Manmade Global Warming - New Extremes, page-4239

Aussie moguls among world’s top emitters

Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes and mining magnate Andrew Forrest top the list of Australians on a global ranking of billionaires with the biggest carbon footprint.

Nov 7, 2022

Australian billionaires have made the list of the world’s richest people with the worst carbon emissions amid calls for governments to “tackle this urgently” as the COP27 summit gets underway.

Atlassian founders Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar and mining magnate Andrew Forrest were included in the list of 125 billionaires when Oxfam looked at their investments.

Also on the list were Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Warren Buffet.

The report found these billionaires’ investments equated to an annual average of three million tonnes of CO2e per person, which is a million times higher than those living in the bottom 90 per cent.

The billionaire lifestyle of flying private jets and having expensive yachts are also thousands of times the average person’s emissions.

“The role of the super-rich in super-charging climate change is rarely discussed … They have escaped accountability for too long.”