When the World Burns, Someone’s Getting Rich Off the Matches

  • 1 min

I’ve been thinking about that slogan again. The one about taxing the rich to save the planet. It’s been rattling around my head for weeks.

Here’s what bothers me.

We’ve turned climate change into a moral story with clear villains and victims. The rich caused it, the poor will suffer, tax the rich, problem solved. Neat. Simple. Completely misses the point.

Because the actual crisis isn’t that wealthy people exist. It’s that we’ve built an entire economic system that requires constant growth to function. Your pension fund needs it. The job market needs it. Even public services depend on it.

I was looking at my investment app the other day (the one that promises ethical investing, naturally). Every company in there, green or not, is trying to expand. That’s just how capitalism works. We’re all complicit, even those of us who think we’re doing the right thing.

The uncomfortable bit? Taxing billionaires might make us feel better, but it doesn’t change the fundamental problem. We’re asking the same growth machine that created the mess to somehow fix it, just with slightly different funding.

Maybe the real question isn’t who pays, but whether we’re willing to acknowledge that solving this means more than shuffling money around. It means questioning whether endless growth was ever sustainable in the first place.

That’s the conversation nobody seems ready to have.