Billionaires Are the Leading Cause of Climate Change

[workinclasszero]

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

BY LUKE DARBY 1 day ago

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.

There are probably no individuals who have had a more toxic impact on public and political attitudes about climate change than the Koch brothers, and it would take an absurd amount of space to document all the money and organizations they've scraped together for that purpose. (Investigative reporter Jane Mayer's groundbreaking Dark Money does basically that.) And they have every reason to: In her book, Mayer notes that "Koch Industries alone routinely released some 24 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere a year."

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

[duforsure]

1. And...

...The leading cause of our deficit skyrocketing again so they can get even bigger tax breaks, if the gop holds onto power in the House and the Senate they'll get it, and they'll destroy Social Security, and start another war. If the Democrats get power of both the House and the Senate we can prevent that from happening. Vote or don't complain about having such a corrupt government run by trump and the gop.

[workinclasszero]

3. The republican party and its 1% backers

are going to destroy this country and this world if they are not stopped somehow.

I guess we will see if the 99% of humanity is willing to march into the graveyard for the Koch bros, Rupert Murdoch and Sheldon Adelson just to name a few.

The midterm democratic turnout will be a signpost.

[hunter]

2. Affluent people are the leading cause of climate change.

This thing we call economic productivity is a direct measure of the damage we our doing to our planet's natural environment and our own human spirit.

I live in my own state of hypocrisy. By some planning and greater good fortune, my wife and I have avoided the automobile commuter lifestyle since the mid-eighties. We live lower on the food chain than most Americans. Yet we still enjoy the fruits of this world's high energy fossil fueled industrial consumer economy.

Anyone can live a low energy lifestyle. Walk out to the main breaker of your electric service, the main valve of your gas service, and turn them off. Pour sand into the engines of your automobiles.

Now what?

[Hermit-The-Prog]

4. carbon dioxide penalties

Call it a carbon tax or polluter tax, but make them pay for the damage.

First, of course, we have to get their GOP shills and puppets out of government.

[SWBTATTReg]

5. Yes, Citizens United wasn't for citizens like us but for billionaires so they would have a way ...

to buy elections. That's what they're doing. In secret or not, they all get together and pretty well buy out the Congress and other elected bodies. Using the so called rule of law and flaunting the boundaries. Look at all of the ways that rump is flaunting the law now. In obvious sight of the Supreme Court, in sight of Congress who are supposed to be watching over this illegal activities.

[Orsino]

6. Billions of people are the leading cause.

The billionaires get an outsize share of the blame, but they are few. We are many, and we kind of suck.

[workinclasszero]

8. Who do you think pumps more carbon into the atmosphere

Me or the Koch bros?

Take this Koch op for instance......

How the Koch Brothers Are Killing Public Transit Projects Around the Country
By Hiroko Tabuchi June 19, 2018

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — A team of political activists huddled at a Hardee’s one rainy Saturday, wolfing down a breakfast of biscuits and gravy. Then they descended on Antioch, a quiet Nashville suburb, armed with iPads full of voter data and a fiery script.

The group, the local chapter for Americans for Prosperity, which is financed by the oil billionaires Charles G. and David H. Koch to advance conservative causes, fanned out and began strategically knocking on doors. Their targets: voters most likely to oppose a local plan to build light-rail trains, a traffic-easing tunnel and new bus routes.

“Do you agree that raising the sales tax to the highest rate in the nation must be stopped?” Samuel Nienow, one of the organizers, asked a startled man who answered the door at his ranch-style home in March. “Can we count on you to vote ‘no’ on the transit plan?”

In cities and counties across the country — including Little Rock, Ark.; Phoenix, Ariz.; southeast Michigan; central Utah; and here in Tennessee — the Koch brothers are fueling a fight against public transit, an offshoot of their longstanding national crusade for lower taxes and smaller government.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/climate/koch-brothers-public-transit.html

And this.......

Koch Industries: The 100-Million Ton Carbon Gorilla
BRAD JOHNSON JAN 30, 2011, 8:40 PM

Koch Industries, the private company of the billionaire Koch brothers, is one of the primary sources of carbon pollution in the United States. However, the actual emissions profile of the diversified giant, with its oil and gas, chemicals, cattle, forestry, and synthetics holdings, is unknown, because of the lack of mandatory carbon reporting in the United States.

Furthermore, Koch is exempt from the risk disclosures that are standard for public corporations. The financial status of Koch Industries is similarly clouded in secret, with only vague statements of annual revenue around $100 billion and the Forbes estimates of the principals’ extraordinary wealth. Charles and David Koch have directed many millions of their shared $43 billion net worth into a vast propaganda machine denying the threat of global warming pollution, corrupting American politics to permit their pollution-based enterprise to continue.

The Koch Industries Carbon Footprint Is About 300 Million Tons. With the assumption that Koch has a carbon intensity on the order of oil majors such as Chevron and ExxonMobil, each billion dollars of revenue corresponds to 2 to 4 million tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent greenhouse gases. Therefore, each year, Koch Industries is likely responsible for about 300 million tons of carbon dioxide pollution every year. Flint Hills Resources, Koch’s refining subsidiary, processes 300 million barrels of oil a year. This one company — with its refining, pipeline, chemical, fertilizer, cattle, and forestry operations — is involved in up to five percent of the entire United States 7-gigaton carbon footprint.

https://thinkprogress.org/koch-industries-the-100-million-ton-carbon-gorilla-ab5c1551eb2b/

[Kaleva]

9. People using or purchasing the products from these companies are to blame.

[Orsino]

13. Kochs do their best to make it easy for us to destroy the planet...

...but we outnumber them billions to one. Man has been changing the climate, exterminating species, and poisoning the environment for hundreds of thousands of years.

There are simply too many of us for the planet to support in the style which we find comfortable. Kochs just get somewhat bigger shares of the blame.

[MrScorpio]

7. Kickage.

[bdamomma]

10. K&R

nt

[Kaleva]

11. A good number of those 100 companies are foreign

https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10/100-fossil-fuel-companies-investors-responsible-71-global-emissions-cdp-study-climate-change

[muriel_volestrangler]

12. If there was a mass movement in the developed world to go low-carbon, that'd be true

but there isn't, yet, so it's not. If we were willing to pay the extra for low or zero carbon energy, then the billionaires would have moved their money into that. If that movement existed, then carbon taxes would be a big feature of political manifestos of parties with a viable chance of power, and the publicly-traded companies would be moving into that arena. But ethical and green investing is still a niche market. How many pension funds have been forced to divest from fossil fuel by their members? Not many.

The average billionaire may be greedier and more wasteful than the average one of us, but not by the amount that would really make them the ones responsible.

Is global warming a major part of the congressional elections this year? No. I rest my case.