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Yameen, Senior analyst at Ernst & Young, “For a Universal Job Guarantee,” American Affairs Winter Volume I, Number 4, 2017 https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2017/11/universal-job-guarantee/

The Politics of a Basic Income

A wealth tax, as proposed by Senator Warren and others, would be a tax not on accessions to wealth but wealth itself, and not at the time of realization but before it. Most court decisions and observers over the past two centuries have conceded that a tax on land and property would be a direct tax, and a wealth tax would encompass the unrealized gain in the value of land and property, such as homes, farms, and personal assets. Taxing wealth is not taxing income, as evidenced by the establishment of a separate tax regime that more resembles property tax assessment mechanisms, the lack of realization events, and that the legal and economic incidence of a wealth tax falls on the same person.

, the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act of 2021, encompasses Warren’s wealth tax concept. Key provisions of the bill include:

The Massachusetts senator on March 1 introduced a bill to tax households worth over $50 million and up to $1 billion at a rate of 2%, and anything over that at 3%. She  during the Democratic presidential primary in 2019.

The legislation, which could raise an estimated $3 trillion over a decade, is meant to reduce inequality by using revenue from the wealthiest Americans to pay for new federal programs to lift up some of the poorest.

The United States government launched its reparations program to African Americans in autumn of 1969. Originally known as “the Philadelphia plan,” the . Over the next decades, such quotas would spread from industry to industry, and would expand into higher education and public contracting. 

The plan is usually credited to the Nixon administration. Sometimes it’s even described as a secret scheme to split the Democratic base. The history is more prosaic. The plan originated under the Johnson administration, .

Last month, the COVID-19 pandemic caused global oil consumption to fall by almost 30 million barrels per day, from its previous high of 100 million barrels. Oil demand is not expected to fully recover by the end of 2020. Some analysts predict that it will never return to pre-pandemic levels. In that case, the world will experience a permanent oil glut. There are many advantages to cheap, abundant oil. Is one of them the end of international oil wars?

If oil is plentiful and not very valuable, why would countries fight over it? Surely, the oil glut will reduce the frequency of international conflicts.

Any manager who tries to create a strategy out of worn-out clichés and unexamined nostrums is dismissed. Yet in the United States and other Western countries we have grown comfortable with the government following outworn nostrums about free trade. We have elevated the economic theory of free trade to the status of a national theology, and we follow its simple dictums as if they were immutable laws. We appear prepared to follow the precepts of free trade wherever they lead us, even if that means plunging lemminglike to our economic ruin.

Today the evidence should be clear to anyone who wants to look at it: our blind allegiance to free trade threatens our national standard of living and our economic future. By sacrificing our home market on the altar of free trade, we are condemning ourselves and our children to a future of fewer competitive businesses, fewer good jobs, less opportunity, and a lower standard of living. These unacceptable outcomes threaten us in ways that are all related to our practice of free trade.

The 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) was held in October. The CPC has thus started on a new journey, and so has China’s development. The thinking of Chinese Communists, as stated at this Party Congress, not only determines China’s direction but also has a sure impact on the world’s future.

Just as people’s worldviews fundamentally shape the ways they choose to engage with the world, the same holds true for countries and political parties. It has been reaffirmed at the Party Congress that China is committed to its foreign policy goals of upholding world peace and promoting common development, and it remains dedicated to building a community with a shared future for [mankind] humankind. Such an official, open declaration of the CPC’s worldview sheds light on the way it engages with the world.

