When you talk about the climate crisis, sooner or later someone will say that population is the problem and worry about the sheer number of people living on Earth now. But population itself is not the problem, because the farmer in Bangladesh or the street vendor in Brazil does not have nearly the impact of the venture capitalist in California or the oil oligarchs of Russia and the Middle East. The richest 1% of humanity is responsible for more CO2 emissions than the poorest 66%. The rich are bad for the earth, and the richer they are, the greater their negative impact (including the impact of money invested in banks, and of stocks that finance fossil fuels and other forms of climate destruction).
In other words, we are not all the same size. Billionaires dominate our politics and our environment in a way that is difficult to understand without considering the shocking extent of their wealth. That impact, both through their climate emissions and through their manipulations of politics and public life, means they are nothing like the rest of humanity. They are behemoths, and they usually use their outsized power in ugly ways – both in the amount they consume and the extent to which they influence the world’s climate response.
Let me put it this way: If you made $10,000 a week—a princely sum by most people’s standards—you would have to work every week from the year of Jesus’ birth until this week to make more than a billion dollars. To earn as much as Elon Musk’s net worth at that rate – currently $180 billion, according to Forbes – you would have to work every week for more than a third of a million years – that is, since before Homo sapiens first emerged in Africa.
Being a billionaire may be a disqualification from participating in the affairs of ordinary people
Another way to put it is: One day last year on the western edge of San Francisco, overlooking the Pacific Ocean, I saw whales spouting, and then I came home and rescued a bee that was buzzing outside my window. The extremely different scales of these two wild creatures impressed me, so I added up: a honey bee weighs about 0.11 grams and 4,000 bees weigh a pound; a gray whale weighs between 60,000 and 90,000 pounds, which means that even at the lower weight, it weighs about the same as a quarter of a billion bees. According to Oxfam, 81 billionaires own more wealth than the poorest half of all humanity, meaning that in monetary terms 81 people are larger than 4 billion people. So when it comes to wealth and impact, billionaires are whales and poor people are bees. Except whales pose no threat to bees.
But billionaires pose a threat to the rest of us: Their enormous political scale distorts our public life. They are disproportionately older, white and male and function as unelected powers, a kind of freelance global aristocracy that too often tries to rule over the rest of us. Some critics think the super-giant tech companies that have produced so many modern billionaires operate in ways more akin to feudalism than capitalism, and certainly many billionaires operate like the lords of the earth as they campaign to protect economic inequality who made them this way. rich and makes so many others so poor. They use their power in arbitrary, reckless and often environmentally destructive ways.
Watch how Musk bought Twitter – a crucial news source for millions of people during disasters and journalists and scientists around the world – and turned it into satellite network and other assets. As the New Yorker put it: “There is little precedent for a citizen becoming the referee in such a detailed manner in a war between nations, or for the level of dependence the US now has on Musk in many areas, of the future from energy and transportation to space exploration.”
Look at how Bill Gates (the sixth richest person on earth, with $104 billion) has decided to influence climate policy. I remember first thinking about Gates’ size when he built his house on the shore of Lake Washington decades ago: how much could one man eat and excrete to inhabit a house with six kitchens and 24 bathrooms ? In a literal sense, he eats and emits a lot; he loves private jets, and the Pacific beach in front of that mansion is supplied with sand brought in by barge from the Caribbean, according to an unctuous article in Business Insider. (Other sources say it was brought in from Hawaii.)
He heads the world’s largest private foundation, and the influence it has had on health and lives, especially in Africa, has been criticized. Now he is trying to exert outsized influence on climate policy. A hallmark of technology billionaires is their boundless confidence in their own competence in whatever area they want to influence. Money talks – or rather, it shouts.
Gates has emphasized that we need “energy miracles” and a “clean energy breakthrough,” stating in 2016: “If the world can find a source of cheap, clean energy, it will do more than just tackle climate change.” to a halt,” while criticizing the existing increasingly cheaper solar and wind energy we have and the roadmaps that many more qualified experts have drawn up for a clean energy transition. The site LiveScience commented on his statement: “Bill Gates ‘discovers’ 14-year-old formula on climate change.”
Climate scientist Michael Mann writes that Gates’ terrible ideas include “a relatively inert but prohibitively expensive proposal known as ‘direct air capture’, and in my view considerably more dangerous ‘solar radiation management’ – a euphemism for plans that typically involve injecting massive amounts of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to form a reflective blanket that could help cool the Earth again.’ That Gates might be wrong about the climate wouldn’t matter if he were someone with the same impact as an ordinary citizen; the problem is his excessive power.
The US has a quarter of the world’s roughly $2,700 billionaires, and two of them – Tom Steyer, who has donated lavishly to several climate groups and has his own political action committee, and Michael Bloomberg, who has contributed substantially to the Beyond Coal campaign – have actually had a positive impact. But extreme wealth is in itself bad for democracy – a one person, one vote system is at risk when some people have so much influence over who and what goes on the ballot and how it is talked about (and many American billionaires have controlled the elections supported). candidates, parties and campaigns that have undermined voting rights and climate action in many parts of the US).
Being a billionaire tends to isolate you from the rest of humanity, and too often places you in an echo chamber of your own making; it is perhaps a disqualification from participating in the affairs of ordinary people. Most billionaires are self-interested, protecting the very inequality and exploitation that has made them so much wealthier than the rest of us. Polls in many countries show that most of the public wants to see climate action and the financing for it; the obstacles are not public opinion, but the fossil fuel companies and vested interests controlled by the elites. This is why many American climate and environmental organizations have made democracy and voting rights part of their work.
A few good billionaires among the saboteurs do not justify the existence of the species. That’s why in Kim Stanley Robinson’s climate fiction novel The Ministry for the Future, billionaires are eliminated as a danger to the climate, and their fortunes reduced to $50 million if they comply. Robinson writes, “There was scientific evidence showing that if the Earth’s available resources were distributed equally among all 8 billion people, everyone would prosper. They would all be in sufficiency, and the scientific evidence very strongly supported that people who lived in sufficiency and had confidence that they would stay there (a crucial point) were healthier and happier than rich people.” On a thriving planet, people should be on a human scale, but the super-rich are on an entirely different scale: giants who trample both nature and our efforts to protect it.
• Rebecca Solnit is an American Guardian columnist