From this data, the most effective thing to focus on in combating climate change is improving efficiency of energy production (solar, wind, nuclear, geothermal, etc instead of coal, gas, etc). The next most effective thing is improving efficiency of transportation, followed by improving efficiency of heating and cooling (e.g. getting people to use heat exchanges instead of separate gas and AC). Yachts, cruise ships, and other related luxury items don’t even register on the list of priorities and are merely a blip. They’re very visible wastes of energy, but they’re lately harmless.
Sure, but the number of people actually using mega yachts is vanishingly small. It’s so small that completely eradicating them would do exactly nothing to combat climate change because the amount they contribute is within a rounding error for any meaningful measure of climate change.
it’s so small that completely eradicating them would do exactly nothing to combat climate change
That’s not true, did you read any of the link posted?
We live in a society made of billions of individuals, we are not ants or robots, everyone is supposed to do is part. Billionare part count as much as millions of people, that’s how big their footprint it.
There are very few billionaires, so while their footprint is larger on an individual basis, their total footprint is absolutely dwarfed by the rest of the population. Going after billionaires may feel good because you’re “sticking to the rich” or whatever, but even if we eradicate all billionaire carbon output, it wouldn’t put a dent in global carbon emissions.
A common refrain from many progressive lawmakers is that the rich don’t pay their fair share of taxes. “Fair share” is, of course, subjective. But a new Treasury study provides data showing that the rich not only pay more than the middle class, they pay more than one-third of their annual income in federal taxes and more than 45 percent when state and local taxes are included.
Indeed, the total tax
burden on the super-wealthy, especially those with large stakes in global businesses, is upwards of 60 percent of their annual income because of the taxes they pay abroad.
Financially they’re a blip, and ecologically they’re a blip as well. Punching up may be cathartic, but it’s not going to solve the climate crisis.
Why are you wasting your time defending billionares who are screwing the planet and everyone over? Are you getting paid or are you playing the devil advocate?
There are 800 billionares in USA alone and more than 3000 around the globe. My country italy has about 60 million people and spend 130B on public health each year. The 5.7T you mentioned would be enough to cover the healthcare spending that covers 60M people for 40 years.
This article breaks global emissions down by sector, and I’m assuming that private jets and private yachts (both the top contributors to billionaire emissions from your link) are included in the aviation and shipping sections, which are 1.9% and 1.7% respectively. Both areas are likely dominated by non-billionaire sources (e.g. freight and passenger travel), so we’re probably looking at <1% of global emissions (probably far less) coming from billionaire jets and yachts.
I’m not saying it’s okay for billionaires to be that wasteful, I’m saying it’s not what’s causing our problem, and even if we eliminate 100% of pollution from billionaires, we’ll still have a massive problem.
Are you getting paid or are you playing the devil advocate?
More the second, but mostly because I see people blaming the wrong problem. Billionaires aren’t the problem, though they are symptoms of problems we have, like high medical care costs (and again, insurance company behavior is a symptom), CO2 emissions, erosion of privacy, data breaches, etc. Yes, billionaires had a hand in each of these, but the real problem is the lack of accountability.
As the saying goes, don’t hate the player, hate the game.
Do you realize how much even 1% in the scale of billions is? It more than entire small countries. If the billionare you are talking about would give you 1% of his money to defend him online you would get 50 millions.
Okay? I don’t care how much money he has, I only care what kind of person he is and what he does with he resources he has.
He chooses to use his position to make a quality service that respects its users, which is sadly uncommon these days. That’s honestly all I expect from a CEO, and for that he gets more respect than most CEOs, meaning I’m pretty “meh” about him. He’s not a villain, but he’s also not a saint, he’s just a reasonable human.
If he offered me 1% of his wealth to shill for him online, I’d probably take it, because I could do so much more good with that money than the minor “evil” of being annoying shilling for a kind of okay dude. $50M means I could fund a charity I believe in and dedicate my time to it.
I honestly don’t care if some people get disgusting amounts of money, I only care how get got it and what they do with it. Gabe Newell seems to care more about the service than the money, and is doing what I expect the average person would do if they had that much money. So he’s a pretty okay dude.
Exactly, it’s just virtue signaling.
