In the memo, Gates did pay lip service to the reality of his
and other billionaires’ emissions, and noted that the poor will be
disproportionately affected by climate change, but he still
characterized worry about this as a “doomsday” approach. He writes, on the
website Gates
Notes that catalogs his thoughts, “The doomsday outlook is causing much
of the climate community to focus too much on near-term emissions goals, and
it’s diverting resources from the most effective things we should be doing to
improve life in a warming world.” Instead, he says, we should adjust to this
new, warmer planet—as though working with urgency both to limit warming and
adapt to it to protect the most vulnerable among us is a zero-sum game. But
Gates’s contradictory logic—or his apparent belief that his purchase of
“legitimate carbon credits” redeems his own enormous emissions—is beside the
point: We shouldn’t be giving the opinions of billionaires this much weight,
anyway.
To be sure, billionaires’ decisions are sometimes important
to report because their thoughts can lead to actions that affect us all. That’s
because they have consolidated so much power and so many resources—economic,
material, and social—that their activities threaten the rest of the globe. By using
headlines as a thought-chyron for billionaires, rather than as an opportunity
to call attention to the problem of their obscene wealth consolidation, news
outlets risk legitimizing billionaires’ hyper-privileged viewpoints through
clicks. This can perpetuate flawed understandings of reality, driven by people
with the morally questionable motivation to be wealthier
than most countries across the globe.
Billionaires’ reflections are often reported with little
attention to the deeper social and structural issues that frame the issues
affecting the rest of us. Billionaires live above any social or economic
constraints, yet their thoughts are reported with the apparent expectation that
readers will accept this inanity as actual news, as accurate facts, rather than
musings of a person untouched by the material problems of the world. How can
Gates’s claim that climate change won’t be humanity’s demise be taken seriously
when he has all the resources in the world to live well and protected, regardless of the consequences of climate change? Why do we care what he says
about this when it is those who are most vulnerable who will actually bear the
effects? Reporting the thoughts of billionaires as news is as grotesque as the
amount of wealth they’ve been allowed to accumulate.
