also I want to clarify that my analogy was more about companies than about billionaires
... in the first-world bubble
There's a hypothetical from an Oxford debate that I am struggling to find that was something like this:
If you are poor family and starving and for every day you could press a button and giant plume of CO2 would get released, but your child would not starve, would not get disease and would lead a fulfilled life, would you press that button?
Every parent would smash that button until their hand bled.
In the first world bubble, we have this button (more or less) but every person on earth would want this button too.
Once we return to a more grounded concept of money, perhaps gold based, where debts are a lot more controlled due to an absence of uncontrolled moneyprinting, growth can then slow down, allowing us more time to digest what's actually good for us and what's not.
Now, what would your comment look like, for example, in context of adopting coal, that is demonstrably much much worse for health and environment and also was adopted when there was hardly any law or public pressure to protect nature?
If we extrapolate the catastrophising it would seem downright apocalyptic. And yet, coal adoption unambiguously led to increased life expectancy and quality of life. Now let's do the tradeoff for plastics :)