Once again it seems to me that the appropriate response is "maybe, but maybe not." Though climate change can cause plenty of misery and deserves to be mitigated for that reason alone, it will not necessarily lead to armed conflict. The political scientists who track war and peace, such as Halvard Buhaug, Idean Salehyan, Ole Theisen, and Nils Gleditsch, are skeptical of the popular idea that people fight wars over scarce resources. Hunger and resource shortages are tragically common in sub-Saharn countries such as Malawi, Zambia, and Tanzania, but wars involving them are not. Hurricanes, floods, droughts, and tsunamis (such as the disastrous one in the Indian Ocean in 2004) do not generally lead to armed conflict. The American dust bowl in the 1930s, to take another example, caused plenty of deprivation but no civil war. And while temperatures have been rising steadily in Africa during the past fifteen years, civil wars and war deaths have been falling. Pressures on access to land and water can certainly cause local skirmishes, but a genuine war requires that hostile forces be organized and armed, and that depends more on the influence of bad governments, closed economies, and militant ideologies than on the sheer availability of land and water. Certainly any connection to terrorism is in the imagination of the terror warriors: terrorists tend to be underemployed lower-middle-class men, not subsistence farmers. As for genocide, the Sudanese government finds it convenient to blame violence in Darfur on desertification, distracting the world from its own role in tolerating or encouraging the ethnic cleansing. In a regression analysis on armed conflicts from 1980 to 1992, Theisen found that conflict was more likely if a country was poor, populous, politically unstable, and abundant in oil, but not if it had suffered from droughts, water shortages, or mild land degradation. (Severe land degradation did have a small effect.) Reviewing analyses that examined a large number (N) of countries rather than cherry-picking one or two, he concluded, "those who foresee doom, because of the relationship between resource scarcity and violent internal conflict, have very little support in the large-N literature." Salehyan adds that relatively inexpensive advances in water use and agriculture practices in the developing world can yield massive increases in productivity with a constant or even shrinking amount of land, and that better governance can mitigate the human costs of environmental damage, as it does in developed democracies. Since the state of the environment is at most one ingredient in a mixture that depends far more on political and social organization, resource wars are far from inevitable, even in a climate-changed world.

Tax-raising policies provoke opposition, and rival politicians may seek to capitalise on this opposition by promising to lower tax rates, or repeal unpopular policies outright. While a crude rational choice model of voting behaviours might lead one to conclude that recurring wealth taxes are likely to elicit widespread popular support – because the overwhelming majority of people are not, and will never be, wealthy enough to pay them – an examination of recent fiscal history suggests otherwise. Many developed democracies have abolished their wealth taxes over the last four decades, citing both practical and normative objections. In some cases, wealth taxes were repealed or suspended only to be reintroduced, and then subject to renewed political attack.

This matters because a net wealth tax focused on the very wealthiest, levied at a sufficiently low annual rate to avoid a taxpayer exodus, requires time in order to achieve its distributional and revenue-raising goals. Recent experience suggests that a durable political consensus around such a policy will prove difficult to achieve. Introducing a wealth tax in the absence of such consensus means that it is likely to become a political football, subject to an ongoing cycle of reform, repeal and reintroduction. This undermines the predictability of the tax system, increases complexity for taxpayers and tax authorities alike, while also multiplying opportunities for investment and accounting strategies that aim at circumventing the tax charges in question.

