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If 2020 teaches us anything, it’s that the next crisis we could have prevented is probably right around the corner, and it will be painful. A pandemic that scientists warned was very likely to occur arrived and has already killed well over 214,000 people in the US. Dozens of predicted, large wildfires — the latest evidence of the climate emergency — are torching the American West, their smoke more damaging to health than almost any fire season on record.

But it’s not too late to intervene and limit climate chaos.

A recent paper in Nature Communications clarifies whose actions in this moment are “central to any future prospect of retreating to safer environmental conditions.” Yes, government and industry leaders are on the hook to decarbonize operations and infrastructure. But it’s also the affluent who use far more resources than the poor — more energy and more material goods per capita than the planet can sustain.

“Highly affluent consumers drive biophysical resource use (a) directly through high consumption, (b) as members of powerful factions of the capitalist class and (c) through driving consumption norms across the population,” the authors write.

The rich or merely affluent, it turns out, are actually the ones blowing through the world’s carbon budget — the maximum amount of cumulative emissions that can be added to the atmosphere to hit the Paris agreement’s 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming goal.

According to a September report from Oxfam and the Stockholm Environment Institute, the richest 10 percent of the world’s population — those who earned $38,000 per year or more as of 2015 — were responsible for 52 percent of cumulative carbon emissions and ate up 31 percent of the world’s carbon budget from 1990 to 2015.

Meanwhile, the richest 1 percent of people — who made $109,000 or more per year in 2015 — alone were responsible for 15 percent of cumulative emissions, and used 9 percent of the carbon budget. The rapidly accelerating growth in total emissions worldwide isn’t mainly about an improvement in quality of life for the poorer half of the world’s population, either. Instead, the report finds, “nearly half the growth has merely allowed the already wealthy top 10 percent to augment their consumption and enlarge their carbon footprints.”

In sum, as the report’s lead author Tim Gore, head of climate policy at Oxfam, said in a statement, “The over-consumption of a wealthy minority is fueling the climate crisis yet it is poor communities and young people who are paying the price.”

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