World's Richest 10% Are Costing Earth Trillions, Study Finds

We've heard that the world's wealthiest 10 percent are disproportionately responsible for environmental damage.

Now, scientists have estimated just how much, in cold hard cash, those damages are worth.

It's difficult to put a price on the environment, and some scientists even argue it's beside the point: that nature has intrinsic value, beyond the services it provides to us.

But in some situations, it helps to try to put it in economic terms: especially when those are the terms the world's wealthiest are used to dealing in.

That's what environmental scientists Inge Schrijver, Rutger Hoekstra, and Paul Behrens, all from Leiden University in the Netherlands, have done.

The world's top 10 percent of consumers, they calculate, owe society trillions for their environmental impact.