The GND is an important rhetorical artifact because it aims to solve a world-wide, highly controversial and life-threatening issue. There have been several green policy propositions in the past, however the GND is unique due to its critical arguments, prominent media attention and response. The document also includes themes of challenging capitalism, patriarchy, and anthropocentrism, which deviate from our expectations of legal, policy documents. My ideological criticism and analysis of the GND is complemented by an analysis of multiple media reactions to the GND to demonstrate how the GND is being interpreted by news media and presented to public audiences. Because public audiences are unlikely to read the GND themselves, the media is likely their only understanding of the goals and contents of the bill. In 18 this project, I analyze how the GND challenges ideologies of capitalism, patriarchy, and anthropocentrism. However, it is important to note that while AOC is challenging these notions, she is also complicit in appealing to these hegemonic discourses. This may be a byproduct of the GND existing within those hegemonic discourses or an intentional strategy to situate the GND in a way that appealed to a wider audience . With the 2020 presidential election already underway and a continually deteriorating environment, it is imperative that hegemonic ideologies of anthropocentrism, patriarchy, and capitalism do not infringe on justice and a healthy environment. Not only does the GND highlight issues of environmentalism, but it also highlights questions of vulnerable communities and the intersection of economics and the environment. This project addresses the ideologies within the American society that produced the GND as well as media responses. This project contributes to the field of communication studies in that it addresses the roadblocks that climate change communication faces in the current political climate. This is analyzed through exposing harmful dominant discourses of capitalism, patriarchy, and anthropocentrism. Issues of feminism, hegemony, and climate change intersect in the GND to highlight a need for critical rhetorical study. In illuminating these harmful discourses, awareness may be able to bring about political and social justice. The method that will be used to examine this phenomenon is an ideological analysis. Since the goal of the research is to analyze ideologies and dominant discourses present in the GND and news media coverage of it, an ideological approach is the most appropriate method for this project. In my analysis, I address the intersections of ideologies, patriarchal and hegemonic structures, and the effects of climate change and its policies marginalized communities. In the case of this project, these previously mentioned characteristics inform the way that climate 19 policy and female politicians are perceived. By using ecofeminism as an orienting frame, I evoke the sentiments discussed by Dow (1995) as a way to analyze artifacts that aim to challenge dominant discourses through empowering marginalized groups. The GND addresses issues of exploitation, vulnerable communities, and the social repercussions to the climate crisis. Feminist criticism is used to help illuminate these occurrences in society, especially when vulnerable communities and other non-dominant groups are at risk. Feminist criticism is a form of ideological criticism, which asks the reader to analyze the dominant knowledge in society. For example, Burke (1964) described ideologies as inhabiting bodies and making them hop around in certain ways. This explanation portrays ideologies as having material effects that may or may not be obvious or directly traceable. Not attending to ideologies and the effects that they have may be dangerous as we leave important communicative elements underrepresents the norms and expectations of society (p. 1). While these norms are inevitable whenever humans congregate, there are ethical concerns when the elite members of society control public knowledge with little opportunity for disruption. Climate change has a long history of debate and misinterpretation which have led to a lack of climate policies in the U.S. government. This project focuses on the ecofeminist themes in the GND to reveal its radical/counter-hegemonic functioning as a much-needed shift from stagnant approaches to climate policy. However, this attention is not without consideration of the many constraints, including those from dominant ideologies, that are apparent in the GND. In the following analysis, I use a critical ecofeminist lens to analyze one of the most radical and noteworthy climate propositions in American politics. As we know, popular media and climate controversy have harmed the ability for climate advocacy to gain traction in politics. 20 Greenhouse gasses and pollution are currently killing our planet and tainting our natural resources. As studies have shown, continuing this harmful path will result in irreversible destruction to our planet. It is time that we call out these roadblocks and continue a conversation of climate advocacy in order to improve our ecosystem. how she calls out harmful ideologies in order to transform American ways of thinking. AOC envisions an ecocentric way of living despite the many obstacles that continue to perpetuate anthropogenic climate change. Ironically, the GND and the media portrayals of the GND continue to echo hegemonic discourses through insults and deflection of the real issues at hand. As communication scholars, it is imperative that we recognize and continue having these transformative and critical conversations. Communication plays a large role in how climate policy is understood and in order to solve this problem we cannot allow these hegemonic discourses to go unnoticed. In the following chapter, I analyze the GND in terms of three major components: challenges to anthropocentrism, challenges to capitalism, and challenges to patriarchy.

The CNBC survey also showed that 58% of millionaires generally support raising taxes on corporations to fund infrastructure improvements, as floated in Biden’s other ambitious spending package, the American Jobs Plan. Under that proposal, the corporate income tax rate would rise to 28% from the current 21%. That lower rate was enacted under the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, a drop from 35%. (Biden has recently indicated a willingness to retreat from that 28%, according to published reports.) Despite many survey respondents agreeing that taxes should rise for the wealthy and for corporations, 73% think their own tax burden is fair — and 21% say they’re paying more than their fair share. Additionally, although most millionaires expect higher taxes under the Biden administration, 62% don’t anticipate making any changes to their finances because of it.

If given the choice to be taxed, or to invest and circulate their wealth, many of the wealthy will choose the latter. And if this is recast as a socially responsible, or even philanthropic, thing to do with one’s wealth, they will feel good about it for more than one reason. 'Sharing the wealth' doesn’t only mean giving it away to charity – it can also mean investing it so that the benefits of growth can be enjoyed by all. And smart, workable wealth taxes can make that happen at a time when the world needs to search for new solutions.

