Loaded and rapacious - Village Magazine

 —  October – November 2013

S evil plutocrat villains go,

Australia’s Gina Reinhart is straight

from central casting. The daugh-

ter of a mining tycoon, she is now

regarded as the world’s wealthiest woman,

with an estimated worth of around $ bil-

lion. Her fantastic wealth is all inherited; her

parents’ vast fortune was made by exploiting

Australia’s mineral wealth.

Reinhart is also quite

outspoken. Last year she

bemoaned the fact that

Australians were not prepared

to work for less than two dol-

lars an hour, unlike African

workers. This fact made the

multi-squillionaire “worry for

this country’s future”.

Reinhart, whose wealth is

entirely serendipitous, is not

shy of advice for other people

who would like to get ahead.

They should, she says, “stop

whingeing” and “Do some-

thing to make more money

– spend less time drinking or

smoking and socialising, and

more time working”. Mind

you, at the two dollars an hour

wage she prefers, the average

Australian would have to work

for approximately ﬁve mil-

lion years to match the pile

Ms Reinhart got handed by

daddy and mummy.

Reinhart is also, shock, horror, a climate-

change-denier. In the last three years, tired

of all the left-wing whining in the media, she

has taken the step that more and more billion-

aires, both home and abroad, have discovered

is foolproof in dramatically improving your

media proﬁle – that is, to start hoovering up

newspapers and broadcasters. She is now the

largest shareholder in Fairfax media whose

journalists were reportedly openly fearful

that Reinhart would turn them into a “mouth-

piece for the mining industry”.

Her best buddy is Rupert Murdoch (net

value: $. billion), the tycoon who uses his

web of media interests to grossly interfere in

politics and undermine democratic oversight

and accountability around the world. The

inﬂuence of Murdoch’s odious Fox network

in polarising and debasing US politics and

demonising science, speciﬁcally climate sci-

ence, is now well understood.

According to Forbes maga-

zine, there are , billionaires

in the world. Collectively, their

combined wealth is around $.

trillion – $,,,,

in longhand.

The net worth of energy-in-

dustry mega-tycoons the Koch

brothers is around $ billion

– around the same as the entire

GPD of Cuba, a country with a

population of over  million.

The Koch brothers invest some of

their vast wealth in funding anti-

climate change disinformation

and astroturﬁng groups. They

are also now dabbling in buying

up media companies.

Here’s a simple thought exper-

iment: imagine our ,-odd

billionaires were planning to head

oﬀ, in a ﬂeet of luxury aircraft, on

a ﬂight path that would take them

thousands of miles from land and

crossing through some hazardous

airspace along the way. First oﬀ, you can be

certain they would insist the aircraft had been

thoroughly checked prior to departure. This

work would have been entrusted to the best

engineers. Similarly, plotting their course,

getting detailed weather forecasts and ensur-

ing their planes’ fuel supplies were adequate,

all this work would be placed in the hands of

the leading experts in their ﬁeld.

And, if they decided to bring along an

in-ﬂight medical team, these would be hand-

picked based on experience, expertise and

their status among their peers. You get the

picture. The world’s billionaires generally

know how expensive it can be to take the

counsel of numbskulls.

And yet. When it comes to the Big One,

whether or not industrial civilisation can

survive the next couple of decades, and

whether humanity itself can escape the jaws

of an encircling trap comprising resource

exhaustion, biodiversity collapse, ecosystem

failure and climate catastrophe, the world’s

richest people can hardly be accused of doing

nothing.

Quite the opposite: their funding, media

access and moral support is enabling an inter-

national cabal of climate deniers, liars and

assorted charlatans to befuddle and bam-

boozle with impunity. What these patrician

geniuses appear to have entirely misunder-

stood is that we (and yes, that includes the

super-rich) really are all in this leaky tub

known as the biosphere together.

Wealth, even humungous wealth, is of

little value when international trade has col-

lapsed, the electrical grid is permanently

down, the global economy is dead and food

production has been destroyed by chaotic

weather. All of these vistas are odds-on in a

world in which average surface temperatures

will have shot up by over ºC this century.

The controversy-averse IPCC routinely

low-balls risks by excluding real but diﬃ-

cult-to-measure threats such as permafrost

methane releases, yet it still says we have no

better than a / shot at avoiding a ºC

global warming calamity. And that slim shot

assumes we all act now to slash emissions.

You and I can fret, we can lobby, we can

make our plans, but in reality, as individuals,

we remain almost powerless. Our billion-

aire betters, on the other hand, have power

and inﬂuence almost beyond measure. Yet,

rather than acting to save even their own

necks, many of them work diligently and

spend freely to actually hasten our collective

appointment with mass extinction.

Let’s conclude with a – perhaps wishful -

update to that ancient Greek quotation: ‘those

whom the gods would destroy, they ﬁrst make

ﬁlthy rich’.

John Gibbons is a specialist environment writer

and tweets @think_or_swim

Billionaires tend to be visionless climate-

denying misanthropists. By John Gibbons

Loaded and

rapacious

ENVIRONMENT billiOnaires

Huge wealth

is of little

value when

the electrical

grid is

permanently

down, the

global

economy is

dead and food

production

has been

destroyed

“

Pic

caption

here