Guest essay by Eric Worrall

h/t Dr Willie Soon – according to GQ, Climate Change is the fault of the individuals whose efforts provided us with all with our modern abundance of consumer choice.

Billionaires Are the Leading Cause of Climate Change

BY LUKE DARBY

As the world faces environmental disaster on a biblical scale, it’s important to remember exactly who brought us here.

This week, the United Nations released a damning report. The short version: We have about 12 years to actually do something to prevent the worst aspects of climate change. That is, not to prevent climate change—we’re well past that point—but to prevent the worst, most catastrophic elements of it from wreaking havoc on the world’s population. To do that, the governments of Earth need to look seriously at the forces driving it. And an honest assessment of how we got here lays the blame squarely at the feet of the 1 percent.

Contrary to a lot of guilt-tripping pleas for us all to take the bus more often to save the world, your individual choices are probably doing very little to the world’s climate. The real impact comes on the industrial level, as more than 70 percent of global emissions come from just 100 companies. So you, a random American consumer, exert very little pressure here. The people who are actively cranking up the global thermostat and threatening to drown 20 percent of the global population are the billionaires in the boardrooms of these companies.

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Even when Republican lawmakers show flashes of willingness to get something done, they’re swiftly swatted down. There are myriad examples, but one example comes via Dark Money, where Mayer describes an incident in April 2010 when Lindsey Graham briefly tried to support a cap-and-trade bill: A political group called American Solutions promptly launched a negative PR campaign against him, and Graham folded after just a few days. American Solutions, it turns out, was backed by billionaires in fossil fuel and other industries, including Trump-loving casino magnate Sheldon Adelson.

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Read more: https://www.gq.com/story/billionaires-climate-change

The planet would obviously be better off if we all had Soviet levels of consumer choice. While we were standing in a queue for half a day to buy a loaf of bread, we would not be driving our cars.