George Monbiot of the Guardian has hit the nail on the head in this recent article about COP 26 in Glasgow.
“The very rich arrogate to themselves the lion’s share of the planetary space on which we all depend.”
The richest 1% of the world’s people (those earning more than $172,000 a year) produce 15% of the world’s carbon emissions, twice the combined impact of the poorest 50%. “On average, they emit over 70 tons of carbon dioxide per person every year, 30 times more than we can each afford to release if we’re not to exceed 1.5C of global heating.”
This disparity in environmental impact mirrors ongoing inequalities within the U.S. and around the world.
“A recent analysis of the lifestyles of 20 billionaires found that each produced an average of over 8,000 tons of carbon dioxide.” The major causes? Their jets and yachts; a superyacht alone, kept on standby (which is usual for billionaire’s boats) will generate around 7,000 tons of CO2 a year.
Bill Gates has positioned himself as a climate champion; he does not possess a yacht, but still has estimated footprint 3,000 times bigger than a conscientious citizen concerned about his or her contributions to global warming. This is largely the result of his collection of jets and helicopters. Although he claims to buy ‘green aviation fuel,” that’s demonstrably “crapola.” There is no such thing as “green aviation fuel.” As Monbiot explains, biofuels for jets, if widely deployed, “would trigger an environmental catastrophe, as so much plant material is required to power a single flight. This means that crops or plantations must displace either food production or wild ecosystems. No other “green” aviation fuels are currently available.”
Jeff Bezos sets another bad example: “the super-rich now hope to travel into space, which means that they would each produce as much carbon dioxide in 10 minutes as 30 average humans emit in one year.”
Money can even by access to meetings like COP26, which by some accountsd is the most exclusive of all climate summits. “Delegates from poor nations have been thwarted by a cruel combination of byzantine visa requirements, broken promises to make Covid vaccines available, and the mad costs of accommodation, thanks to government failures to cap local prices, or make rooms available. Even when delegates from poorer nations can scale these walls, they often find themselves excluded from the negotiating areas, and therefore unable to influence the talks.”
“By contrast, more than 500 fossil fuel lobbyists have been granted access, more than the combined delegations of eight nations that have already been ravaged by climate breakdown: Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Mozambique, Myanmar, Haiti, Puerto Rico and the Bahamas. The perpetrators are heard, the victims excluded.”
Monbiot’s solution is likely to be rejected in the United States, where everyone seems to hope that someday that they, too, might become “filthy rich.” It’s also hard to re-imagine capitalism. But we could end concentrated wealth if that could be accomplished politically. As Monbiot says, “Our survival depends on it.
Preventing systemic environmental collapse means driving extreme wealth to extinction.” Extreme wealth is perfectly legal; at the current moment, the way that extreme wealth is used is also quite wrong.