In the ‘coming soon’ notice announcing this article I said that “[t]here aren’t any real climate deniers anymore”. I was mistaken and there are a very few people like Jeremy Corbyn’s brother Piers Corbyn. I’ve only met and spoken with him once but I’m satisfied that he’s genuine in his beliefs despite them being misguided. He and others like him have the right to believe whatever they like and he’s harmless enough – while he may persuade a few people the vast majority will understand that he’s mistaken and wrong.
Image of UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak reads 1% RICHEST 100% CLIMATE DENIER
So apart from Piers Corbyn and a few similar people, there is no such thing as a climate denier nowadays. The Capitalists profiting from climate destruction have known for 60 years of more that they were profiting from destroying the planet and were forcing future generations to endure intolerable climate conditions, annihilating many thousands of species of plants and animals and generally totally fekking everything.
Governments are controlled, directed, owned by a very few extremely rich and powerful people, the very people that are profiting and maintaining their wealth, power and influence from destroying the planet. According to this perspective we do not exist in a democracy and it is instead a pretence hiding the influence of the rich and powerful. We exist in a plutocracy – we have a wealthy ruling class that politicians serve.
It cannot be accepted that politicians like UK’s Prime Minister Rishi Sunak or our expected next Prime Minister Keir Starmer and the like are mistaken true believers like Piers Corbyn believes. Rather they are climate deniers in the sense of the fossil fuel industries – Exxon, Shell and BP – who know fully well that they are destroying the planet but deceive and mislead to continue making a filthy profit. It’s obvious to see that these politician cnuts serve this rich elite’s interests – Tory and Labour UK governments have answered to media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, sucking up to him, grateful to accept his orders.
Image of InBedWithBigOil by Not Here To Be Liked + Hex Prints from Just Stop Oil’s You May Find Yourself… art auction. Featuring Rishi Sunak, Fossil Fuels and Rupert Murdoch.
Sunak, despite being fully aware of the climate crisis is continuing to destroy the planet. Announcing the go-ahead for the Rosebank oil field he said that he intends to get every last drop of North Sea oil.
UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak travelled to the COP28 Climate Conference by private jet.
‘Members of a super-rich elite who are super-heating the planet.’
As the 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP28) got underway in Dubai on November 30, the Prime Minister is facing fresh outrage from climate campaigners over his choice of transport to the meeting – private jet.
Downing Street confirmed that as well as Sunak, the new foreign secretary, David Cameron, and the King, were all taking separate private jets to a conference aimed at tackling climate change and cutting global emissions.
Defending the decision, the PM’s official spokesperson claimed there was nothing wrong with the UK’s leading representatives travelling to the crucial climate summit this way, as the government is ‘not anti-flying.’
“We are not anti-flying. We do not seek to restrict the public from doing so and it’s important the UK has strong attendance at COP28, given we continue to be a world leader in tackling climate change,” said the spokesperson.
No 10. also insisted that the plane Rishi Sunak was using operates on 30 percent sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), and carbon offsetting will be used to minimise its impact on the environment.
The announcement was not received well among climate campaigners and opposition parties.
Carla Denyer, co-leader of the Green Party, described Sunak and Cameron as members of a “super-rich elite who are super-heating the planet.”
“A short trip on a private jet will produce more carbon than the average person emits all year,” she continued.
Caroline Lucas said the “excessive climate-wrecking private flights amount to pumping jet fumes in the face of those on the frontline of this crisis.” The Green MP is also in support of a new levy on private jets to “make them think twice before hopping on the next one.”
As the COP28 climate talks begin today in Dubai, the Green Party has set out three key demands. They are to ‘keep 1.5 alive’; an agreement on the fair and managed phase-out of all fossil fuels; and measures to address ‘climate inequality.’ Greens are challenging the UK government to lead by example and put into practice policies that will help meet these demands.
Image of the Green Party’s Carla Denyer on BBC Question Time.
Co-leader of the Green Party, Carla Denyer, said:
“We need to hear a clear unambiguous commitment from the UK government to the 1.5C Paris Agreement target which was signed up to by 196 countries eight years ago at COP21. The government must agree to whatever it takes to get this target back on track. It’s going to require a hugely ambitious strategy, but the massive scaling up of climate action that is now necessary is because of dither and delay by countries like the UK in taking the bold action needed.
“Another vital outcome of COP28 must be the fair and managed phase-out of all fossil fuels. As one of the rich countries most responsible for the climate crisis, the UK must stand on the side of future generations and those on the front line of climate breakdown and agree to urgently move away from fossil fuels. The UK government must resist pressure from the petrostates and others at COP who wish to continue with business as usual and keep the world hooked on fossil fuels. At home this means leading by example with an immediate end to all new oil and gas licences and a rapid acceleration towards renewable energy.
“Thirdly, these climate talks must recognise that it is a super-rich elite who are super-heating the planet. The UK government must be willing to challenge the grotesque inequality driving climate breakdown and reform our tax system to make the polluter pay. This means taxing the wealth of the super-rich and introducing a carbon tax on the most polluting corporations and individuals. Such taxes, introduced globally, could generate the funds needed for a generous new Loss and Damage Fund to finance climate action in the poorest countries – those suffering the most from the impacts of climate breakdown but contributing the least to the crisis.”
Image of the Green Party’s Carla Denyer on BBC Question Time.
