Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet in the movie Titanic.
Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet in the movie Titanic.
THREE KEY FACTS
There are 3000 billionaires in the world.
Oxfam says they produce, per person, 1 million times more carbon emissions than the rest of us and invest in fossil fuels at twice the average of the top 500 corporates.
Their economic clout is equal to half the entire US economy.
OPINION
Simon Wilson is an award-winning senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, urban and social issues. He joined the Herald in 2018.
Titanic turned up on Netflix again a couple of weeks ago and I am here for it. Love that movie.
For all the usualreasons – great romantic story, great actors (RIP Bernard Hill, the captain) – but also for something else. I love that it’s a parable. For everyone who identifies with the young men on the boat, it asks a question: are you Jack, or are you Cal?
Jack, we all know. Cal, you may have forgotten. He’s the horrible rich guy Rose is supposed to marry.
And if you identify with Rose, it asks you much the same: who would you choose?
This parable of a rich man and a poor man doesn’t make that choice hard. Cal – Caledon Hockley, played by Billy Zane – is rude, narcissistic, a coward, liar and cheat. A man with a silly name who is without honour or, indeed, any redeeming features at all. Although he is very rich.
He sneers at Jack, played by Leonardo de Caprio, for not knowing the etiquette of the dining table. He belittles Rose, played by Kate Winslet, for breaking the class rules. She’s not supposed to talk to people like Jack, let alone go partying with him below decks, let alone ... well, you’ve seen the film.
Cal is the worst of us. He’s a monster, made that way, the film suggests, by the finest education and everything else that money can buy.
Whereas poor Jack is charming, spirited and brave. He’s a chancer who breaks the rules compulsively, delightedly, as a way of life. And yet he’s a profoundly honourable, selfless person. He’s the best of us.
We want to be Jack, to be with Jack. We want to think we are or would be as good – as morally good – as him.
Even though Cal is right, in their story honour is a fatal flaw. Jack dies and Cal survives. One of the lessons of Titanic is that selfishness helps you survive.
But the larger lesson is that this is irrelevant. Even though Cal wins and Jack loses, nothing changes in our affections. Jack is still our guy.
Because Jack is humanity. At least, he is what we want humanity to be. And the Titanic is our boat.
We’re all aboard, shuffling the deckchairs while icebergs break free from the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica (icebergs, even now, 112 years later, being an excellent metaphor for the danger of messing with the natural world). We hope we’re not going to drown; we wonder if there’s anyone around who might save us.
For a while, the deckchairs were just fine where they were.
Actually, there is. Cal could save us.
Jack saved Rose, and that’s always possible: one person can save another, especially if they’re brave enough. But a rich person can save a lot of people.
And right now, as the Northern Hemisphere confronts another record summer of heatwaves – the previous record heatwave killed 70,000 people in Europe alone – the very richest among us could save us. Not only could they do it, they should do it.
Because that’s the other question Titanic asks: what is the point of Cal?
Or, to translate for today: what is the point of billionaires?
It’s not just to show us what not to be, is it? Surely, they have some greater purpose than that.
One answer is that it’s okay for a tiny number of people to have unimaginable wealth because, in a crisis, they can use the power that accompanies that wealth to overcome the crisis.
In the climate crisis, what does this mean?
There are about 3000 billionaires on the planet. That’s 3000 people in Cal’s social class: 0.0000375% of the global population, who have, according to Forbes magazine, a combined wealth of US$14.2 trillion ($23.2t).
The global economy hit US$110t this year, and means 3000 families worldwide account for 13 per cent of it. That’s nearly half the size of the entire American economy, three-quarters of the Chinese and more than the next three (Germany, Japan and India) put together.
When it comes to greenhouse gas, the emissions curve correlates directly to wealth and is steeply exponential. The wealthiest 10% are responsible for half of all carbon emissions. But the Stockholm Environment Institute estimates the wealthiest 0.1% emit 10 times more carbon than the rest of the top 10%.
That’s 800 million people producing half the emissions, but only 8 million of them producing nearly all of that half.
If you wonder whether superyachts, private jets, enormous mansions and a lifestyle of luxury travel and consumption make a difference, the answer is yep. They really do.
An Oxfam study found the carbon-equivalent emissions from the lifestyles of billionaires are thousands of times higher than the emissions of the bottom 90% of the global population. Photo / 123rf
Especially if they’re at the very top end of that wealth. A 2022 report from Oxfam International found the carbon-equivalent emissions from the lifestyles of billionaires were thousands of times higher than the emissions of the bottom 90% of the global population.
But that’s not the heart of the damage they do. The Oxfam report found billionaires’ investments cause an annual average of 3 million tonnes of emissions per person, compared with the average 2.76 tonnes emitted by the rest of us.
That’s over a million times more.