Why would a wealth tax encourage the rich to spend? Think of it this way: If your assets above some level is subject to a stiff federal wealth tax, you’ll have a strong incentive to keep your wealth below that threshold. To put it another way, at the margin of a wealth tax, the tax encourages you to spend any additional amount you accumulate. Economists have recognized a wealth tax’s perverse incentive to consume for a long time. I to make the point, and the late Princeton economist David Bradford made the same argument years ago. Imagine two very rich people. Joe is a spendthrift who buys yachts, fancy cars, diamonds, and other rapidly depreciating property. Because his spending habits keep his assets below the wealth tax threshold, he effectively is rewarded for his spending habits. Jane makes the same annual income as Joe. But she is a saver and investor, prudently putting money away for the future or using her wealth to help create or expand businesses and job opportunities. Because she accumulates sufficient assets to be subject to the wealth tax, she effectively is penalized for saving and investing. More charitable giving The super-rich could stay under the tax threshold by increasing their charitable giving. And they could get a double tax benefit from their donations. They’d not only lower assets that would be subject to the wealth tax, but gifts to non-profits may also be deductible from taxable income subject to the income tax. To be sure true charities benefit, the wealth levy would have to be carefully designed to prevent the wealthy from avoiding tax by shifting money to family foundations or other charities they tightly control. And while non-profits almost always can use extra money, large contributions often come with strings. And that is not necessarily healthy for charitable organizations. More campaign contributions But the more interesting issue is how a wealth tax would affect politics. Two leading advocates of the levy, that the super-rich have outsized influence in politics through their enormous campaign contributions. That thesis is itself debatable: One could argue that local car dealers and real estate developers (who tend to be rich but not super-rich) have more influence on a typical legislator than billionaires with a national agenda. But there are exceptions. , in 2018, Sheldon Adelson, his wife, and various related parties gave at least $123 million in campaign contributions (and perhaps more in “dark money” that cannot be tracked). Michael Bloomberg donated at least $95 million to campaigns, directly and indirectly. In that year, 13 super-wealthy people each gave $10 million or more to political candidates—nearly all to one political party or the other. And 80 others gave $2 million or more. that while campaign giving by mega-donors has little direct effect on policies that effect their personal wealth, it does give the rich outsized influence in the general direction of government policy. For the sake of discussion, then, let’s say Saez and Zucman are correct and it is both true and a bad thing for civil society that a few billionaires have excessive control over national politics. It is hard to see how a tax that will encourage more political contributions by mega-donors will fix that problem. Increasing political donations is a way to offload wealth and avoid, or at least reduce, tax liability. And, of course, the super wealthy could use their newly-purchased influence to convince lawmakers to repeal the tax itself. We all may be better off if they just buy another yacht.

Rich people changing their behavior in response to a tax increase is likely to be negligible compared to the benefit of public investments that could be financed with the revenue.

The Times article quotes a piece from former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers and law professor Natasha Sarin arguing that too aggressively targeting the rich with tax increases would “degrade economic efficiency and punish success in ways unlikely to be good for the country.” But the good of the country is not served when millionaires fail to pay for the public investments that allow them to get rich in the first place.

The well-documented rise in wealth inequality in the United States since the 1980s has sparked debate on wealth taxes as a tool to raise revenue and reduce wealth disparities. Contributing to this debate, a new working paper finds that wealth taxes are preferable to capital income taxes because a wealth tax shifts the tax burden from productive to unproductive entrepreneurs and reallocates capital to the more productive ones. The optimal wealth tax in the model the authors study increases aggregate productivity and reduces consumption inequality relative to the status quo, thus delivering large and broad-based welfare gains.

A wealth tax is a tax on a household’s wealth, or the value of its assets less its debts, whereas a capital income tax is based on the income generated by wealth. Federal, state, and local governments in the United States tax wealth through property taxes; income taxes on interest, dividends, and capital gains; and corporate taxes, but they do not use wealth taxes.

As most readers who follow the 2020 campaign proposals are aware, Elizabeth Warren has proposed an annual wealth tax of 2% for wealth greater than $50 million and 3% for wealth greater than $1 billion. Various pundits have said that the tax is “probably unconstitutional”1 and that the Supreme Court could “stop the wealth tax dead in its tracks.”2

Warren’s wealth tax is constitutional under the standards laid down by the Founders, as this article will demonstrate. Apportionment of a wealth or land tax by population would now require the injustice of substantially higher tax rates in poorer states: when that happens, under the Founders’ standards, the tax is not a direct tax for which apportionment is required. Apportionment was not written to protect wealth from assault, as proponents of its unconstitutionality now claim, but rather to reach wealth by what was thought to be the best then available measure of wealth.

