This is a ridiculous metric. They measure carbon emissions not just by what the billionaires are consuming, but by what their investments (businesses, factories, etc) are producing. This is akin to the world blaming China for their grossly inflated per capita emissions, while conveniently ignoring that it’s actually being consumed by other countries and it’s just shifting numbers around.
There are plenty of legit reasons to hate billionaires, there’s really no need to be making up new questionable ones that can be torn apart.
You got a point. However, billionaires are still extremely horrible for the environment. Just owning a private get and regularly using it emits probably more carbon than the average person.
I think that’s a really good point to be fair. Would be interested to see what it was on a consumption basis - like other people are pointing out, the lifestyle of the ultra rich is definitely pretty carbon intensive.
It makes some sense to approportion to them the share of the negative externalities of their businesses that matches the share of the revenue they get as profit from those businesses (since the business has to have a higher level of activity to generate profit that it would to merelly break even).
However for the reason you pointed out it doesn’t make sense to assigned to them the responsibility for the negative externalities of creating wealth which they did not themselves capture even if they own the businesses that did that wealth creation.
Of course, things can be quite a lot more complex than this - for example, if a billionaire choses to go with a disproportionally more poluting process in their business to get a small increase in profit, doesn’t he or she have responsability for that extra polution which goes well beyond merelly the extra profit they got? - but as a rule of thumb it makes sense that people’s responsability for the polution in wealth creation activities is proportional to how much of that created wealth ends up in their hands.
Warning: Unpopular opinion coming up
This is a ridiculous metric. They measure carbon emissions not just by what the billionaires are consuming, but by what their investments (businesses, factories, etc) are producing. This is akin to the world blaming China for their grossly inflated per capita emissions, while conveniently ignoring that it’s actually being consumed by other countries and it’s just shifting numbers around.
There are plenty of legit reasons to hate billionaires, there’s really no need to be making up new questionable ones that can be torn apart.
You got a point. However, billionaires are still extremely horrible for the environment. Just owning a private get and regularly using it emits probably more carbon than the average person.
Oh yes, no argument there. That’s my entire point, in fact.
I think that’s a really good point to be fair. Would be interested to see what it was on a consumption basis - like other people are pointing out, the lifestyle of the ultra rich is definitely pretty carbon intensive.
It makes some sense to approportion to them the share of the negative externalities of their businesses that matches the share of the revenue they get as profit from those businesses (since the business has to have a higher level of activity to generate profit that it would to merelly break even).
However for the reason you pointed out it doesn’t make sense to assigned to them the responsibility for the negative externalities of creating wealth which they did not themselves capture even if they own the businesses that did that wealth creation.
Of course, things can be quite a lot more complex than this - for example, if a billionaire choses to go with a disproportionally more poluting process in their business to get a small increase in profit, doesn’t he or she have responsability for that extra polution which goes well beyond merelly the extra profit they got? - but as a rule of thumb it makes sense that people’s responsability for the polution in wealth creation activities is proportional to how much of that created wealth ends up in their hands.
Your first point is pretty good.
Although your argument about China is very wrong.