Co-leader of the Green Party, Carla Denyer, said:
“As the COP28 climate conference gets under way this week, governments can no longer ignore the very large elephant in the room – that it is a super-rich elite who are super-heating the planet.
“Private jets are the favoured form of transport by this super-rich elite and are the ultimate symbol of the ‘climate inequality’ that is not only leading to the breakdown of our climate but is also deeply unfair. A short trip on a private jet will produce more carbon than the average person emits all year.
“The Green Party wants the UK government to challenge the grotesque inequality driving climate breakdown. By pledging to impose a ban on all private jets taking off or landing at UK airports, the government would send a clear message to global leaders at COP28 that the super-rich cannot be allowed to continue with their lavish and destructive lifestyles at the expense of the rest of the global population.
“While the richest can use their vast wealth to cocoon themselves, the poorest have nowhere to hide from the impacts of climate chaos. COP28 needs to ensure those with the greatest responsibility for the climate crisis end their destructive ways. And we must redistribute the price paid by the heaviest polluters towards helping those on the front line of climate breakdown and to hasten the transition to a fairer, greener world.”
An Electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing (eVTOL) aircraft developed by Joby Aviation Inc. is seen outside the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) during the company’s initial public offering on August 11, 2021, in New York. (Photo: Liao Pan/China News Service via Getty Images)
The Future Can Do Better Than Air Taxis for the Super Rich
Just imagine if all the investments and expertise going into turning our skies into air-taxi lanes for the richest among us were instead going into air-speed services that actually meet real public needs.
Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane, it’s… Wall Street’s electric air-taxi future!
Earlier this month, a flying machine from the California-based Joby Aviation became the first “electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft—“eVTOL”—to go airborne from the Downtown Heliport that services Lower Manhattan’s financial district.
Joby is now expecting, by sometime in 2025, to be regularly ferrying high finance’s finest from Wall Street to JFK Airport in a mere seven minutes. Mere mortals taking autos and subways routinely spend well over an hour making the same trip.
We must not let ourselves treat climate and inequality as “separate issues,” environmental activist Greta Thunberg adds in her foreword to Oxfam’s latest appraisal of our world’s environmental and economic crises.
Joby’s new one-pilot, four-passenger eVTOL figures to be only the first of many corporate efforts to speed New York’s deepest pockets on their electric way to destinations both lucrative and exotic. A host of corporations—from China’s eHang to Germany’s Volocopter—already have big plans underway for zipping the world’s richest up and over congested city streets.
But just imagine if all the investments and expertise going into turning our skies into air-taxi lanes for the richest among us were instead going into air-speed services that actually meet real public needs. Imagine air taxis, for instance, ferrying critically injured rural residents to distant emergency care.
Those sorts of efforts will have to wait. The vast wealth of our wealthiest is instead bending innovation and expertise to servicing the already rich. And that bending, new research out of Oxfam details, is keeping our planet’s richest entertained at a vast environmental cost.
The world’s wealthiest 1%, Oxfam’s latest research reveals, are now generating more carbon emissions than all the world’s poorest 66% combined. The carbon emissions from this 1% will—between 2020 and 2030—“cause 1.3 million heat-related deaths” worldwide.
The world’s bottom 99%, Oxfam adds, would have to consume away for 1,500 years to match the carbon output that billionaires now produce in a single year.
But, even so, the political impact of the super rich actually outpaces the impact of their personal energy consumption. Only our richest “have the wealth, power, and influence to protect themselves.” And that same “wealth, power, and influence,” the new Oxfam study lays out, is keeping governments worldwide doing no more than “incentivizing incremental change” in energy policy instead of phasing out fossil fuels and investing massively in renewable energy.
We must not let ourselves treat climate and inequality as “separate issues,” environmental activist Greta Thunberg adds in her foreword to Oxfam’s latest appraisal of our world’s environmental and economic crises.
“Either we safeguard living conditions for all future generations,” she relates, “or we let a few very rich people maintain their destructive lifestyles and preserve an economic system geared towards short-term economic growth and shareholder profit.”
The “twin crises of climate and inequality,” Oxfam’s Climate Equality: A planet for the 99% report goes on to spell out, are “driving one another”—and only “a radical new approach” stands any chance of “overcoming the catastrophe unfolding before us.”
That “radical new approach” must take on “the disproportionate role that the richest individuals play in the climate crisis through their emissions, investments, and capture of politics.”
How can we best realize this badly needed “new approach”? We would need, argues Oxfam, to start aggressively taxing our super rich and the corporations that fuel their fortunes “to help pay for the transition to renewable energy.”
Just one example: Some 45 major oil and gas corporations averaged annual windfall profits of $237 billion in 2021 and 2022, dollars that overwhelmingly funneled straight into rich shareholder pockets. Governments worldwide, Oxfam notes, could have increased global investments in renewable energy by 31% had they taxed this windfall profit at 90%.
The new Oxfam study surveys a wide range of other options the world’s nations could pursue to subject the rich to serious taxation. Govrnments could, for instance, levy “steep and progressive” tax increases on the incomes of the ultra rich—as well as on their property, land, and inheritances. They could raise taxes on corporate profits, fossil fuels, and financial transactions—or levy entirely new taxes on “high-emitting luxury travel.”
The world, in other words, could have plenty of money for social and climate spending “if rich-country governments were willing to implement bold and progressive tax reforms.”
“We cannot allow the richest countries to claim that they cannot afford to raise the trillions needed,” Oxfam ends up concluding. “Mobilizing this money simply takes political will.”
