Among the 1,500 business leaders in attendance were oil and gas executives from the world’s most polluting companies – such as BP, Chevron and Saudi Aramco. Also on the guest list: chief executive officers of JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo, banks that are top financiers of oil and gas and recently came under fire for funding a group campaigning against climate efforts, and the CEO of BlackRock , who despite his green rhetoric, still holds $133 billion in the stocks and bonds of the top oil and gas companies.
Speaking in Davos on Thursday, activist Greta Thunberg told attendees that it was “absurd” to trust a class of people who “mainly drive the destruction of the planet” to willfully help slow climate change.
“Somehow those are the people we seem to rely on to solve our problems when they’ve proven time and time again that they don’t prioritize that,” she said. “They prioritize self-greed, corporate greed and short-term economic gains over people and over the planet.”
One study after the other shows that the richest people in the world live far lower-carbon lifestyles than the rest of us. Take for example their propensity to travel by private jet, which by one estimate emits up to 14 times more emissions than traveling by commercial airliner.
Last year, more than a thousand trips by private plane to the World Economic Forum generated four times the carbon emissions of such planes worldwide in an average week according to a recent Greenpeace report, which highlighted the “ecological hypocrisy” of the participants.
Thanks to the use of private jets and other high-carbon habits like cruising yachts and living in mansions, the personal consumption habits of billionaires are a thousand times more carbon-polluting than those of the average citizen. But lifestyle choices are not even the biggest driver of the climate crisis by the global elite.
Even more crucial is their role in shaping the global economy. According to a 2022 study by charity Oxfam, billionaires emit more than a million times the carbon emissions of the average person after accounting for the global warming pollution from the companies they invest in.
Certainly executives spend more time talking about climate change, also in Davos. In fact, pledges to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 have skyrocketed in recent years, by 60 percent to over 11,000 in September 2022, the United Nations said at the conference.
“Clients are becoming better informed about the energy transition, demand for sustainable and green products has held up well and clients are increasingly keen to measure the impact of their portfolios,” said Suni Harford, president of the wealth management arm of bank and financial services company UBS, told Portal.
But despite those pledges, the world is still way off track to meet its climate goals.
A major assessment by the UN’s Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services last year warned that the focus of world leaders on short-term gains and economic growth has fueled ecosystem destruction and impacted human well-being.
There is evidence that to truly solve the climate crisis, wealth, power and property must be redistributed. As noted in a May 2022 report, economic inequality is a major handicap for climate policy because it increases the likelihood of government corruption, undermines trust in officials, and fosters feelings of division that make it difficult to carry out major policy projects.
“Inequality undermines the social foundations of democracy and makes it more difficult to develop collective responses to climate change,” said Fergus Green, senior lecturer at University College London and co-author of the paper.
If redistribution is the answer, the world seems to be moving in the wrong direction. An analysis this week found that billionaire wealth is growing at a staggering $2.7 billion a day. In addition, the top 1 percent has grabbed almost two-thirds of all new wealth created since 2020 – almost twice as much as the bottom 99 percent of the world’s population. As a result, the richest 1 percent now owns 45.6 percent of all global wealth, while the poorest half of the world owns just 0.75 percent.
The World Economic Forum itself recognizes that inequality is a major problem. But promoting a fairer world is not in the interests of many of the conference’s attendees, who cost up to a quarter of a million dollars to attend.
“Without massive outside public pressure, these people will go as far as they can,” Thunberg said in her speech on Thursday. “They will continue to throw people under the bus for their own benefit.”
Dharna Noor can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @dharnanoor.