On Wednesday, October 27th, billionaire Bill Gates celebrated his 66th birthday on a multi-million-dollar yacht in a closed bay in Turkey alongside 50 other guests, including founder and former CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos.
Gates and Bezos claim to be fighting against climate change, with Gates having authored a book titled “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need”, published in February of 2021. Bezos has pledged 2 billion (0.009% of his total wealth) to “restoring nature and transforming food systems” that have been affected by climate change and its ramifications.
Remember the multi-million-dollar yacht mentioned at the beginning? Named “Lana”, it is a 107-meter superyacht that Gates is renting for approximately 2 million a week. It has been proven that the about 300 superyachts around the world that are in operation use over thirty-two million gallons of oil and produce 627 million pounds of carbon dioxide emissions a year.
Not only this, but after attending Gates’ obviously very eco-friendly birthday bash, Bezos returned to his own yacht (The Flying Fox) on a private helicopter, which travelled a 120-mile round-trip. This helicopter ride resulted in the emission of about 215 pounds of CO2 into the atmosphere.
For a couple of “climate activists”, these humble billionaires are contributing quite a lot to the issue that they claim to care about preventing. We see this time and time again, where large public figures put themselves on a pedestal for funding organizations and movements that are fighting against urgent real-world environmental issues, while simultaneously being the biggest perpetrators and creators of the things that are destroying our planet and the lives that live on it.
It needs to be brought further into the spotlight how little these figures care about the planet that we live on, and how desperately they want us to think they care about the effect that their actions have on the planet, while blaming the general population for the problems that they themselves are causing.
