Last spring, the Financial Times published a useful series of charts showing the correlation between CO2 emissions and the global distribution of wealth. The inequalities of the climate crisis are often, in many ways rightly, conceptualized as inequities between countries — particularly those of a few rich, carbon-intensive, industrialized economies and the rest.

But, as the FT’s data very clearly showed, there’s actually a stark and highly visible divide between a tiny minority of extremely wealthy people and everyone else. Taken as a whole, those in the global top 1 percent of income account for 15 percent of emissions, which is more than double the share of those in the bottom half. The extremely wealthy have only gotten richer over the past thirty years and, as the data shows, their carbon footprints have gotten much bigger as well.

When this perspective is narrowed to individual countries, the class divide vis-à-vis carbon emissions is truly astonishing to behold. In the United States, those in the top decile of income alone account for half of household emissions while the bottom half account for under 10 percent. While America is admittedly a pretty extreme case, the same basic pattern holds true across many large industrialized economies — a point which underscores that the divides within countries are often at least as important as the divides between them.