Jets, Yachts, and Shares: How the Ultra-Rich Plunder the Planet
Kim Kardashian, a celebrity with whom I am quite fascinated, opined in Interview magazine: “I believe in climate change. But I also believe in being realistic, and I think sometimes there’s so much to worry about on this planet, and it can be really scary to live your life with anxiety. I do what I can. But you have to choose what works for you in your life,” she added.
That same year, in 2022, Kim chose to buy herself a Gulfstream G650ER airplane for $95 million. She upgraded the interior for an additional $55 million, installing extensive cashmere finishes throughout, and unveiled the new design on her reality show. Since then, Kim has been jetting around the world. According to public records, she took thirty flights in 2024, including a round trip to Paris Fashion Week on the same day and five separate trips around California in a single day. Her sister Kylie Jenner also bought herself a private airplane (a Bombardier Global 7500) for $72.8 million. She uses it primarily to fly around California to spend time with fellow celebrities. In 2022, to considerable public outrage, she took a 17-minute flight that would have taken approximately forty minutes by car and cost only a fraction of the emissions.
With an estimated net worth of approximately US$1.9 billion, Kim Kardashian belongs to the richest 0.1 percent of people in the world. Other members of this exclusive club, for example, Taylor Swift, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg, also fly private jets, own multiple sprawling mansions, drive luxury cars, spend time on superyachts, or even travel to space. Their consumption-related emissions can be hundreds of times higher than those of average people like you and me. Combined with emissions linked to their investments and broader wealth portfolios, the carbon footprint of the ultra-rich is now a significant driver of the climate crisis, pushing the planet toward the dangerous threshold of 2 °C of warming and contributing to economic hardship and suffering for millions of vulnerable people worldwide. It is not just a problem of inequality; the rich plunder our common resources and commit a form of systemic violence.
The Polluter Elite
Carbon inequality — the unequal distribution of emissions between countries, regions, and economic groups — has been documented for some time. Oxfam’s 2023 report Climate Equality: A Planet for the 99 Percent revealed that in 2019, the richest 10 percent were responsible for 50 percent of all global emissions. The super-rich 1 percent (77 million individuals) accounted for 16 percent of global carbon emissions, the same share as the poorest 66 percent of humanity (about 5 billion people). The richest 0.1 percent of the world’s population, a small global elite of billionaires and multimillionaires, accounts for 7–8 percent of global emissions.
These ultra-rich individuals are overwhelmingly male, largely based in North America and Europe, and have either inherited family fortunes or amassed their wealth primarily in finance, technology, real estate, or extractive industries. Oxfam refers to them as the polluter elite. The largest share of their emissions stems from private jets, superyachts, and carbon-intensive investment portfolios. In its report Carbon Inequality Kills, Oxfam tracked the private air travel of 23 of the world’s richest billionaires and found that each took an average of 184 flights in a single year, emitting approximately 2,074 tonnes of CO₂ annually from air travel alone. This is equivalent to roughly 300 years of emissions for a person with the global average annual footprint of 6–7 tonnes — or more than 2,000 years for someone in the world’s poorest half, who emits around 1 tonne of CO₂ annually. Large superyachts, which require immense quantities of fuel for propulsion, air conditioning, swimming pools, helicopters, and support vessels for staff, can generate an annual carbon footprint of 5,672 tonnes of CO₂ — equivalent to 860 years of emissions for the average person. Three yachts owned by the Walton family, heirs to the Walmart retail fortune, had a combined annual carbon footprint of 18,000 tonnes — comparable to the yearly emissions of 1,714 Walmart shop workers.
Jeff Bezos is a poster boy of the polluting elite. He owns two private jets and the superyacht Koru, accompanied by its support vessel Abeona, which he uses to travel between multiple residences and luxury destinations worldwide. He also owns Blue Origin, a company that transports wealthy clients to the edge of space for hundreds of thousands of dollars per seat. Although the hydrogen-powered engines of the New Shepard rocket primarily emit water vapor, the overall environmental footprint of each ten-minute flight is reportedly in the hundreds of tonnes of CO₂-equivalent per launch. The Czech Republic also has members of the polluting elite. Many maintain a low public profile while engaging in high-end luxury consumption. Petr Kellner, the richest Czech before his death in 2021, owned a Boeing 737, and billionaire Karel Komárek owns a Gulfstream G550. Coal magnates and dollar billionaires Daniel Křetínský and Pavel Tykač frequently travel by private jet, whether owned by their companies or chartered from private operators.
According to another Oxfam report, Climate Plunder (2025), the average person in the richest 0.1 percent emits approximately 298 tonnes of CO₂ per year from personal consumption alone. Yet conspicuous luxury emissions represent only the tip of the iceberg. A substantial share of the ultra-rich’s climate impact derives from their investments and ownership stakes in polluting industries — oil, gas, mining, cement, steel, aviation, and others. The emissions generated by these companies’ operations must also be attributed to their principal owners. The average investment-related emissions of 50 of the world’s richest billionaires amount to approximately 2.6 million tonnes of CO₂-equivalent each — the equivalent of 2.6 million years of consumption emissions for someone in the poorest half of the global population who emits about 1 tonne of CO₂ annually. In a single year, one billionaire’s total emissions can equal the annual emissions of the Maldives — a country of roughly 500,000 people that is facing existential threats from rising sea levels.