“The world’s wealthiest individuals’ investments account for up to 70% of their emissions,” Oxfam said. The report revealed they invest in polluting industries at twice the average rate of all investments in the S&P 500.
That is, the very richest among us gravitate towards fossil-fuel industries.
Right now, it's like we're all on the Titanic, one way or another. But the ship doesn't have to sink. Picture / Michael Cunningham
Some of their investments are direct: the money goes to the exploration, mining and distribution of oil, coal and gas. Some goes into products made from these fossil fuels, such as fertiliser, concrete and plastics. Some goes into products that use the fuels, such as home appliances and industrial machinery. And cars.
Quite a bit of it is money making money, by financing all of this.
And there’s another big way billionaires are doing the damage: it’s the world they’ve made.
We all have choices about how we reduce our emissions, but we can only do so much. Our personal choices are constrained by what’s possible.
We didn’t make the world that requires us to rely on cars or buy plastic products wrapped in yet more plastic. We didn’t create the society that tells us, everywhere we look, to burn more, consume more, waste more.
To a large extent, that’s what the billionaires did. And their success in doing that has given them the wealth and power to stop fossil fuel production. They could do it quickly. They could do it while refocusing the global economy so collapse doesn’t follow.
Back on the Titanic for a moment, nobody’s saying they should just shut the ship’s engines down. But they could get started on turning the boat around.
From financing wind and solar farms to building more compact cities, to lobbying governments to boost public transport and strengthen energy-efficient building codes, there’s so much the megawealthy could do.
One obvious example: get behind the global campaign to cap plastic production and eliminate single-use plastics altogether. There’s an island largely comprising plastic waste floating northeast of Hawaii, called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. It’s twice the size of Texas and there’s another one, almost as large, close to Japan.
The harm is done by plastic bottles, plastic wrap, all the usual suspects, and a lot of microplastics, too. Microplastics are tiny particles, often microscopic, that occur when plastics of all kinds break down.
In February, Science Daily reported that “a flurry of recent studies has found that microplastics are present in virtually everything we consume, from bottled water to meat and plant-based food”. One such study found them in every sample of human placenta that was tested.
Are the billionaires going to step up? If not, why don’t we tax them?
Plastics damage the environment and public health, but also, because they’re made from oil, they contribute to the climate crisis. Photo / 123rf
What possible reason could there be not to tax the polluting megarich and their corporations? I mean, if they’re just going to carry on carrying on like now. What better way to create a massive global climate action fund?
British climate scientist Kevin Anderson, whose background is in petrochemicals, argues there’s another reason we need to start asking the “1% of richest emitters” some hard questions.
“The 1% group use their hugely disproportionate power to manipulate social aspirations and the narratives around climate change,” he wrote in an unpublished piece for The Conversation last year.
“These extend from highly funded programmes of lying and advertising to proposing pseudo-technical solutions, from the financialisation of carbon to labelling extreme any meaningful narrative that questions inequality and power.”
Anderson blamed a “supine” media for compounding the problem and added, “The tendrils of the 1% have twisted society into something deeply self-destructive.”
It’s been 42 years since the world first agreed to “negotiate an agreement to limit dangerous climate change” by establishing the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change at a conference in Rio de Janeiro.
Since then, emissions have risen 60%, which suggests Anderson has a point.
In New Zealand, we’re doing a bit better: net emissions are up 25%, driven by a 123% rise in dairy emissions and an 85% rise in transport emissions. These rises have been offset by the growth of plantation forests and other changes to land use.
The trajectory has started to fall, but only recently. We have little to celebrate yet.
And now time is running out. Climate Action Tracker says the world is heading for 2.7 degrees of warming, well above the 1.5 degrees target of the 2015 Paris Accord.
How, really, could billionaires save us?
By leaning on the politicians – many of them are used to doing this anyway. By closing down all fossil-fuel industries and routing the money to renewables, resilience and repair. In particular, by financing this work among developing nations.
I know, mostly they don’t do this. Mostly, they do the reverse. But it’s not just that they can, surely, change. They have to change. And if they do, deeply and seriously, hey, they could even keep their superyachts. Powered by wind and solar, of course, not marine diesel.
Because the question remains: Is it okay for a tiny number of people to have unimaginable wealth? Titanic isn’t the only parable on Netflix with something to say about this.
House of the Dragon asks: What happens when the highborn, the immensely wealthy lords of the kingdom, carry on with their morally obnoxious self-obsessions, blithely ignoring the suffering, which they caused, of the smallfolk?
The answer: Insurrection. Or brutal suppression. Or both.
It would be nice to think, as the icebergs keep crashing off the ice sheets in our own Seven Kingdoms, as drought sweeps up through Africa and wildfires ravage North America, that we’re not going to get to that.
Olivia Cooke and Emma D'Arcy in House of the Dragon.
