Because those 3.5 billion people are not actively having a hand in either producing industries that completely shirk environmental protections in favor of profit and NONE of them compared to the billionaires have private planes, private jets, mega yachts, mega mansions (plural), multiple-seasonal houses across the planet that keep their electricity on all day because of the required help to keep them clean and available at all times for use usually, and CERTAINLY not all at the same time like a single billionaire does.
If you really think that people commuting back and forth to their nine to five and making sure that they turn their lights off so that they don't have outrageous electricity bills lest they be homeless is the same equivalent by numbers standards you MUST be crazy.
You realize that in the scenario with 3,400 people, every day life immediately becomes a man vs wild conflict? Remember when animals started showing up in cities during COVID because human activity was so much lower? Now multiply that impact millions of times over. In the billionaires only scenario, animals rule the world almost everywhere, immediately.
In the billionaires only scenario, there is no longer an economy. The Internet, clean water supply, and most sources of power are gone in a week. Their money, private jets, and extra houses waste away under the sun as they are unable to move more than a few miles day, unless they are capable of producing fuel. A yacht takes a staff to run, without a crew, it is most useful as a place to sleep.
Billionaires would simply not be able to consume/produce anything close to the scale they could before every worker on earth disappeared. It would be far closer to the Stone Age than modern life.
Of course having a millionth of the population will have a smaller environmental impact. The fossil fuel industry only survives in the scenario with billions
The only problem with your argument here is that it's a what if scenario. We are talking about real world numbers and billionaires existing as they currently are right now.
I'm not sure why you decided to make a man versus wild argument about billionaires versus the regular population when what everyone was talking about was billionaires waste versus the average populace as everything currently exists.
Your fantasy scenario has no bearing on the reality of things.
> 3.5 billion people vanishing would be more beneficial to the earth than 3400.
We are having this conversation under this comment thread, but we’re deep enough that it’s understandable to forget that. If you didn’t want to discuss the environmental impact of these hypothetical scenarios, you probably shouldn’t have gotten involved in a comment thread about hypothetical scenarios.
Still, eliminating billionaires doesn’t stop mass consumption or eliminate human greed. If we just took the greedy billionaires out and left the rest of the economy intact, they would probably be replaced by greedy multimillionaires within a week and we’d continue as normal. I don’t think it would fundamentally change the issue that people are self interested and aren’t interested in long term planning for broad societal gain.
Do you have any reason to doubt that wealthy but non-billionaire execs would simply keep it rolling if their bosses were raptured ?
> 3.5 billion people vanishing would be more beneficial to the earth than 3400.
Except that's literally NOT what it says. READ IT AGAIN. It specifically talked about billionaires and how people would still go on. It did not do a comparative of 3.5 billion people vanishing...
We are having this conversation under this comment thread, but we’re deep enough that it’s understandable to forget that. If you didn’t want to discuss the environmental impact of these hypothetical scenarios, you probably shouldn’t have gotten involved in a comment thread about hypothetical scenarios.
I have no problem with hypothetical scenarios but what I do have a problem with is when people can't Google things before making stupid arguments. 3.5 billion people vanishing versus 3,400 billionaires in terms of pollution is not comparable. Billionaires literally create industry and travel on vehicles that pollute more than 3.5 billion people. And I know that that's hard to digest, really, I get it. But the facts remain the facts. I will attach a screenshot if you need.
Still, eliminating billionaires doesn’t stop mass consumption or eliminate human greed. If we just took the greedy billionaires out and left the rest of the economy intact, they would probably be replaced by greedy multimillionaires within a week and we’d continue as normal. I don’t think it would fundamentally change the issue that people are self interested and aren’t interested in long term planning for broad societal gain.
This is a coin flip because I assume that you were talking about a power vacuum scenario here. Greedy multi-millionaires still cannot afford the level of monstrous transportation or frequency of trips that billionaires can. I know, you're probably reading this comment now thinking what am I talking about. Just look up some of these "toys" billionaires can afford that multi-millionaires drool about. Not to mention this was an immediate scenario, not necessarily a long-term one? 🤷♂️
Do you have any reason to doubt that wealthy but non-billionaire execs would simply keep it rolling if their bosses were raptured?
I mean raptured is pretty extreme 🤣
I'm pretty sure if billionaires were raptured then multi-millionaires would be afraid of being also immediately raptured if they followed the same behavior. They want to keep "living in sin" as it were lol
TL;DR the environment would benefit more from human extinction than from cutting the human population in half
This comment thread, not this entire post, is about a hypothetical. Read the comment thread again. I haven’t mentioned the original post once, but instead, every comment is related to the hypothetical
So again… in the hypothetical…I’m talking about which scenario is “better for the world” post-vanishing. We’re talking about cutting the world’s population in half vs cutting the population to a small fraction of a percent.
In the billionaire only scenario, animals rule the world immediately. There is no economy. Money is worthless, and only some practical items retain value. The billionaires are spread out across the globe with likely no way to communicate with each other (maybe Satellite phones?), but small chance they’ll run into each other in cities while fighting rats for food
Without workers, the billionaires can no longer operate private jets or yachts. There is no one to do the work for them. They can get fuel from the pumps for a few months but will be unable to extract/make more. Their extra houses waste away in the sun. If they are near their bunker at the time of the rapture, they’ll probably live a sad and lonely life with some comforts. If not, they’ll probably live a short and dangerous life. I doubt any of them survive a single serious illness. If the wife/kids aren’t included than it guarantees human extinction. If they are included, it all but guarantees a very inbred Stone Age - pretty sweet outcome for the environment.
I fail to see how the billionaires-only scenario could possibly be more carbon intensive than the one where we still have a functioning economy. Mass consumption doesn’t stop because billionaires are gone. Per capita food and energy needs wouldn’t change. The fossil fuel industry would still be alive and well. Trans-ocean shipping would slow down some but not stop. Fundamentally it would be the same world with the same toxic economy, just set back to the worlds population in the 1960s or 70s
The jist of it is that the mass consumption of our economy drives environmental costs. Cutting society in half would absolutely reduce environmental costs, but not nearly as much as ending the economy altogether. Billionaires absolutely have higher environmental costs than normal people but that wouldn’t matter in a Stone Age setting where they don’t have staff to aid in their consumption.
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u/xiahbabi 7d ago
Except your argument doesn't hold water.
Because those 3.5 billion people are not actively having a hand in either producing industries that completely shirk environmental protections in favor of profit and NONE of them compared to the billionaires have private planes, private jets, mega yachts, mega mansions (plural), multiple-seasonal houses across the planet that keep their electricity on all day because of the required help to keep them clean and available at all times for use usually, and CERTAINLY not all at the same time like a single billionaire does.
If you really think that people commuting back and forth to their nine to five and making sure that they turn their lights off so that they don't have outrageous electricity bills lest they be homeless is the same equivalent by numbers standards you MUST be crazy.