This infuriates me.
I would actually love to do more to REDUCE my carbon footprint, but it’s prohibitively expensive to.
But billionaires (and millionaires) can literally greenify every aspect of their lives, even be carbon-neutral or carbon negative! But they choose not to.
I think taxing the rich just isn’t enough. We need to CAP the rich. There should be no billionaires.
They can spend millions trying to reduce everyone’s carbon footprints. Like literally they can lobby for trains and shit. But no they won’t.
Some do
Name one.
Stephen King
- Not a billionaire.
- I’ve seen no indication he is carbon neutral or that he makes large green infrastructure investments.
Its designed to infuriate you. This is not personal emissions of billionaires, its including their businesses.
brother, that doesn’t make it any better. these pieces of shit can do more pollution in 90 minutes than any of us will in a life time since it’s for their business? the one which is such a massive operation of exploitation and extraction that it earns them billions of illbegotten dollars, which is why they’re being talked about to begin with?
“this infuriating shit was designed to infuriate you, don’t be infuriated, just accept it instead!”
this is the same stupid shit argument as “um bezos can’t pay more taxes bc he doesn’t actually have all the money his networth implies, that’s not how networth works” as if people mad at jeff bezos or any of these other worthless rich parasites don’t know that, as if we need someone like you to explain some stupid shit to us
This is not personal emissions of billionaires, its including their businesses.
The Oxfam report says that private planes and “superyachts” are contributing factors, as well as investments in polluting industries like oil and mining.
Nowhere does it mention that their businesses are what’s contributing to their carbon footprint. They are explicitly talking about their lifestyle choices.
So, I’m not sure where you got that info from, but if they are including businesses that these billionaires run, I’d be interested in seeing that data.
Mind you, the majority of these billionaires are in software… a business that’s very easy to convert over to a carbon-neutral model, especially with their resources.
A billionaire is a business themselves. One person can’t even passively possess a billion dollars without tons of support staff
If you separate the direct actions of the person from the actions of the staff required to maintain and grow their wealth, you’re missing most of the reason why billionaires are so harmful to society
Either we need the figures to represent a billionaires emissions when dealing only with their personal benefit, or we offset the current figures with the benefit to society for their ventures.
Im sure their personal emissions are bad enough. We dont need to make shit up. If willful ignornace had a physical form, it would be Lemmy’s mascot. Truth is the only thing that matters.
But again, it’s all for their personal benefit. A human Their money is managed to grow by any means, and that has a lot of knock on effects
They generally either put their money in funds with the highest returns (which often use unethical and illegal but accepted practices, and the best ones require large minimum deposits), or they directly own large percentages of a company and use that influence when it suits them
I see where you’re coming from, but I think the line is blurry. Their direct personal actions don’t capture the full extent of their actions, but this also assumes full responsibility for their ownership, where honestly it’s impossible to know what level of emissions the companies would have if the billionaire’s wealth machine wasn’t involved
I wouldn’t say this is totally unfair to say though - at the end of the day they own what they own, and letting others do your dirty work doesn’t absolve you of responsibility
The fact that their life would barely be affected if they added emissions to their criteria for investment makes this worse - these are the figures the billionaires should be looking at to make decisions
The line isn’t blurry, it’s disingenuous. Those companies hire thousands of people. They serve millions of people. Otherwise advocating against billionaires using this argument means you automatically argue against any modern solution to a problem. No stores, no supply chain, no agricultute, no medicine. Hell, you can’t even go for earlier periods - Genghis Khan was a billionaire and deserves flak for the gazillion horses his army used which contributed to climate change.
you’re just typing a paragraph to employ the “job creators” myth as an argument lol
so being a middle man who does nothing but extract and capitalize on needs that people have makes you a job creator? pretty sure mcdonalds didn’t create hungry people and people would have needed to buy a burger regardless of whether or not mcdonald’s was a multibillion dollar corporation.
i will admit, mcdonalds does create some hungry people tho-- their own workers, who they underpay by massive amounts.
What’s your point? There is no difference in 50 McDonalds locations and 50 independent burger joints when it comes to carbon footprint. If there is a difference, then it is in McDonalds favour - economy of scale, established logistics etc. Probably three different places need to pop up to offset one McDonalds beimg magically removed, each with its own AC, freezers, grills.
