Dynastic Wealth

... AKA: Rich Legacy Pukes

Yacht Buyers

The author makes one slip - he assumes the mega-wealthy can be shamed.

It can work with some - kinda - but it's wrong-headed, and needs to be stomped out of our thinking.

Plutocrats assume they're very special in a very special kind of way. They think their genius at "creating wealth" exempts them from the need for the moral code that binds the rest of us to each other.

The need to adhere to an ethical framework is just not something they believe applies to them.

Above all else, they need to believe their own press clippings about how they're different from other people, so they get to do things and live in ways that no one else can. They hate the "collective", so they have to hate anything that requires a collective effort - except of course the collective effort that keeps putting billions in their pockets, or the one that looks a lot like the crew of a SuperYacht.

The Superyachts of Billionaires Are Starting to Look a Lot Like Theft

If you’re a billionaire with a palatial boat, there’s only one thing to do in mid-May: Chart your course for Istanbul and join your fellow elites for an Oscars-style ceremony honoring the builders, designers and owners of the world’s most luxurious vessels, many of them over 200 feet long.

The nominations for the World Superyacht Awards were all delivered in 2022, and the largest contenders are essentially floating sea mansions, complete with amenities like glass elevators, glass-sided pools, Turkish baths and all-teak decks. The 223-foot Nebula, owned by the WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum, comes with an air-conditioned helicopter hangar.

I hate to be a wet blanket, but the ceremony in Istanbul is disgraceful. Owning or operating a superyacht is probably the most harmful thing an individual can do to the climate. If we’re serious about avoiding climate chaos, we need to tax, or at the very least shame, these resource-hoarding behemoths out of existence. In fact, taking on the carbon aristocracy, and their most emissions-intensive modes of travel and leisure, may be the best chance we have to boost our collective “climate morale” and increase our appetite for personal sacrifice — from individual behavior changes to sweeping policy mandates.

On an individual basis, the superrich pollute far more than the rest of us, and travel is one of the biggest parts of that footprint. Take, for instance, Rising Sun, the 454-foot, 82-room megaship owned by the DreamWorks co-founder David Geffen. According to a 2021 analysis in the journal Sustainability, the diesel fuel powering Mr. Geffen’s boating habit spews an estimated 16,320 tons of carbon-dioxide-equivalent gases into the atmosphere annually, almost 800 times what the average American generates in a year.

And that’s just a single ship. Worldwide, more than 5,500 private vessels clock in about 100 feet or longer, the size at which a yacht becomes a superyacht. This fleet pollutes as much as entire nations: The 300 biggest boats alone emit 315,000 tons of carbon dioxide each year, based on their likely usage — about as much as Burundi’s more than 10 million inhabitants. Indeed, a 200-foot vessel burns 132 gallons of diesel fuel an hour standing still, and can guzzle 2,200 gallons just to travel 100 nautical miles.

Then there are the private jets, which make up a much higher overall contribution to climate change. Private aviation added 37 million tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere in 2016, which rivals the annual emissions of Hong Kong or Ireland. (Private plane use has surged since then, so today’s number is likely higher.)

You’re probably thinking: But isn’t that a drop in the bucket compared to the thousands of coal plants around the world spewing carbon? It’s a common sentiment; last year, Christophe Béchu, France’s minister of the environment, dismissed calls to regulate yachts and chartered flights as “le buzz” — flashy, populist solutions that get people amped up but ultimately only fiddle at the margins of climate change.

But this misses a much more important point. Research in economics and psychology suggests humans are willing to behave altruistically — but only when they believe everyone is being asked to contribute. People “stop cooperating when they see that some are not doing their part,” as the cognitive scientists Nicolas Baumard and Coralie Chevallier wrote last year in Le Monde.

In that sense, superpolluting yachts and jets don’t just worsen climate change, they lessen the chance that we will work together to fix it. Why bother, when the luxury goods mogul Bernard Arnault is cruising around on the Symphony, a $150 million, 333-foot superyacht?

“If some people are allowed to emit 10 times as much carbon for their comfort,” Mr. Baumard and Ms. Chevallier asked, “then why restrict your meat consumption, turn down your thermostat or limit your purchases of new products?”

Whether we’re talking about voluntary changes (insulating our attics and taking public transit) or mandated ones (tolerating a wind farm on the horizon or saying goodbye to a lush lawn), the climate fight hinges to some extent on our willingness to participate. When the ultrarich are given a free pass, we lose faith in the value of that sacrifice.

Taxes aimed at superyachts and private jets would take some of the sting out of these conversations, helping to improve everybody’s climate morale,” a term coined by Georgetown Law professor Brian Galle. But making these overgrown toys a bit more costly isn’t likely to change the behavior of the billionaires who buy them. Instead, we can impose new social costs through good, old-fashioned shaming.

Last June, @CelebJets — a Twitter account that tracked the flights of well-known figures using public data, then calculated their carbon emissions for all to see — revealed that the influencer Kylie Jenner took a 17-minute flight between two regional airports in California. “kylie jenner is out here taking 3 minute flights with her private jet, but I’m the one who has to use paper straws,” one Twitter user wrote.

