Copyright newrepublic
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, 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.
