Statement of Account · Est. Annual

The Carbon
Ledger

A running account of what the world's wealthiest spend in carbon — jets, yachts, mansions, and the portfolios behind them. Covers a documented subset, not every billionaire — see why below.

Share of humanity

…%

3,428 billionaires (live-projected) out of … people alive right now — a rounding error in the human population.

Share of climate impact

90 min ≈ 1 lifetime

Oxfam's own figure: the top 50 billionaires' investments, jets and yachts emit more in 90 minutes than the average global person (≈4.8 t CO₂/yr, ~350 t over a 73-year life) emits in their entire life — not a high-income-country person, whose lifetime footprint is much bigger. Using a U.S. average instead (≈14.3 t/yr, ~1,130 t over a lifetime), that same billionaire spending takes closer to 4–5 hours to match — our own extrapolation from Oxfam's rate, not an Oxfam-published figure.

Source: Oxfam, Carbon Inequality Kills (2024) — the report itself specifies "average person" as the global average, not any single country's.

Tracked emissions, this session

tonnes CO₂e
accruing at the combined
rate of documented entries

These are the documented billionaires — the handful researchers have actually calculated jet, yacht, or portfolio emissions for. It is not a list of all billionaires; see the "All Documented Billionaires" tab for the full breakdown, including where estimates are modeled rather than measured.

EntryTonnes CO₂e / yr

The ledger's largest line, off the books

Jets and yachts are the visible spending. The real balance sits in portfolios: Oxfam estimates the average billionaire in its 2024 study holds an investment-related footprint of roughly 2.6 million tonnes CO₂e a year — about 340 times their combined jet and yacht emissions.

Of the holdings analyzed, close to 40% sit in oil, mining, shipping, and cement.

This is not a list of all billionaires — it's every billionaire we could find documented, plus a modeled tier covering Forbes' Real-Time Top 1,000, out of 3,428 total on the current Forbes list. 22 named individuals (plus 4 averaged samples) have independently published carbon estimates; 982 more are modeled from net worth alone using Forbes' Real-Time Billionaires list (July 8, 2026 snapshot). Net worth is from that snapshot unless labeled with an older year.

Compare against — pick an income group, then a country

Per-person CO₂ tracks income, but loosely — an average American emits about 3.5× what an average person in France does, even though both are "high-income" by World Bank standards. "The average person" isn't one number; groupings below use the World Bank's income classification (based on Gross National Income per capita, not outdated labels like "developed/developing world").

Today's low per-capita emitters didn't get there by restraint alone — the U.S. is responsible for roughly a quarter of all cumulative CO₂ emitted since 1751, and the EU for close to a fifth, largely from over a century of industrialization that many lower-income countries were, historically, extraction sites for rather than participants in.

Name	Type	Assets tracked	Net worth	CO₂e / yr	Years to match at avg. person's yearly rate
Combined, filtered rows			—	—