Season 5 is made possible in part by listeners who supported our show and by a grant from the International Women's Media Foundation.

You know those mind-bending factoids that you hear these days about the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few?

For example, that the world's 25 or so richest billionaires who could take a trip together on one good-sized private jet,

that they've piled up more wealth than the poorest half of the entire global population, almost 4 billion people.

Jebus! Yes, yes, just like that John.

Wow, there's a parallel kind of gross inequality when it comes to climate and greenhouse gas emissions.

A United Nations report in 2020 found that the richest 1% of the global population are responsible for twice the emissions of the poorest 50%.

Now, that calculation is about individual behavior.

Right, so richer people drive around in gas guzzlers, use lots of energy at home, take lots of airplane trips for business and pleasure.

That's right, but more important than those individual choices is the way societies live based on their very different levels of wealth.

The carbon footprint of the average American is 30 times that of the average person in Bangladesh.

To mention one country not at all randomly.

A key takeaway in that UN report was that the leading emitters like China, the US and the European Union would need to triple their current pledges to cut greenhouse gas emissions if the world is going to meet this agreed upon goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

That's their pledges, mind you.

The big polluter countries in the global north are congratulating themselves for announcing plans like we're going to cut our emissions in half by 2030 from our 2005 levels.

And we're going to achieve net zero by 2050.

Put aside for now that while some of them are stepping up their actions somewhat or at least announcing their intentions to, the big emitters are not putting policies in place to make those pledges happen.

That's right. And a lot of countries are straight up lying about their emissions reductions.

So even what they're reporting to have done so far may not actually be true.

A new investigation from the Washington Post found that the gap between reported and actual emissions is somewhere between 8 and 13 billion tons a year.

On top of that, even the pledges, if they were hitting them, are not enough. Climate experts crunching the numbers say rich nations need to cut our emissions by about 8% each year after year for the coming decade if we're going to avoid catastrophic warming.

Catastrophic meaning we're now on pace to warm the planet by close to three degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels. That's more than five degrees Fahrenheit.

...