As media outlets around the world covered the backlash, other celebrities like Drake and Taylor Swift scrambled to defend their heavy reliance on private plane travel. (Twitter suspended the @CelebJets account in December after Elon Musk, a frequent target of jet-tracking accounts, acquired the platform.)

There’s a lesson here: Massively disproportionate per capita emissions get people angry. And they should. When billionaires squander our shared supply of resources on ridiculous boats or cushy chartered flights, it shortens the span of time available for the rest of us before the effects of warming become truly devastating. In this light, superyachts and private planes start to look less like extravagance and more like theft.

Change can happen — and quickly. French officials are exploring curbing private plane travel. And just last week — after sustained pressure from activists — Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam announced it would ban private jets as a climate-saving measure.

Even in the United States, carbon shaming can have outsized impact. Richard Aboulafia, who’s been an aviation industry consultant and analyst for 35 years, says that cleaner, greener aviation, from all-electric city hoppers to a new class of sustainable fuels, is already on the horizon for short flights. Private aviation’s high-net-worth customers just need more incentive to adopt these new technologies. Ultimately, he says, it’s only our vigilance and pressure that will speed these changes along.

There’s a similar opportunity with superyachts. Just look at Koru, Jeff Bezos’s newly built 416-foot megaship, a three-masted schooner that can reportedly cross the Atlantic on wind power alone. It’s a start.

Even small victories challenge the standard narrative around climate change. We can say no to the idea of limitless plunder, of unjustifiable overconsumption. We can say no to the billionaires’ toys.

SuperYacht sinks off Italian coast

How Rich?

It would be good if I could figure out how to embed this, but I can't - and it's possible the people who came up with it are smart enough not to give me the chance.

Anyway, go look it over, and scroll all the way thru it so you get the full effect of just how fucked up our system of "meritocratic capitalism" has become.

https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/

I got ridiculously lucky and made a few million dollars in my career. If you take all that money and make a stack of 100-dollar bills, it would be about 10 feet tall.

If you take all of Jeff Bezos's money (let's be really conservative and say $150 billion), and you make a stack of 100-dollar bills, it would be over 100 miles tall.

100 MILES

The Whims Of The Wealthy

NYT:

In the Manhattan restaurants around Lincoln Center, the tips often rose and fell with the changing playbill. A popular classic musical could mean more preshow diners, and more income. A more famous actress as Eliza Doolittle could do the same. The end of a big run, like “My Fair Lady,” meant the opposite: Tips would be down for a while.

“We were dependent on how well shows were doing at Lincoln Center, and we really did pay attention,” said Emma Craig, who was a server at the Atlantic Grill a block away before the coronavirus crisis. She has not returned to that job yet, or to another singing at a private supper club downtown. In both jobs, she said, “I am dependent on the trickle down.”

The recession has crushed this kind of work in particular: service jobs that depend directly on the spending — and the whims — of the well-off.

Too much money (which means too much power) is in the hands of too few people.

Let's Do Some Pie

Wealth inequity is the surest way for rich people to fuck themselves out of being rich.

Over time, wealth (and the power that always goes with it) migrates upwards.  More and more money and power are concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, until just a very small number of plutocrats are running the whole show.

In order for that to work, less and less money and power has to be shared by more and more people, until folks come to understand that they've been left with nothing more to lose.

That's when the man on the white horse rides in, riles 'em up and they crash the plutocrats' party in the most unpleasant ways - all in the name of goodness and patriotism and Making America Great Again.

To be sure, there's a righteousness about trying to even things up - trying to get equilibrium back into the thing. But when a system is as badly out of balance as it is in USAmerica Inc, people get desperate. And desperate people do some pretty crazy (ie: stoopid) things - like following the wrong guys who talk them into doing some really fucked shit.

Trump is the deceiver.

If I ignore what I consider the silliness of people who believed in gods and demons and a geocentric universe, and look to the basic human circumstances that seem to prevail no matter the place or time, I can get pretty cozy with the warnings of a mad monk in a cave 1800 years ago, trying to suss out why so many rich people act like such dicks, and why it's so easy for them to sucker so many normal everyday otherwise-clear-thinking folks.

It is a wonderment.

BTW - looking at Trump as that false messiah helps explain the fucked up "logic" of American Evangelicals.

And also too - the parallels with Nazi occultism are getting really freaky.

Perspective

Jeff Bezos has over $110 Billion.

That's 110,000 people with a million dollars each.

If Liz Warren's Wealth Tax had been in effect since 1983, Mr Bezos would still have more than $86 Billion.

We can stop feeling sorry for billionaires.

hat tip = Robert Reich

The Patron Geek

How rich is Bill Gates?

USA - USA - USA

We're number...18?  Aah fuck.

Per Global Wealth DataBook (Credit Suisse):

What happens when a country's middle class takes a hit?  Look around.