A collection of books, blogs, research papers, audiobooks, and podcasts that I have read and enjoyed.

P.S. Yes, audiobooks and podcasts do count as reading: Reading with your ears v.s. reading with your eyes!

2026

Books

Research Papers

  • Environmental damages of the top ten percent consumers exceed global climate and biodiversity funding gaps by Schrijver, Hoekstra, Behrens (2026) #climate #economics #sustainability

    My summary

    Core question: Estimating the environmental damage impact from lifestyle of the world’s wealthiest 10%

    Methodology & the mental models:

    • Step 1: Leverage footprint data. Researchers took data on what the top 10% of consumers actually spend money on across 168 countries – food, transport, housing, clothing, services. When you buy wagyu beef, a yacht, or a flight, you are not just buying that product. You are triggering an entire supply chain: the farm, the fertilizer plant, the steel mill, the fuel refinery. They use an economic model (called EE-MRIO) that mathematically traces every dollar of spending backwards through all these supply chains and converts it into physical environmental impacts - tonnes of CO2, hectares of biodiversity lost, kilograms of nitrogen released into waterways, liters of freshwater consumed. This is the consumption-based footprint.

    • Step 2: Get the price. Not market price but the damage price. They used the Environmental Prices Handbook, which estimates what it actually costs society when one tonne of CO2 is emitted, or when one hectare of species-rich land is degraded. These are not what you paid at the pump. They are the downstream costs borne by everyone else: health impacts, ecosystem collapse, drought, heat stress. They adjust these prices by country (a biodiversity loss in a high-income country is valued higher because willingness-to-pay is higher there), except for CO2, which gets one global price since climate damage is diffuse and hits everyone equally.

    • Step 3: Estimate. Footprint multiplied by damage price, summed across all five environmental categories, gives you the damage bill per person in the top 10%.

    Findings: The global top 10% owes $2,300 to $7,500 per person per year. For Americans in the top 10%, the bill is $19,000 to $63,000 – roughly 6 to 20% of their income. The biggest single contributor is not carbon (which gets most of the attention lol) but biodiversity loss, at 47 to 56% of the total damage bill. Collectively, just this group’s consumption damages exceed the entire international funding gap for both climate action and biodiversity conservation combined.

    Important caveat: This only estimates what people spend, not what they own. The top 10% (and especially the top 1%) hold most of the world’s productive assets: shares in airlines, oil companies, factories, real estate portfolios. Those assets generate emissions too, and those emissions are attributed to the buyers of their products, not the owners of the capital. Another research (Chancel (2022)) suggests that for the top 10%, investment-related emissions are roughly equal in size to consumption emissions. So the damage bill here is closer to a floor than a full accounting.

    Interesting Note: It was quite interesting to see the difference between the estimates for different countries like USA vs India. The top 10% in different demographics had wildly different estimates. Also, I did some searching to understand what constitute top 10% in each of these countries and it was surreal to see the stark difference in wealth bands. For e.g. you are in India’s top 10% if you very roughly earn more than 6-8 lakhs INR/year which is about $6-9k.

Blogs

Videos

2025

Books

Blogs