Understanding Congress’s taxing power under the Constitution begins with a consideration of the tax provisions and their role in the constitutional structure. Article I Section 8 Clause 1 provides Congress’s general taxing power: “The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence [sic] and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States.” This language grants Congress a broad general taxing power for a broad range of public purposes.2 The provision only includes one explicit restriction: that such measures must be imposed uniformly across the country. As described below, the courts have not interpreted the uniformity requirement as a significant limitation to Congress’s taxing power. CREATIVE COMMONS COPYRIGHT 2021 | R O O S E V E LT I N ST I T U T E .O R G 2 2 Article 1 Section 9 Clause 5 provides the only explicit constitutional limit on Congress’s taxing power: Congress cannot tax state exports. Other constitutional restrictions that are beyond the scope of this brief, such as the Due Process Clause in the Fifth Amendment, could also limit Congress’s taxing power in particular circumstances. One additional restriction appears at two other locations in the Constitution, which is referred to as the “apportionment rule.” Article 1 Section 2 Clause 3 originally provided, in the context of the structure of the House of Representatives, that “Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.” Article 1 Section 9 Clause 4 similarly provides: “No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or enumeration herein before directed to be taken.” The apportionment rule, when it applies, requires a tax to be imposed in each state, proportional to that state’s population. This rule, by definition, treats taxpayers differently based on their geographic location, and is therefore incompatible with the uniformity requirement, which precludes such differential treatment. As a result, the uniformity requirement and the apportionment rule are commonly understood to apply to different forms of taxes, but not simultaneously to the same tax.3

