsibility for what they have absolutely no control over.
I notice the absurdity of you suggesting you have no responsibility.
It is a matter of how you choose the percentage. You choose 99%. If you would have said 50%, than whoops, suddenly you would include yourself in the responsible part. I claim that most rich people (western countries) are in the responsible part and maybe they should start reason like that.
You claim that rich people shouldn't fly. I would be fine with nobody flying. Or, even, with only rich people flying but not more than today (that would be still a 10x reduction in CO2!).
In my opinion too many people think in the terms of "what should the others do" rather in terms of "what should we all do", so that they have an excuse to do nothing.
You consistently try to re-frame the matter in a factually incorrect way.
While average individuals do have responsibility, theirs is many orders of magnitude smaller. Not only from their personal impact being comparatively minuscule, but because their objective possibilities to make substantial changes is negligible.
It's not "a matter of how you choose the percentage": the distribution is as it is, a "hockey stick" shape. The numbers just help to understand that.
Western people are far from being uniform in their wealth. While generally certainly substantially richer than other parts of the world, their societies nonetheless are wildly uneven in their wealth-distribution. You might want to look at actual data on the subject, your intuition is way off.
You're right on principle in that collective action is needed. But the reality of the matter is, collective action in western societies is captured by the rich. They control the media, the purse and the government effectively.
People in the top 1% can be attributed with 25% of emissions when you take their investments into account also.
But most importantly, they are the ones who actually "steer the boat". They are responsible for the utter lack of proper action against the pollution.
Your "arguments" are precisely the deflection they employ to steer public attention away from them. Notice the utter absurdity of asking the bottom 99% of humanity to take responsibility for what they have absolutely no control over.