You people should stop demonizing billionaires. You're the ones burning the fossil fuels, not them. If their wealth way distributed among more people then those people would spend it damaging the environment which is what people generally do with their money anyway.
Doesn't this kind of argument prove too much?
Consider an alternate reality without food standards and regulations. Things like the melamine incident are commonplace and people regularly suffer due to contaminated food. Someone argues "perhaps the corporations should stop poisoning our food". Then someone else responds "Stop demonizing the executives, their objective is to make a profit, which they get from the consumers. The consumers are the ones buying the contaminated food, the executives aren't. If people don't want to get sick, they should exercise more diligence."
It's easy to offload coordination problems on the people who make imperfect decisions as a consequence, but saying "just don't have coordination problems, then" is rarely useful if one wants to mitigate those problems.
People don't want to buy poisonous food knowing it's poison. They might take a gamble on if it the odds seem good enough. (even in highly safety regulated western countries, people sometimes die from contaminated food). In contrast, people do want to burn petrol knowing that it 100% will pollute the environment every single time they drive their car. We do what benefits us personally despite the cost to the environment. So it's our fault. It's hard to correct your own faults while you're blaming somebody else for them instead of accepting responsibility.
Most people don't get to pick how much money they have, their employer does. Most people don't choose and how much the car they want costs, a company does. Most people have very little say on laws and regulations, but billionaires have friends and family in government.
If billionaires were less greedy and paid more, more people could choose environmentally friendly options. If billionaires were less greedy and sold environmental options for cheaper, more people could choose environmentally friendly options. If billionaires cared about the planet, they could use their influence to pass laws for the good of the planet.
Instead you have corporations holding salaries down and squeezing margins from their customers. How's someone making the median salary in Bolivia ($3,631/yr) supposed to buy anything but the cheapest gas-burning car?
You got corporations going full cartoon villain too with disinformation campaigns, lies and bribes/lobbying to impede anything regulation that would cut into their profits. Exxon wants to keep selling gas, and the's a lot they can do (and have done) to keep you without any options but gas [1].
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Evy2EgoveuE
If billionaires gave their money to poor people, they're not going to spend it on electric cars because of the environment. They're going to spend it on stuff that benefits them personally because most people are basically more selfish than environmentalist.
It's fine to criticize billionaires but people shouldn't make the common mistake of thinking the world would get much better if billionaires ceased existing. That tells me their understanding of how the world works is overly simplistic in the wrong ways leading to a distorted understanding and flawed predictions.
I think we could wish for better billionaires don't you? Some are ok, some are extremely not ok and have made the torment nexus we live in right now.
I agree, but there are alternatives that are even worse, like agrarian communism under Pol Pot. I'm not saying there's no scope for improvement with billionaires and their role in society, I just dispute that billionaires are some unique and unitary source of problems. For example, if a tax law was passed that caused an exodus of billionaires (capital flight), I do not believe that the median living standards would rise. I do not believe things would get much better. So this is not so much a disagreement in values but more about the facts of the matter.