Transcript

HANS ROSLING:

I’m not the best person to tell you how bad climate change will be. Nor am I a specialist on how to prevent it. What I can do is to show you data to make you understand who is the one that emits the carbon dioxide. I will show this. You remember the yardstick from the poorest billion to the richest billion, from the one who hardly can afford shoes to the one who fly with airplanes?

Now, this shows the total amount of fossil fuel used in the world during one year – coal, oil and natural gas. And it represents more or less the total emission of carbon dioxide. Now, how much of that is used by the richest billion? Half of it. Now, the second richest billion? Half of what’s left. Then you understand what the third use, half of what’s left. And the others use hardly anything.

This is rounded numbers, but it clearly shows that almost all the fossil fuel is used here by the one, two, three richest billions. More than 85% they use. Now, the richest billion here at least have stopped increasing. But we are yet to see whether they will decrease. And in the coming decades, it’s the economic growth of these two that will increase the fossil fuel use and the carbon dioxide emission.

Even if these ones over here come out of extreme poverty and get richer all the way to the motorbike, that doesn’t contribute much to the emission of carbon dioxide. And regarding population growth, most of the additional billions in the next 40 years will be in this group here.

But still, if you ask people in the richest end, they seem to get everything wrong. They look down on the world from their very high emission and then they say, oh, those over there, you cannot live like us. You will destroy the planet. You see, I find the argument from the people here catching up to be much more correct and logic. They say, who are you to tell us that we can’t live like you? You better change first if you want us to do it differently.