Through their ownership of companies and private financial and physical assets, from oil producers to property developments, the super-rich are responsible for an outsized slice of the greenhouse gases that are overheating the planet. The top 1% of people by wealth, through their shareholdings and investments, control about a quarter of global annual emissions in total.

Greenpeace has calculated the “climate debt” of these high net worth individuals, by attributing to them their share of the damage done to the climate by the assets they own. By this reckoning, the world’s richest cause nearly $1tn a year of damage to the climate...

The glaring inequalities between the impact on the planet of the super-rich and those of ordinary people are increasingly coming under the spotlight, as wealth inequality soars around the world. Last week, the economist Thomas Piketty led a report showing that the world could live equitably within the planet’s finite resources, if excesses of wealth were curbed by taxes and the poor allowed to keep a bigger share of what their labour produces.

Governments from around the world, excluding the US, have gathered in Bonn, Germany, for a fortnight of talks in advance of the Cop31 UN climate summit in November. One of the items likely to receive most attention will be arrangements for a “just transition” to help workers affected by the transition away from fossil fuels to participate in the low-carbon economy.

Wealth tax, for one, must be brought in. Enough of the s**t from the obscenely rich.