In February 2009, James Wilsdon was attending a conference in a bitterly cold Chicago when he got a phone call with an intriguing invitation. The caller hoped that Wilsdon’s boss, the president of the Royal Society in London, might visit Richard Branson’s Necker Island, where the tycoon was assembling a scientific and financial supergroup for a new initiative, the “Carbon War Room”. When the president declined, Wilsdon went in his stead. A small private plane whisked him from Chicago to Beef Island, Necker’s nearest airstrip. Then, he was escorted to a white speedboat and, shortly afterwards, he arrived in Branson’s living room, still in his winter coat. Around the room sat the founders of Skype, Microsoft and the Dutch postcode lottery as well as scientific directors, fund managers and, inexplicably, Vivienne Westwood. Branson had assembled this small band of big money as a shock brigade on the climate crisis. The Carbon War Room gathered in the “temple”, an expansive pitched-roof villa originally constructed by Branson for meetings of the “Elders”, a group of pan-global leaders established by Branson and musician Peter Gabriel in 2007. (As Necker can be hired, pictures of the temple can be viewed on TripAdvisor.) There followed a series of briefings on what could or couldn’t be done to solve the problem of the Earth’s rising temperature. Wilsdon came away impressed by the appetite of people with “a certain amount of financial freedom” to make large-scale climate interventions, but unsure whether their grand plans could or would materialise. The Necker Assembly interests me for several reasons. First, as a novelist who’s just written a book about an island-based plutocrat with a distinct vision for humanity’s future, I would have rejected it as unrealistic. (A temple? Too much.) Second, it now seems Branson’s scheme was merely a prototype for the breed of magnate that has appeared in the years since, one who wants to rescue the planet from the industries and systems which, in many cases, made them rich in the first place. As Wilsdon told me the tale of the Carbon War Room on the phone from his University College London office on an unseasonably warm spring day, one term in particular stayed with me: “Greenfinger”. Back in 2008, when climate expert David Victor coined the term, the word described a theoretical “self-appointed protector of the planet” who might fund a big, risky, climate-saving scheme and unintentionally do substantial harm in the process. The idea is usually the preserve of sci-fi. But talking with Wilsdon, I began to consider how far climate philanthropy had changed. Today, practically everyone above a certain net worth has a World-Saving Project or WSP. Elon Musk ($225bn) has pledged $100mn to the winners of his XPrize for carbon capture. George Soros ($7.16bn) wants to refreeze the Arctic. As well as defeating death and going to Mars, Jeff Bezos ($153bn) has announced $10bn for his grant-giving Bezos Earth Fund. Former Reddit chief Yishan Wong intends to plant a trillion trees. The potential benefits of all this funding are, of course, huge. But a wealthy individual’s financial nimbleness, and their limited accountability, potentially create the kind of risks that Victor warned of back in 2008. Might the world’s first real Greenfinger appear in the not-too-distant future? Wilsdon is now director of the Research on Research Institute, which works to improve public R&D. He remains politely sceptical about deep-pocketed funders. His view is that what we need is “not some sort of uber-tier of incredibly omniscient billionaire philanthropists picking where to put the money”, but a “well-lubricated, funded, secure research system” that has the strength and capability to turn to big problems as they arise. He tells me the UK government’s R&D budget is approaching £20bn a year, and that private-sector R&D now exceeds public money roughly threefold. In the philanthropic space, there are foundations like the Wellcome Trust or Cancer Research and individual donors riding their personal hobby-horses. Recommended How To Give It How to spend enough to save the world While he welcomes all science funding, Wilsdon believes that, during Covid-19, for example, “the people who made the really big differences were people who’d been working in very proximate areas for a very long time and could then pivot. The idea that you can sweep it all away and reinvent it from scratch much more effectively is a bit naive.” He reckons that the Covid response from private funders like Fast Grants, which awarded $50mn to hundreds of projects at the start of the pandemic, was somewhat overhyped. Existing funding bodies are perfectly able to pivot towards sudden challenges; in 2021, work on Covid featured in 9 per cent of all scientific papers published, even though most funding was allocated pre-pandemic, showing that scientists who had been funded for something different were nonetheless able to contribute to the pandemic response. (A representative for Fast Grants’ co-founder, the Stripe billionaire Patrick Collison, declined to comment.) Some researchers have seen their fields substantially disrupted by a rise in philanthropic funding as enthusiastic donors have piled in. “It has changed considerably over the two decades I’ve been involved,” says Filippa Lentzos, a biosecurity expert and associate professor at King’s College London, who works on biorisk management and biological arms control. “There is clear benefit to that, but what’s happened with my field is that it’s relatively niche and philanthropic funds have flooded the market”, leading to an imbalance in research funds. Mysteriously, nobody seems to know how much private money goes into scientific R&D. Both the UK’s Department for Science and the US’s National Science Foundation told me they don’t track that data because the bewildering array of structures used — foundations, charities, limited liability partnerships, spinouts — make it too complex to count. Yet there are clearly advantages to these private cash injections. Dozens of world-changing technologies were supported through their first fragile years by private money. Agronomist Norman Borlaug was hailed as a hero for developing new varieties of dwarf wheat that doubled or trebled crop yields. Many believe he saved millions in India and Pakistan from famine; in 1970 he won a Nobel Peace Prize. His chief funders were the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, the ossified fortunes of earlier millionaires. When the UK’s Medical Research Council refused to countenance work on IVF in 1971, US philanthropist Lillian Lincoln Howell supported pioneers Edwards, Steptoe and Purdy (a fact only acknowledged after her death in 2014). In the 1950s, Michigan millionairess Katharine McCormick single-handedly funded development of the pill, at a time when the government and pharmaceutical industry had shown zero interest and 30 states legally restricted the sale of contraceptives. Perhaps most striking, in the 1930s, after the RAF derided high-speed seaplanes as money-burning “freak machines”, the manufacturer Supermarine was on the brink of abandoning its new project, the S.6B, until Dame Fanny Houston, England’s second-richest woman, wrote them a cheque. That plane’s eventual successor, the Spitfire, played a substantial part in winning the Battle of Britain. These innovations were significant. But the technologies being researched today have the potential to make even greater impacts. © Kate Dehler The most popular idea among the potential Greenfingers is solar radiation management (SRM), a technology nurtured in its earliest years by grants from wealthy individuals including Bill Gates. It would involve spraying fine aerosols into the upper atmosphere, probably from a fleet of high-altitude planes, in essence dimming the sun slightly and thus cooling the atmosphere. This is the idea Wilsdon briefed Branson’s Carbon War Room on. It would require billions of dollars, but it’s by far the cheapest option suggested. Many experts consider SRM fraught with risks. It could alter rainfall patterns. Once we start spraying, we might not be able to stop, for fear of a catastrophic release of pent-up heating called “termination shock”. The odds of global consensus on deployment seem slim. Nonetheless, after years of the tech being regarded with suspicion, the US government has announced