Hey Bill and other elites - does this mean no more 20,000 square foot homes and private jets?
He apparently has 6 total houses.
See: https://www.velvetropes.com/backstage/bill-gates-house
Anyways, Gates is always preaching about “policy” (The Gates Foundation is about power and getting governments to fund their objectives, ultimately) but never actually sets a good individual example of how to live, like normal citizens.
I mean, it is not coincidental that he is preaching about global warming right after the Nord Stream pipeline was blown, which released an unprecedented amount of methane in to the atmosphere.
To simplify, let's assume that Bill Gates has a Boeing 747, which burns about 38 pounds of fuel per mile [1]. Distance between New York (JFK) and London (LHR) is 3,440 mile. For a round trip, double that, so we have about 261k pounds, or 118 ton of fuel. Applying jet fuel to CO2 conversion ratio of 3.16 [2], we get about 374 ton of CO2.
If Bill Gates takes this trip every day for a year, we get about 137,000 tons of CO2. Okay, that's a lot! However,
Mankind emitted about 35 billion ton of CO2 in 2020. That's about 66,000 tons per minute. So Bill Gates would have contributed about two minute's worth of global warming in a year.
That's still an extremely large amount for a single person, but the question we should ask is, did Bill Gates's action (such as advocating nuclear power) result in delaying global warming by two minutes? Not one year, not even a day, but just two minutes?
Alternatively, did he speed up mankind's preparation, again, by two minutes?
If the answer to either question is Yes, then I'd argue that it's worth the CO2 spent on it.
Now let's invert the question. What's the justification for people who say "Fuck global warming!" and hop on a trip to Hawaii? Collectively they sustain many more flights per year, and it's not like most of them are doing anything substantial to mitigate AGW.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft
[2] https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-the-growth-in-gr...
Because the BP execs aren't being hypocrites and telling all the commoners to lower their living standards..
Maybe not directly, but neither is Bill Gates.
For the vast majority of other ultra rich, they should be suffering through awful airports and airlines like everyone else. Partly just so there's a chance their collective frustration of flying actually results in somehow working to improve the broken industry.
When you use "leading by example" as an absolute stick, what happens is that you end up being more lenient to the more corrupt and greedy. These people propose that everybody should just take whatever they can buy with their money, consequences be damned, and they live the exact same life - no hypocrisy at all! (It's just a coincidence that they have so much money and power that they can fuck over the less fortunate, while others can't.)
I have seen it play out many times in my country (Korea), which is hardly unique in that regard. Once in a while a politician would propose, say, an election reform to cut down illegal funding, and others would attack him "Look at the hypocrite! He says he's against illegal funding of elections, but he used more than one tenth of the illegal funding we did!" True story.
The headline says 'no.'
He consumes way way way more than the average citizen.
I don’t even know why people listen to him.
Shouldn’t we be listening to actual climate scientists in the US government? And not some software CEO who has conflicts of interest? Why are we even platforming this dude and giving him any legitimacy?