Why don't the rich care more about Climate Change?

William Timberman says he first wrote this post as a comment here, it's entirely appropriate my comment to that thread also spawned a post for me:  That is to address the bizarre lack of urgency on the part of America's Owners over the climate crisis.   Why aren't Bill Gates or Warren Buffet or the hundreds of other billionaires more interested in fixing the climate crisis?

Let's ignore the billionaires who are actually themselves deniers, I'm sure there's a few, but if T. Boone Pickens can face reality, I'm going to guess people as highly informed as billionaires would almost need to be, cannot really be unaware of this nor afford to deny it.  

I can think of a couple possible explanations:
1) They're fools who think they'll just ride above all the problems.
2) They expect the invisible hand or geoengineering to solve it.
3) They're trapped in a prisoner's dilemma

The first explanation is the most obvious and cynical.  I think the ultra-rich suffer some of the same ego effects that Hollywood stars have:  It's only too easy to surround yourself with sycophants and golddiggers who will constantly tell you how great you are.  Then add in the ego boost of tremendous personal wealth, and you can probably fairly easily end up believing that you got super rich all by yourself, and are now indestructable.  Ian Welsh often points out that the super rich live in a different world, staying at $20,000/night hotels, flying in private planes from private terminals to private yachts and so forth.  The problems of little people never affect them.  They could easily massively underestimate the problems of climate change to think it won't ever reach them.  For the older ones this is probably true, but they usually have kids, so must have given some thought to the world their kids will live in.

I also can't ignore the second.  Neoliberalism is by far the dominant viewpoint of elites.  Markets fix things.  Problems arrive, and are somehow solved by someone.  As much as I like the videos at Ted.com, there is an underlying triumphantilism to those events that is almost celebrating the inevitable victory of private genuis over all the world's problems.  Further, even if fusion or cheaper-than-oil solar electricity don't magically appear, or come past the tipping point where Siberia's methane is all being released, geoengineering is plausible and technologically feasible.  We already have enough planes to seed the atmosphere with sulphur.  I'm no fan of geoengineering (except as a very last resort) and fear the huge externalities and unexpected consequences that might stem from any of the schemes, but it does present an easy escape for intellectual cowards to hang their hopes.  

But I also wonder how much role the third plays.  See, I had this thought from another Warming Wednesday piece discussing how a big wealth management/consulting firm has now modified its portfolio recommendation to include hedging against the likely effects of ongoing climate change.  It seems like the rich are quietly going about the business of continuing to maximize returns even as storms, floods and droughts ravage the planet and maybe a rainforest or two dries up.  I mean, if you know things are going to become terrible, and just start hedging by shorting this and that, or buying up the stuff that will become scarce in a new climate world, then you know the problem is real, serious and getting worse.  Why not do something about it?

The answer here has to do with a special kind of prisoner's dilemma where one prisoner is any individual wealthy person, and the other "prisoner" is all the rest of them as a sort of monolithic collective.  If this seems hard to grasp, just think of any situation where you evaluate your own position against the world as a whole - so the dilemma happens that no individual rich person can really move the needle on this alone.  So if they bolt from the pack and start pursuing a climate solution (and backing it with real money) they'll just miss out on all the great economic opportunities that their peers will continue to enjoy (as if they are the other prisoner who still rats out his peer in the other room).  Since they can't make the other prisoner cooperate in solving the crisis, and believe the crisis will happen anyway, they decide they may as well stay on the party boat until it sinks.

A shorter version of this could be "they believe it is inevitable" and it's probably the most depressing of the three.

Philmisanthropists

Atrios got me thinking about something I've been meaning to do.  That is to assemble a half decent list of the known billionaires who fund US politics.  All us dirty hippies have long known that far far more and bigger sacks of cash exist on the right, mostly courtesy of an arm length list of ultra-wealthy donors who have decided to misuse their great luck in life on an ideological mission to remake the world into a safer place for Pharohs and Princes.  According to Forbes, there were 403 American billionaires in 2010.  That isn't the whole set to worry about, I'd say Rev Moon and Rupert Murdoch belong on my list despite not being Americans. 

Here's a start:

Class Traitors	Funding Fathers
George Soros	Koch Brothers
Peter Lewis	Rupert Murdoch
Herbert & Marion Sandler	Richard Devos
	Richard Mellon Scaife
	Reverend Moon
	Bob J. Perry
	Jerry Perenchio
	Robert Rowling
	Sheldon Adelson
	Philip Anschutz
	B. Wayne Hughes
	Harold Clark Simmons
	Carl Lindner
	John Templeton
	Alexander Gus Spanos
	T. Boone Pickens
	Roland Arnall
	Pete Peterson
	Charles R. Schwab
	Pete Coors
	Steve Forbes
	Sam Zell
	August Busch III

Part of the idea here is to create a simple, visual aide that can be pointed to when encountering the usual right wing hysterics about Soros.  Soros recently pointed out himself the absurdity of Beck hyperventilating about him, when really what Beck describes actually fits Murdoch much better. 

I really tried to find some more left wing billionaires, the closest I came were Sanford Robertson and Fred Eychaner, neither of whom appear to actually be billionaires.  Of course there are such things as billionaires who hold left-wing views, but very few of them actively and regularly fund liberal/progressive ideological or Democratic partisan politics in a big way.  I'm sure a few other left(ish) wing billionaires give their $30,000 to the DNC and $2000 to a bunch of candidates, but this is pittance compared to Scaife and the Kochs actively funding the wingnut welfare system that is the vast right wing conspiracy.  Left wing billionaires tend to end up on lists like this, which is well enough as far as it goes, but eradicating malaria or polio isn't going to help much if we can't build a political movement powerful enough to get something done to avert a climate catastrophe.

There's also plenty of rich people who give to the Democratic party as part of their bet-hedging or influence peddling, but do not qualify as people actually interested in promoting any kind of left wing vision for America.  They may find the current incarnation of the Republican party too extreme, particularly on social issues, but they're not going to fund MoveOn or a new ACORN or hire dozens of left wing intellectuals to churn out research papers which overworked journalists are happy to transcribe and meet deadlines, as happens on the right.   

Also, if I start including mere hundred-millionaires then I would also include right wing funders like Fred Eschelman, and no doubt we could have a similarly slanted, albeit longer, list.

But I need help.  What major right wing funders am I missing?  What about any left wing funders?  Anyone not deserve to be on that list?  For now I would rather cast too wide a net and then whittle down based on some reasonable criteria that better distinguishes Scaife or Murdoch from some dot com billionaire that say, gives money to support net neutrality but otherwise is ideologically unremarkable in philanthropic terms.