its own five-year research scheme into “climate interventions”. Within the past year, a couple of tiny real-world experiments have been conducted by individual scientists. Could an individual Greenfinger start dimming the sun without state support? Neither enthusiasts nor sceptics think it would be possible (the US air force could blow any Greenfinger planes from the sky without difficulty). David Keith, a Harvard climate scientist of 30 years’ experience, whose own research into the science of SRM was backed by funders including Gates, tells me that while “technology exists to do some forms of geoengineering”, arguments about deployment are for governments. I ask him if billionaires might have outsize influence on the course of research. “I see a problem in democracies of rich people having too much power to shape events,” he says. “But I don’t see that as black and white, and I don’t see governments as necessarily better.” He points out that Gates’s funds have had an “outsize influence” against malaria and HIV. Opponents insist SRM is too dangerous even to research, and their arguments are powerful (and terrifying). Frank Biermann, professor of global sustainability governance at Utrecht University, is concerned that even discussing this technology is to normalise it. As he puts it, “Development inevitably leads to deployment.” He has spearheaded a proposed Non-Use Agreement on Solar Geoengineering with 450 signatories, but he fears corporations and billionaires will lobby the tech into existence: “The problem with developing such a technology is that you don’t know who will eventually use it.” He uses a Star Trek analogy to explain. Captain Kirk, the hero, has autonomous control over the course of his spaceship, aided by his multinational crew and the unlimited knowledge of his sidekick Mr Spock. “That is what many people, especially in the natural sciences, seem to believe the planet has.” The problem? “There is no Captain Kirk,” Biermann says with a smile. The US might deploy this technology; so might Vladimir Putin. A geographically fractured, stop-start, “chaotic deployment” seems more plausible than a single actor. But the simplicity is tempting: “It’s almost like John Wayne in a sense,” says Biermann. “The world is chaos, you enter the saloon, and then you solve it with a couple of shots.” What if a Greenfinger became intrigued by “self-spreading vaccines”? This is the idea of commandeering harmless but transmissible viruses, matching them with viruses we want to inoculate against, and letting the transmissible “taxi” virus carry the vaccine across the world. The risks are many: vaccines combining with human pathogens, becoming dangerous decades from now or the increased odds that bad actors will gain the ability to make lethal viruses super-spreadable. Even if there’s no sinister Greenfinger waiting to unleash their aerosol-spraying planes or virus-riding vaccine, these technologies are exactly the kind you might expect from a cadre of (predominantly) men who were enormously successful in tech, and who changed the world’s infrastructure along the way. Why shouldn’t another bold, tech-based solution work, they might ask? By contrast, they are a long way from how earlier billionaires donated their fortunes. Andrew Carnegie built 2,500 libraries. Cornelius Vanderbilt commissioned Grand Central Station. The new WSPs make the work of Michael Bloomberg — who has pledged $500mn for lobbying US states to close their coal power stations — seem rather old-fashioned. The most popular idea is solar radiation management. Opponents insist it is too dangerous even to research Many people, myself included, worry these are high-tech distractions. The idea of carbon reduction gets little plutocratic attention compared with infinitely splashier carbon-capture technologies. But at a time when the world has a limited carbon budget left before lethal temperature rises are locked in, the idea of a giant silver bullet might be either a pointless diversion or, even worse, an excuse to do nothing. “The debate about the technology being available in 2040 or 2050 might have a chilling effect in terms of what needs to be done in terms of cutting emissions,” says Biermann. It seems to me that there’s a huge accountability gap here too. Consider Oceankind, a grant-giving body founded in 2018 which has sunk over $120mn into oceanic research. Most is uncontroversial, but it has also supported Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement (OAE): essentially SRM at sea, scattering millions of tons of finely ground rock into the oceans to absorb carbon and fight acidification. Even when Oceankind bankrolled an OAE conference in 2019, few attendees knew who was paying. Only last year was Oceankind’s founder and director revealed to be geneticist Lucy Southworth — wife of Larry Page, the world’s eighth-richest man. (Oceankind declined to comment for this piece.) Oceankind funds some vital work, from decarbonising shipping to reducing fishing by-catch. The question is: does the public have a right to know who is funding potentially planet-changing technologies? The principles of private enterprise seem to say no. But when it comes to inventions which might govern the 21st century, does that work? Greenfinger might actually be an old-school lobbying story — in a field with global implications. Where are the watchdogs? Many of the bodies researching the area of “existential risk” — and human technologies are high on the threat list — have taken money from Big-Tech philanthropists. Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute and Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk have both received funds from Elon Musk, whose concerns have oscillated from runaway AI to establishing his own version of ChatGPT. Lentzos of KCL worries that certain risk researchers in her field of biotech are too focused on huge, existential pandemics that might kill us all. “If that’s all we focus on, our entire policy apparatus will be skewed. We need to focus on all the risks, many others of which are much more likely. But that’s so much less sexy to talk about than the end of the Earth.” She sees a role for private funding, and has received some herself, but acknowledges that government funding is important because governments are “democratically accountable. They have to take into account the values and principles we build our societies on.” IVF and the pill were technologies for which governments weren’t ready. And this has been the philanthropists’ real superpower — as long-term incubators for technologies they believe in, keeping them ticking over until governments do listen. Few would wish to uninvent those technologies, and Harvard’s Keith insists that “research is just research”. I’m not so sure. Every invention brings unintended consequences. Norman Borlaug’s crops have since been called into question by some ecologists who maintain that his new breeds damaged soil fertility and genetic diversity, required more water than local ecosystems could spare and displaced countless peasant farmers. The jury on Borlaug is irretrievably hung, a troubling testimony to the law of unintended consequences — not what his backers might have expected. Wilsdon briefed his audience about the Royal Society’s study on geoengineering, “essentially to warn them off doing anything too rash”. After three days, the conference ended. Some years later the Carbon War Room was swallowed up by the Rocky Mountain Institute, which shares the mission to accelerate the clean energy transition. What will happen to all these WSPs? I suspect we’ll keep inventing new technologies to get out of the scrapes we got into with our last bright idea. I’m glad I haven’t found a Greenfinger — even the most powerful billionaires would crumble against determined state intervention — and the planet-savers clearly have the power to do tremendous good. But their unaccountability, their obsession with techno-fixes and their need to focus on the entire risk spectrum worry me. Most concerning of all is the potential for us to make irreversible, unwise decisions if we listen to only one kind of pitch. In my novel, Sir John Pemberley, the plutocrat on his Bond-villain island, does whatever he thinks best because no one is prepared to stop him. I wrote the book in the hope it would stay fictional. Will it? We’ll probably know this time next century.