Billionaires provide NO benefit to society.
And?
yeah we do need to bust a cap in the rich, i agree
Carefully Autopsy their Person?
Sounds good.Cap them in their knees.
Some would argue that we could simply cap the rich instead
Please don’t use this as an excuse for. “It doesn’t matter how much I emit then”.
Use this as motivation for grassroots and political action aiming to stop the concept of billionaire from existing.
I think I just found out I can reverse my entire life’s footprint if I can manage to blow smoke in one billionaire’s face.
Probably two lives, given their security will likely shoot you in the face.
ACAB.
… billionaires’ security are not cops
Well they both use the threat of violence to reinforce the status quo. So in my mind they are effectively the same.
I feel like that’s missing the point of ACAB.
The problem with cops is that there are good cops who generally behave well and genuinely want to serve and protect their communities. The reason they’re still bastards is because of the unions that they keep (and support). They have some bad apples, and not removing them from the bunch means the bunch gets spoiled.
The problem with cops is that there are good cops who
generally behave well and genuinely want to serve and protect their communitiesdo not report bad cops.They are law enforcement, enforce the law. No exceptions.
Yes, I agree completely. I was just explaining that it’s not ACAB because literally all cops are out there getting away with extrajudicial beatings. It’s ACAB because they don’t throw out the bad apples (aka. don’t report bad cops)
The ones that do, aren’t cops for long.
True, there’s no masking in private security.
Bargain.
Fuck yeah! You get it.
I’m glad you addressed this. As soon as I read the title of the post, I knew there would be people who use it as an excuse not to try to do what they can to reduce their negative affects. Which is so incredibly frustrating. Every! Little! Bit! Counts!
Also I doubt anyone in this comment section is average.
The average sits somewhere between us and the all the people in third world country who emit practically no carbon pollution
The only way to stop it is when we’re hungry enough, and it’s time to eat.
Why should I restrict my limited lifetime on contributing pennies to solving this issue when there are mountains of gold right there doing nothing? I’m not bending over backwards unless the big ones bend with me — pretty fair stance to take, right?
So stop eating cows and eat the rich instead?
Whether or not you eat the rich, please consider not eating the cows.
There is no such thing as an innocent billionaire.
There are no innocent millionaires. The threshold of wealth that requires some seriously unethical behaviour is pretty low.
What do you count as innocent? Like doesn’t use products made in factories with human rights violations? I’m never gonna hit a million, but economists are saying we all need to have a Mil or three in order to retire? I know a couple million airs who seem like normal people, they’re just business owners?
I mean there is no way to goss a million a year without directly and knowingly exploiting people on a daily basis.
Millionaire refers to total wealth or cash on hand, not annual salary. Someone making $1M a year is probably worth $100M+ if they own stocks and may be well on their way to billionaire.
That’s not true you can earn a few million from hard work. Its rare these days, but doable. Still pennies compared to Elon et. al. I think the cutoff should be between 50-100 million. After that we name a park after you and you get a trophy for winning at capitalism. Congrats or whatever, but we’re taking the rest.
Whatever the threshold, it needs to be indexed to inflation and COL in the local area.
You definitely can not become a millionaire on YOUR hard work. It takes the hard work of other people working for you. And unless you over charging for their work or under paying them for their work, you aren’t going to be making millions.
I disagree, since the Internet allows indie studios for things like music and games to reach a massive audience. Selling your indie game that you made with your friends for $20 to 300k people makes you a millionaire without exploiting anyone. As long as you can avoid publishers leeching most of that away… Plenty of people also have become millionaires just by selling their house and moving somewhere cheaper.
That’s completely, 100% untrue.
I’m going to make these numbers up, but the math checks out.
If you’re a nurse making 100k/year, let’s assume you take home 60k of that. You’ll take home a million dollars after “just” 17 years. Are you really going to tell me that nurses are exploitative labor?
Now, I’m not going to get into the math of expenses because I’m lazy, but I’m also not factoring in any kind of investing either.
Now, those nurses need a supervisor to handle advanced work they aren’t familiar with, scheduling, dealing with mgmt, telling Drs to fuck off, etc. So if that nurse lead takes home 100k, they can do it even sooner at just 10 years. You can argue that this is exploitative labor, but you’d be wrong.