The Rich Are Killing Us
Through extravagant luxury consumption and large ownership stakes in polluting industries, the ultra-rich generate carbon footprints that are thousands to millions of times higher than the emissions of ordinary people arising from the satisfaction of basic needs — heating, mobility, and essential goods. This is not merely extreme wealth inequality; it is a vastly disproportionate appropriation of our shared planetary ecological resources through activities that are often meaningless, obscenely wasteful, and primarily demonstrative of power and status.
The stark inequality in emission-intensive luxury consumption is especially alarming because the remaining carbon budget consistent with limiting global warming to 1.5–2 °C and avoiding dangerous climate change is now small and rapidly shrinking. The 1.1–1.2 °C of warming that has already occurred has produced measurable global impacts: more frequent and severe heatwaves, intensified droughts, heavier rainfall and flooding, more destructive wildfires, Arctic sea-ice loss, accelerating sea-level rise, ocean acidification, and mass coral bleaching. Every additional fraction of a degree increases the frequency and severity of these disruptions. Every billionaire’s excessive emissions further accelerate these impacts. They translate into heightened risks of crop failure, water scarcity, climate-sensitive diseases, displacement, infrastructure damage, and mounting economic losses that fall disproportionately on populations least responsible for the crisis. Oxfam’s Carbon Inequality Kills report demonstrates that emissions attributable to the richest contribute measurably to higher temperatures and to declines in GDP and human development in hotter countries of the Global South, primarily through reduced agricultural yields and excess heat-related mortality.
The luxury emissions of the polluting elite are not abstract numbers; they are directly linked to poverty, hunger, and death. The Maldives, mentioned above, is a case in point. This developing island state has annual emissions of 2–3 million tonnes of CO₂, comparable to those attributed to a single billionaire, such as Virgin Group founder Richard Branson, who is known to visit frequently, or Czech coal baron Daniel Křetínský, who owns a stake in a luxury resort there. More than 80 percent of its land lies less than one meter above sea level and is therefore highly vulnerable to rising seas. Rising seas, coastal flooding, saltwater intrusion, and erosion threaten homes, infrastructure, and livelihoods depending on fishing and tourism. With public debt exceeding 120 percent of GDP, the country has very limited capacity to finance adaptation measures such as seawalls or land reclamation. Despite contributing almost nothing to global emissions, the Maldives stands on the front line of climate change.
Addressing Luxury Emissions: Regulation and Language
The frivolous, decadent, and unnecessary luxury consumption and accumulation of wealth by the ultra-rich are demonstrably contributing to planetary destruction. Emissions generated by excessive wealth intensify ecological degradation, accelerate the climate crisis, and drastically exacerbate unequal exposure to its impacts. Yet luxury emissions continue to rise and remain largely unregulated. Fuel for private aircraft, for example, is largely exempt from taxation. The number of superyachts has more than doubled since 2000, yet they are not subject to binding CO₂ emissions limits. The International Maritime Organization sets emissions standards only for commercial shipping, and while the European Union is moving to include commercial maritime transport in its emissions trading system, it has introduced no carbon pricing mechanism for luxury passenger vessels.
A range of policy instruments exists to curb emissions by the ultra-rich: progressive income and wealth taxation, surcharges on fossil fuel profits, windfall taxes, and targeted luxury taxes on private aviation, superyachts, SUVs, and frequent flying. Such measures have long been advocated not only by scholars and civil society organizations — including Oxfam and, most recently, UN Special Rapporteur Olivier de Schutter — but also by major international financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which recognize carbon pricing, subsidy reform, and progressive fiscal measures as necessary for effective emissions reduction and more equitable distribution of climate costs.
Before such taxes and regulatory reforms are enacted, we could begin by cultivating more precise and morally adequate language to describe the luxury consumption of the ultra-rich. Rather than cautiously framing it as an unreasonable or unequal use of shared ecological capacity, we should recognize it as the plunder of the planetary waste sink and a reckless gamble with humanity’s remaining carbon budget. Instead of merely stating that it accelerates climate change, we should acknowledge that it produces ecological destruction and disaster. Rather than referring abstractly to impacts and costs – drought, crop failure, food insecurity, displacement – we should speak of systematic environmental violence. Luxury emissions are not merely neutral externalities, unintended side effects, or unpriced social costs; they constitute deliberate and foreseeable harm — material damage, injury, and systematic environmental violence inflicted upon vulnerable communities by identifiable actors who knowingly persist in practices that expose others to risk, loss, and the destruction of livelihoods.
The text was produced with the support of the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Representation in the Czech Republic. The publisher is fully responsible for the content; the positions presented in the text do not necessarily represent the position of the foundation.