A Wealth Tax Will Make Americans Healthier. America’s most experienced public health experts point out that more resources are needed for major public health challenges like cardiovascular disease, the nation’s top killer, and high levels of opioid addiction.” High rates of inequality have been linked to lower life expectancies.“ The wealthiest Americans are now estimated to live up to 15 years longer than the poorest Americans, and individuals living in disadvantaged communities are more likely to die before the age of 75, regardless of their income level.*” With a modest tax on the most wealthy families to fund investments creating opportunities for lower-income and middle-income families, we can improve public health outcomes and extend life expectancies.

Finally, it seems unlikely that a tax on the ultrawealthy would harm innovation, which is a precursor to productivity growth. University of Southern California professor Michael Simkovic refutes the claim that innovation and growth require shifting more wealth and resources into the hands of a small number of billionaires. There is little, if any, overlap between billionaires or half-billionaires and the Nobel Prize,83 and most authors of patents are middle or upper-middle class.84 To reach lucrative commercial success, patented inventions may require substantial business skills related to commercialization and expanding production—skills that patent authors seldom have. On the other hand, those with the requisite business skills depend on the patent author’s innovation.85 Additionally, peer-reviewed studies show that increasing wages increases work effort, while increasing wealth actually reduces work hours.86 In light of these data, it appears that a policy directing revenues from a wealth tax toward public investments in science and education would be more likely to enhance and improve innovation.