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.
this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2024
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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.
Its designed to infuriate you. This is not personal emissions of billionaires, its including their businesses.
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.
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.
they want thier private jets, and megayahcts+ a fleet or escort yachts.
they could also make electric cars...
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
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.
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.
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.
What If I gambled some money I made from honest work and won several millions? Who am I exploiting?
All the addicts who didn't win.
And that could've been me.
What if people just donated several millions to me because they liked something I did? that's not exploitation
How did Linux Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel, exploit people?
What did Linus Torvalds do?!