Climate billionaires needed

I was talking to a friend of mine about the gasoline prices going through the roof in America. There is a hype of electric cars online but they are nowhere in sight except some Teslas one might spot in posh neighborhoods. Even if one wants to buy a Tesla, the wait time for the vehicle to be delivered is between 6 and 11 months. I commented how electric cars were needed urgently and he said by the time electric cars would be available, gasoline prices would have gone down again and so there wouldn’t be much need for them.

It is all about fulfilling the need in the present. The small problem now is bigger than the big problem later. People demand electric cars to reduce their expenses instead of reducing carbon emissions. That is how the average person’s mind works. And it is true across the board. Therefore, I am convinced that climate action would come not from a genuine sympathy toward the planet and its inhabitants or from the need to preserve this planet for the generations ahead. The real change would rather come from a mechanism that would answer the people’s genuine needs and offer very tangible benefits.

The global population did not shift to adopting computers because they thought efficiency in computing would solve humanity’s major resource wasting problems. Steve Jobs invented personal computing in his California garage not just for human beings to have a tool for their minds. He wanted to sell the tool. Bill Gates quit his Harvard education to develop Microsoft not because he wanted to usher humanity into a modern age. He wanted to sell Windows. I remember the early days of the internet when we used to go to what were called internet clubs back then. We went because the internet was cool. I do not know anyone who got on the internet and adopted Email instead of postal mail because they thought saving paper would help their grandchildren.

Mark Zuckerberg did not create Facebook in his dorm room because he thought that connecting people around the world would end wars. Truth be told, Facebook is where the wars happen now. His little Instagram is knowingly impacting people’s mental health, which could lead to major societal problems.

People do not adopt changes in their routine because they think it is good for the wider world. People do not change their behaviour even when they know that doing so will benefit their own health otherwise smoking would never exist. People are not going to change how they produce and consume energy just because they think their behaviour would affect how their grandchildren would live on this planet. Let us not fool ourselves and expect the global population to possess this collective sense of obligation and foresightedness.

The existing batch of billionaires have largely come from internet entrepreneurship. If human beings are to survive on this planet in the next century then the next generation of billionaires better come from climate entrepreneurship. Whoever comes up with that brilliant idea, which will make people stay carbon free not out of a moral obligation but because it would mean more money in their pockets, would join the future list of billionaires. People do paperless billing not because it saves trees but because it means less clutter in their mailbox and easy search in the email instead of sifting through a ton of envelopes. If there is a system, which will make carbon neutral life a more comfortable one, people will adopt it in a heartbeat. That is why the major help toward solving climate change could very well come from the very private and profit driven greed that created it in the first place.

The world needs activists, preachers and opinion leaders. But the Earth needs creative entrepreneurs who would not only ‘think different’ but make people do things differently without reminding them about morality.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 27^th, 2022.

Like Opinion & Editorial on Facebook, follow @ETOpEd on Twitter to receive all updates on all our daily pieces.