Excessive wealth is speeding us towards climatic disaster

The inauguration of the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre in early April took social media by storm. Feeds and news media were filled with videos and images of India’s most wealthy people attending the function. 

The Indian Express, one of the countries leading newspapers, even goes as far as covering what was on the thali served at the gala. This cultural obsession with wealth is not unique to the Ambani and certainly not to India. 

Across the planet, billionaires such as the Ambani are feted as geniuses, plastered over magazine covers and television screens. They are the subjects of best-selling biographies, while major news organisations cover the oscillating rich lists breathlessly.

While The Washington Post hailed Kylie Jenner’s ascent into billionairedom as one of the defining pop culture moments of the 2010s, Time magazine declared Elon Musk as its person of the year in 2021. 

Also read: Richest 1% emit twice as much carbon as poorest 50%: Oxfam report

This obsession has permeated every aspect of society, from the TV shows to the music we listen to. Netflix is overflowing with reality shows following the rich and out of touch; from Mumbai to Los Angeles, no city is spared. Billboards are covered with the tantalising dream of a multi-crore house overlooking the ocean, and social media is filled with the latest extravagant wedding. We are constantly being sold an aspiration centred around excess. 

These aspirations are hugely damaging to society and the planet. Over the last few decades, inequality has skyrocketed across the planet while social mobility has declined. This has resulted in a greater concentration of wealth in a few hands.

On the other hand, for a huge proportion of people, even the basic human rights of food, water and shelter are out of reach. For the rest, the promise of wealth is a mirage that is largely unattainable.

A 2021 Oxfam report estimated that by 2030, the wealthiest 1 per cent will exceed the emissions needed to meet the Paris Climate Goals by 30 times. The 2015 Paris Agreement aims to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, a threshold that, if breached, will result in climate disasters on a scale that will dwarf the devastating flooding in Pakistan last year.

These massive emissions are driven by lifestyles that are so extravagant. And in a reflection of increasing inequality, the differences between the emissions between the rich and everyone else is also rising.

Last year it was revealed that some of the richest celebrities in the world, including Jenner and Taylor Swift, use their private jets for journeys that would take just a few hours by car. The emissions produced by Swift’s private jet between January and August are equivalent to the total carbon emissions of over 1,000 houses in the US for a year. But, the sky is not the limit for the richest of the rich.

The new frontier is space, and a number of private companies, including Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, are diving headfirst into commercialising space travel. A ticket on one of their space shuttles goes for an eye-popping $250,000, and there are already hundreds of reservations.

This egomaniacal race to space has a very real impact on those of us who are stuck on Earth. Estimates suggest that an 11-minute flight to space emits 75 tonnes of carbon per passenger at the very least, though it is likely to be much higher.

To put this into perspective, a person in the bottom one billion earners on the planet will not emit this much carbon in their entire lifetime. These rocket launches are also thought to have impacts on ozone depletion, but the industry is almost completely unregulated. 

Though differences in carbon emissions between countries have taken the spotlight in recent years, the World Inequality Report 2022 found that within-country inequality exceeds between-country inequality in their contribution to global emissions inequality. This means that the difference between the emissions of rich and poor people within a country is, on average, greater than the difference between rich and poor countries.

Also read: Cut inequality to fight climate crisis

So rich people, no matter which country they live in, live extraordinarily excessive lifestyles that are not in line with global climate targets and far above what is necessary to create a sustainable society. In India, the report finds that the top 10 per cent of earners emit eight times more than the bottom 50 per cent and four times more than the middle 40 per cent of earners.

These inequalities are particularly concerning because in the same way that rich countries are not as impacted by climate change as poor ones, rich people in middle and low-income countries are also protected from the worst impacts of climate change. People with limited income, who already have tenuous access to food, shelter and water, will face the brunt of these effects.

In addition to direct emissions from their lifestyles, the super-rich and the companies they helm are some of the most vociferous defenders of the status quo. They spend millions bribing governments and politicians to stymie any action on climate change, environmental degradation and workers’ rights while continuing to invest in polluting industries.

For example, fossil fuel companies BP and Shell, whose boardrooms are packed with some of the world’s richest people, spend over $100 million annually to lobby against climate efforts across the planet. Amazon, headed by Jeff Bezos, the world’s second richest person, has used every tactic in the playbook to prevent the unionisation of its workers that would allow collective bargaining for better wages and worker rights.

And Gautam Adani, India’s richest man, and his company are the world’s largest private investors in new coal fields, an energy source we must phase out completely to ensure climate stability. Their protection of the capitalist hegemony has created a global economy based on excess consumption and endless profit that the finite resources of our planet cannot support. 

The investments of the super-rich are another way in which they are contributing to climate change. An analysis by Oxfam found that the 125 richest people on the planet have investments that contribute to 393 million tonnes of CO2 per year. That is equal to the total emissions of the entire population of France, a country of 67 million people.

The investments are in some of the most polluting companies in the world, including fossil fuel giants BP, Shell and Exxon, as well as consumer goods companies such as PepsiCo. What is even more disturbing is that many of these decisions are made simply to maximise profits, ballooning already vast coffers of wealth.

The super-rich has accrued their wealth unjustly through the exploitation of their workers and the environment and then used these resources to control governments as well as our access to information. They have used these same information channels to downplay the climate crisis and protect their burgeoning profits by sanitising their image and encouraging a more wasteful society.

Meanwhile, they are contributing more than any other people to the catastrophic state of the climate through their excessive lifestyles and continued political interference. All this while they are building luxury bunkers in which they can ride out the worst impacts of the chaos they have created. 

Thomas Piketty, the renowned economist and author of Capital, has written that making the super-rich pay their fair share in tax would be one of the best ways to combat the crisis and fund decarbonisation efforts and climate-resilient infrastructure across the planet. However, to truly protect the planet, we must go further. And instead of placing them on the next cover of Forbes, we must hold them accountable and tax them.

Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth

The author is an ecologist who works to conserve the reefs of the country’s western coast.

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