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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
26 April-May 2025
April-May 2025 27
Billionairheads
How economic power leads inexorably
to environmental destruction
By George Monbiot
POLITICS
26 April-May 2025
April-May 2025 27
The richest 1% of the world’s people burn
more carbon than the poorest 66%, while
multibillionaires, running their yachts, private
jets and multiple homes, each consume
thousands of times the global average
D
on’t they have children? Don’t
they have grandchildren? Don’t
rich and powerful people care
about the world they will leave
to their descendants? These are
questions I’m asked every week, and they
are not easy to answer. How can we explain
a mindset that would sacrifice the habitable
planet for a little more power or a little more
wealth, when they have so much already?
There are many ways in which extreme
wealth impoverishes us. The most obvious is
money-spreading across our common
ecological space. A recent reporting by
Oxfam, the Stockholm Environment Institute
and the Guardian gives us a glimpse of how
much of the planet the very wealthy now
sprawl across. The richest 1% of the world’s
people burn more carbon than the poorest
66%, while multibillionaires, running their
yachts, private jets and multiple homes,
each consume thousands of times the global
average. You could see it as another colonial
land grab: a powerful elite has captured the
resources on which everyone depends.
But this is by no means the end of the
problem. Some of these pollutocrats also go
to great lengths to thwart other people’s
attempts to prevent Earth systems collapse.
Billionaires and centimillionaires fund a
network of organisations that seek to prevent
eective environmental action. Many of the
Who genertes the crbon?
junktanks founded or funded by Charles and
the late David Koch, owners of a vast
business empire incorporating fossil fuel
extraction, oil refineries and chemical
plants, supply the arguments that disguise
industrial self-interest as moral principle. So
do their opaquely funded counterparts in the
UK, in or around Tufton Street in Westminster.
The multimillionaire Jeremy Hosking, who
poured millions into Vote Leave and the
Brexit party, is also the main funder of
Laurence Fox’s Reclaim party, which claims
there is no climate emergency and campaigns
against net zero policies and low trac
neighbourhoods and in favour of fracking.
Coincidentally, an investigation by
openDemocracy last year found that his
company, Hosking Partners, had $134m
invested in the fossil fuel sector.
28 April-May 2025
April-May 2025 PB
Harder to explain perhaps are the oligarchs
who are not heavily or directly involved in
fossil fuels, yet foster opposition to
environmental action. A recent investigation
by the website DeSmog found that 85% of
opinion pieces about environmental issues
published in the Telegraph over the previous
six months either denied the science or
attacked the measures and campaigns
seeking to prevent environmental
breakdown.
At the core of Elon Musk’s empire is Tesla,
which makes electric vehicles. But he has
turned his recent acquisition Twitter (now X)
into an intensely hostile place for
environmental discussion: research suggests
that almost 50% of its environmentally
oriented users have either gone quiet or been
driven o the platform since its emuskulation.
Musk himself has contributed to the denial of
environmental science that has boomed on X
since he bought it.
A broad coalition of interests – fossil fuel
companies, billionaires and their newspapers
and other members of the economic elite –
has lobbied for and achieved the
criminalisation of environmental protest in
many parts of the world, including the UK.
Here, as in several other countries, gentle
environmental protests now attract long
prison sentences, facilitated by silencing in
court: campaigners in some cases are
prohibited from telling the jury why they took
their action. In the US, organisations funded
by oil companies and billionaires draft laws
including the most draconian and chilling
penalties for protesters, then seek to
universalise them across numerous states
and nations. Entirely peaceful protesters are
demonised as extremists and even terrorists.
A widespread hostility towards environmental
campaigners has been manufactured by
dark-money junktanks and the billionaire
press. It is obscene that those who seek to
protect the living planet by democratic means
are arrested en masse and imprisoned by the
authorities, while the people and
organisations trashing our life-support
systems are untouched by the law.
So why do oligarchs who do not have
direct investments in environmental
destruction appear so hostile to
environmental protection? Part of the reason
is that any opposition to business as usual
is perceived as opposition to its beneficiaries.
Those who are billionaires or centimillionaires
today are, by definition, well-served by the
current system. They correctly perceive that
a fairer, greener world means curtailing their
immense economic and political power. Even
those who have invested in green
technologies or who donate to green causes
doubtless feel an instinctive sense of threat.
Networks funded by fossil fuel companies
deliberately aggregate the issues,
connecting green policies with communism
and violent revolution, while promoting
political candidates who will clamp down
simultaneously on environmental action,
democracy and redistribution. The property
paranoia often associated with extreme
wealth – the sense that everyone is plotting
to take it away from you – is easily triggered.
But we cannot discount the possibility that
some of these people really don’t care, even
about their own children. There are two
convergent forces here: first, many of those
who rise to positions of great economic or
political power have personality disorders,
particularly narcissism or psychopathy.
These disorders are often the driving forces
behind their ambition, and the means by
which they overcome obstacles to the
acquisition of wealth and power – such as
guilt about their treatment of others – which
would deter other people from achieving
such dominance.
The second factor is that once great wealth
has been acquired, it seems to reinforce
these tendencies, inhibiting connection,
affection and contrition. Money buys
isolation. It allows people to wall themselves
o from others, in their mansions, yachts and
private jets, not just physically but also
cognitively, stifling awareness of their social
and environmental impacts, shutting out
other people’s concerns and challenges.
Great wealth encourages a sense of
entitlement and egotism. It seems to
suppress trust, empathy and generosity.
Auence also appears to diminish people’s
interest in looking after their own children. If
any other condition generated these
symptoms, we would call it a mental illness.
Perhaps this is how extreme wealth should
be classified.
So the fight against environmental
breakdown is not and has never been just a
fight against environmental breakdown. It is
also a fight against the great maldistribution
of wealth and power that blights every
aspect of life on planet Earth. Billionaires –
even the more enlightened ones – are bad
for us. We cannot aord to keep them.
www.monbiot.com. This article first appeared
in the Guardian
It seems to suppress trust, empathy and generosity. Affluence
also appears to diminish people’s interest in looking after their own
children. If any other condition generated these symptoms, we
would call it a mental illness
The mulibillionires, running heir ychs, prive jes nd muliple
homes, ech consume housnds of imes he globl verge
