Why Billionaires?
Instead of re-inventing the wheel, here are some excerpts from Andreas Malm’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline.
But consumption is part of the problem, and most particularly the consumption of the rich. There is a very tight correlation between income and wealth on the one hand and CO2 emissions on the other.
A diminutive share of the population accounts for a wildly outsized portion of the gas released.
After a meticulous study on the level of households, Kenner concludes that ‘all rich individuals in the US and the UK have a significant carbon footprint associated with their lifestyle’.
One Oxfam report from 2015 suggests that the richest 1 per cent of humanity has a carbon footprint 175 times larger than that of the poorest 10 per cent; distending the hierarchy, the richest Americans beat the poorest Mozambicans two thousand times over.
[Another] study calculates only the CO2 emissions from the gasoline burnt to move the superyachts around. The global fleet has 300 vehicles. In a year, it generates as much CO2 as the 10 million inhabitants of Burundi.
The private jets operating in the US alone generate as much CO2 as half of Burundi does in a year.
[There is a stark difference between] luxury and subsistence emissions. The former happen because rich people like to wallow in the pleasure of their rank, the latter because poor people try to survive.
Subsistence emissions occur in the pursuit of physical reproduction, in the absence of feasible alternatives. Luxury emissions can claim neither excuse.
Luxury emissions become more atrocious at the tail-end of carbon budgets, for at least six reasons. First, the harm they inflict is now immediate.
To be super-rich and hypermobile above 400 ppm is to dump lethal hazards on others and get away from them in one master stroke.
Luxury emissions represent the ideological spear of business-as-usual, not only maintaining but actively championing the most unsustainable kinds of consumption. This is crime sold as ideal living.
The burning of money has an additional ethical connotation when that money could be diverted to helping the victims of that same burning.
If we cannot even get rid of the most preposterously unnecessary emissions, how are we going to begin moving towards zero?
Under the current balance of class forces, the average capitalist state with some pretension to care about the climate will rather be inclined to begin at the opposite end: with an attack on subsistence emissions.
Macron’s carbon tax weighed five times more heavily on the bottom 10 per cent of the population than on the top – effectively a regressive tax on subsistence, while luxury was released from all restraints by le Président des riches. It backfired, as it should.
Rich people cannot have the right to combust others to death.
An attempt to break out into the only viable route for mitigation: if we have to cut emissions now, that means we have to start with the rich.