• merc@sh.itjust.works
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    4 hours ago

    And yet, there aren’t very many of them but there are billions of us.

    Even if their lifestyles result in 1000x as much pollution, they only represent 0.00004% of the worldwide population, which is not enough to move the needle.

    To put that in perspective, metro Tokyo has a population of approximately 38 million. If the fraction of billionaires in Tokyo matches the global ratio, there would be about 15 billionaires in Tokyo. Anything 15 people do in Tokyo will be just noise compared to what the other 37,999,985 people do.

    Let’s just pretend that all 3000 of the world’s billionaires lived in the USA. They’d still only make up 0.001% of the entire US population. Even if they were flying around in personal jets, being followed by Airbus Beluga jets carrying their yachts, it would still pale in comparison to the sheer number of people currently suffering in economy class right now.

    live air traffic showing the thousands of planes currently in the air over the US

    I still think billionaires should be squashed by a hydraulic press, but I’m not kidding myself into thinking that doing that will have any impact on the environment at all. I support it more because they’re greedy assholes who are taking far more than their share, and who are using their immense wealth to distort the well functioning governing of the world.