If you look at sources for pollution, it’s largely:
From this data, the most effective thing to focus on in combating climate change is improving efficiency of energy production (solar, wind, nuclear, geothermal, etc instead of coal, gas, etc). The next most effective thing is improving efficiency of transportation, followed by improving efficiency of heating and cooling (e.g. getting people to use heat exchanges instead of separate gas and AC). Yachts, cruise ships, and other related luxury items don’t even register on the list of priorities and are merely a blip. They’re very visible wastes of energy, but they’re lately harmless.
https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/billionaires-emit-more-carbon-pollution-90-minutes-average-person-does-lifetime
Mega yachts fall into the personal transportation problem. If everyone would go around in a mega yacht we would be long time extinct.
Sure, but the number of people actually using mega yachts is vanishingly small. It’s so small that completely eradicating them would do exactly nothing to combat climate change because the amount they contribute is within a rounding error for any meaningful measure of climate change.
That’s not true, did you read any of the link posted?
We live in a society made of billions of individuals, we are not ants or robots, everyone is supposed to do is part. Billionare part count as much as millions of people, that’s how big their footprint it.
There are very few billionaires, so while their footprint is larger on an individual basis, their total footprint is absolutely dwarfed by the rest of the population. Going after billionaires may feel good because you’re “sticking to the rich” or whatever, but even if we eradicate all billionaire carbon output, it wouldn’t put a dent in global carbon emissions.
It’s the same issue as the popular notion of taxing the rich. If we took all of Elon Musk’s wealth ($486 billion from a quick check), we could fund the US government for less than a month. If we took the entire wealth of the top 400 people in the US ($5.7T combined), we still couldn’t fund the US government for a year. Here’s an article about it from the tax foundation (they have a right-center bias with high factual accuracy):
Financially they’re a blip, and ecologically they’re a blip as well. Punching up may be cathartic, but it’s not going to solve the climate crisis.
Why are you wasting your time defending billionares who are screwing the planet and everyone over? Are you getting paid or are you playing the devil advocate?
There are 800 billionares in USA alone and more than 3000 around the globe. My country italy has about 60 million people and spend 130B on public health each year. The 5.7T you mentioned would be enough to cover the healthcare spending that covers 60M people for 40 years.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/11/megayachts-environment-carbon-emissions-ban
This article breaks global emissions down by sector, and I’m assuming that private jets and private yachts (both the top contributors to billionaire emissions from your link) are included in the aviation and shipping sections, which are 1.9% and 1.7% respectively. Both areas are likely dominated by non-billionaire sources (e.g. freight and passenger travel), so we’re probably looking at <1% of global emissions (probably far less) coming from billionaire jets and yachts.
I’m not saying it’s okay for billionaires to be that wasteful, I’m saying it’s not what’s causing our problem, and even if we eliminate 100% of pollution from billionaires, we’ll still have a massive problem.
More the second, but mostly because I see people blaming the wrong problem. Billionaires aren’t the problem, though they are symptoms of problems we have, like high medical care costs (and again, insurance company behavior is a symptom), CO2 emissions, erosion of privacy, data breaches, etc. Yes, billionaires had a hand in each of these, but the real problem is the lack of accountability.
As the saying goes, don’t hate the player, hate the game.
Do you realize how much even 1% in the scale of billions is? It more than entire small countries. If the billionare you are talking about would give you 1% of his money to defend him online you would get 50 millions.
Okay? I don’t care how much money he has, I only care what kind of person he is and what he does with he resources he has.
He chooses to use his position to make a quality service that respects its users, which is sadly uncommon these days. That’s honestly all I expect from a CEO, and for that he gets more respect than most CEOs, meaning I’m pretty “meh” about him. He’s not a villain, but he’s also not a saint, he’s just a reasonable human.
If he offered me 1% of his wealth to shill for him online, I’d probably take it, because I could do so much more good with that money than the minor “evil” of being annoying shilling for a kind of okay dude. $50M means I could fund a charity I believe in and dedicate my time to it.
I honestly don’t care if some people get disgusting amounts of money, I only care how get got it and what they do with it. Gabe Newell seems to care more about the service than the money, and is doing what I expect the average person would do if they had that much money. So he’s a pretty okay dude.