Dirty money fuels climate crunch

It looked like it was all going swimmingly. It seemed that the excess of 21^st-century billionairehood was on track to gel effortlessly with the remnants of the 13^th-century excess caked into the walks and waterways of Venice. Here was very new high-tech money-grabbing ownership – for just a few days – of the very old low-tech grandeur that pervades Venice.

That new money arrived in environmentally-destructive private jets and super yachts to one of the most environmentally fragile cities in the world. What could possibly go wrong?

But then the motley crew of protesters upped their game, just as the first guests to Jeff Bezos’s wedding struggled off their engine-powered gondolas onto dry land. Things became more tense. No-one was certain: was this down to the threat of inflatable crocodiles being unleashed into the Venetian waterways, or the dramatic events unfolding in Iran?

Anyway, the tone became more subdued.

Meanwhile, at about the same time, on the other side of the Atlantic, a former pupil of Cape Town’s St George’s Grammar School had just claimed victory in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary. (Zohran Mamdani was at the Cape Town school for a few short childhood years; he seems to have left a good impression.)

Given that New York has long been a Democratic stronghold, he now looks a certainty to take the mayoral title later this year.

But the guys with the money and most of the power are nervous. And given that unimaginable things keep happening in the US these days, it’s not impossible that the big, moneyed Democrats who poured funds into Andrew Cuomo’s unsuccessful mayoral primary campaign will swing behind an independent candidate in a bid to ensure New York does not get a socialist Muslim mayor.

So, while his victory in the primary was a stunning rejection of the tired old Democratic establishment, there is no certainty that establishment won’t block Mamdani’s access to the mayoral office.

There is certainty about one thing though, Mamdani won’t be one of Bezos’s 200 guests. But it’s likely that his victory will be a hot topic at the various €1,000-a-seat meals over the three-day wedding bash.

Tax the rich

Mamdani, who wants to tax the rich so he can afford some serious social upliftment projects, told the BBC recently: “This [New York] is a city where one in four of its people are living in poverty, a city where 500,000 kids go to sleep hungry every night.

“And ultimately, it’s a city that is in danger of losing that which makes it so special.”

Of course, Venice is also in danger of losing that which makes it so special. It is sinking into the ocean. It has a housing problem. And increasingly the locals are resentful of tourists who bring job opportunities but at a cost.

The protest around Bezos’s wedding isn’t just about another 200 or so tourists piling into the city. As one of the protesters told CNN, it’s the symbolism.

What Bezos and his wedding guests symbolise is the out-of-control, unconstrained power of the wealthy. It’s rather reminiscent of the unconstrained power of the Venetian wealthy back in the 13^th century.

Over a thousand years of political development, including democracy and universal franchise, are apparently redundant.

As for the symbolism, well that was best captured by the reports of 95 private jets parked at Venice airport and all the super yachts moored at the Venice pier.

Here were the super wealthy reminding us all not just of their super wealth, but of their massive, unchecked ability to wreak havoc on the environment. And they were doing it in one of the most environmentally fragile settings in the world.

The top 10%

A recent report by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis reckons the world’s wealthiest 10% are responsible for 66% of observed global warming since 1990. The consumption and investments of wealthy individuals have had a disproportionate impact on extreme weather events, says the report. “These impacts are especially severe in vulnerable tropical regions like the Amazon, Southeast Asia, and Southern Africa – all areas that have historically contributed the least to global emissions.”

That’s a grim but tame analysis compared to Oxfam’s no-holds-barred report released at the end of last year. The yachts, jets and polluting investments of the world’s 50 richest billionaires are accelerating the climate crisis, says Oxfam. Its research shows that “the emissions of the world’s super rich 1% are causing economic losses of trillions of dollars; contributing to huge crop losses; and leading to millions of excess deaths”.

The World Inequality Lab was one of the first think-tanks to go big on highlighting the strong connection between wealth and carbon emissions. In a 2023 report it warned that the total carbon emissions by the top 1% of the global rich largely exceed emissions by the entire bottom half of the global population.

“Or to put it more drastically,” the lab said, “the consumption and investment choices of a fraction of the population are causing significantly more ecological harm than the entire bottom half of the world’s population combined.”

By their reckoning each member of the top 1% emits 101 tonnes of CO₂ a year; the top 10% emits 28.7 tonnes each; the middle 40% emits 6.1 tonnes; and the bottom 50% emits 1.4 tonnes.

All three reports call on governments to introduce policies to address the issue. They presumably know such policies – restraining consumption by the super wealthy – are unlikely ever to be implemented. It turns out that as a function of their extreme wealth, the super wealthy have extreme influence over most politicians.

Hardly surprising then that protesters have daubed the walls of Venice with anti-Bezos slogans and that hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers voted for the anti-establishment candidate.

_{Top image: Rawpixel / Currency collages.}