Recent searches
Search options
1/ Rebecca Solnit wonders whether one planet can support so many billionaires.
"Billionaires are a menace to the rest of us: their sheer political size warps our public life. Disproportionately older, white & male, they function as unelected powers, a sort of freelance global aristocracy who are too often trying to reign over the rest of us. Some critics think that the supergiant tech corporations that have spawned so many modern billionaires operate in ways that resemble feudalism more than capitalism, & , certainly, plenty of billionaires operate like the lords of the Earth while campaigning to protect the economic inequality that made them so rich & makes so many others so poor. They use their power in arbitrary, reckless & often environmentally destructive ways." https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/nov/20/billionaires-great-carbon-divide-planet-climate-crisis?CMP=share_btn_tw&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
2/ "A few good billionaires among the saboteurs don’t justify their existence. That’s why in Kim Stanley Robinson’s climate-fiction novel The Ministry for the Future, billionaires are eliminated as a #climate hazard, their fortunes whittled down to $50m if they comply.
Robinson wrote: “There was scientifically supported evidence to show that if the Earth’s available resources were divided up equally among all 8 billion humans, everyone would be fine. They would all be at adequacy, & the scientific evidence very robustly supported that people living at adequacy, & confident they would stay there (a crucial point), were healthier & happier than rich people.”
On a thriving planet, human beings should be human scale, but the super-rich are on another scale altogether, giants trampling underfoot both nature & our efforts to protect it."