At some point you get supervisors that don’t do or contribute anything and pull in like 500k/year. Those jobs should probably not exist since they are by definition exploitative. But earning a few million dollars over the course of your lifetime is easily achievable on your own labor alone.
You can’t be a billionaire on your own labor. You can be a millionaire on your own labor, but it isn’t easy and takes a long time.
My net worth is almost a million dollars because my wife and I don’t have kids and our jobs pay decently. We should be millionaires in the next five years or less. We don’t have anyone who reports to us. Who have we exploited? In my col area we need (currently) 3 million total to live a modest retirement. Under your plan, this would be impossible to achieve. Do you want to make everyone a wage slave forever? And that’s ignoring high COL areas like NYC and LA where a million dollars might get you a small house.
I made millions by buying bitcoin years ago. Who did I exploit?
You could say others who bought in later than you, but regardless I wouldn’t really classify that as “hard work”.
Third world Bitcoin miners, the energy it costs to run block chain math and transactions, and the harvesters of the materials of the hardware.
But in terms of capitalism, only 3 exploits is pretty low so I wouldn’t feel too bad about it, you’re no different than myself or anyone else existing with a computer, you just got a bit luckier.
(This is really only to point out that there are few businesses where exploitation cannot exist, namely those of small businesses, and even then, they exist in capitalism which bred the exploitation. That is to say, you just can’t get away from it. This is not a critique of you, and also, congratulations! That’s quite incredible :) )
Thanks. I think there are other examples. For example, authors of (best selling) books.
But most ethical millionaires are just extremely privliged or lucky or both.
Most arts are exempt due to the nature of them. Music, visual art, etc, the resources they take can be fairly ecofriendly, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that they will be.
I was actually just thinking about this from an article that got posted, “Can music be sustainable?” and I was thinking about the production and supply side of it, like with records and CD’s, or in the case of books, print and cloud. As an author, there’s options for how you publish your book, but I would imagine not many think about how they publish being more or less eco-friendly than other alternatives.
It’s an interesting question – do paper books take more resources than cloud-streamed books (via Kindle)? I would imagine not, but they do need to process the paper and then ship the copies. But, Kindles need to be produced, and AWS needs to exist to serve them via the cloud.
Similarly for music - does the process of making records and shipping them have a bigger impact than we realize? The article itself was talking about touring emissions, but it got me thinking about the product side of things too with CD’s, records, and streaming music.
Also, back to the topic at hand, I think any service business could have the potential to earned a million dollars ethically, a lot of the factors just come down to luck and opportunity. My father is a photographer, he could earn a million dollars with his business if he had the right number of clients. All it could take is a viral TikTok and suddenly he’s the most requested photographer in the state. In a way, businesses have a social media lottery now, where virality can make you a millionaire as long as you can keep up with the demand. We see it happen with individuals too who get meme status and a bunch of interviews.
You’re spot on with that, I would think.
You need to be a millionaire to comfortably retire so…
nah million USD isn’t as much money as it used to be. That’s a house and couple of cars in more expensive countries. Though, personally 1 million USD net worth would be more than enough for me and my family.
Damn, thank god we killed plastic straws for people with sensitive mouth problems. Thank god Musk can ride his jet 24/7.
For perspective, that’s over 400,000x as much. As in 40,000,000%.
When no one was looking, Lex Luthor polluted forty million percent more than an average person. He polluted 40,000,000% more. That’s as many as four tens (times a million)%. And that’s terrible.
wow they must be breathing really hard then
Of course… Work hard, breath hard… A million times harder than you or me, based on income… /s
It’s the farts actually, they’re really stinky.
At some point, things are gonna get bad enough that the masses will turn on them. That’s why they’re all buying islands and building bunkers. We should do it now, while it can make a difference.
Allowing to self exile to islands will make it easier to trap them. Simply destroy their means of leaving.
Bunkers are even easier, burying them in trash.
But I’m the asshole for not using the public transportation my city doesn’t have. Anyway, I need to get to the grocery store I should start walking now so I can be there before it closes in 2 hours.
Don’t worry, I got this. I went to the shop by foot today instead of driving.
