Why tax their billions?
Taxing socially and ecologically destructive wealth should be a no brainer. The urgent action needed to power the world with cheaper, cleaner renewable energy and reduce our energy use needs huge public investment, but governments in the Global North are failing to step up. Controversy over who foots the bill for climate action is happening in many countries around the world. Forcing the richest in society to pay through implementing wealth taxes is one of the clearest and most straightforward solutions to this problem. Not only could governments raise the trillions needed to act on the climate crisis, they would also help reduce wealth inequality between the richest and poorest.
The question of who pays for climate action is at the heart of a culture war that is being stoked across Europe and beyond. The climate-denying far-right is gaslighting the public on a planetary scale – saying that ordinary people will have to pay for the cost of climate-friendly measures, like building more solar panels or installing heat pumps. That’s just not true. Who pays is not an inevitability, but a choice – and the reality is that the super-rich can and must be forced to contribute. Billionaires and multi-millionaires often pay far less than their right and just share in taxes, while contributing disproportionately to the climate crisis, which impacts the poorest people in wealthy nations and climate-vulnerable nations alike. A wealth tax would make the resources needed to tackle the climate and cost of living crises available. It could power cheaper, renewable energy, make all of our homes safe and warm, travel cheaper and more convenient, our air and water cleaner, and provide long promised finance to the world’s most impoverished nations to repair and prevent climate damage and scale up the renewable energy transition.
There can be no more delays, no more scapegoating, and no more excuses. Almost ten years after the signing of the Paris Agreement, rich countries are still failing to deliver even the minimum needed each year to repair and prevent climate damage, to build climate-proof infrastructure, or to scale up renewable energy at the level and speed required by the climate crisis. Government leaders – many exposed to the lobbying of billionaires – have too often chosen austerity over action. Incorrectly and disastrously, many of them have cast the blame for a broken economic system and social issues driven by inequality on marginalised groups like immigrants and the LGBTQ+ community. Rather than making the political choices to ensure children have food on their plates, people receive good healthcare and can live in and afford warm homes.
It is the super-rich – hoarding staggering wealth, avoiding taxes and exploiting ordinary working people – that are one of the reasons our economic system is broken. And hand in hand, the fossil fuel bosses and other mega-polluting businesses have caused and are worsening the climate crisis with their lobbying and refusal to change. Taking urgent, meaningful measures to tax their excessive, destructive, and illegitimate wealth is one step towards fixing it. The billionaires included in this briefing are just the tip of the iceberg. But they are largely characteristic of an ultra-wealthy class that, until now, have acted with impunity and represent not only a problem to be solved but an opportunity to deliver transformative change for everyone who cares about climate justice.
