The Tragedy of the Superyacht Bayesian
Will the fate of the Bayesian spur the green transition? Or have billionaires already gone too far?
On Monday morning at 5am the rapidly heating ocean made one billionaire, his family and colleagues pay a sudden and tragic price for humanity’s extravagant carbon-emitting habits and for the luxury emissions of the ultra-rich.
This tragedy - unlike the almost daily drownings of the world’s asylum seekers - has gripped the world’s media. The BBC majored on the Bayesian story for most of Tuesday, 20th August, with live reporting of rescue efforts. The sudden drowning of a billionaire tech tycoon, Mike Lynch, his 18 year-old daughter, his colleague Jonathan Bloomer, chair of insurance group Hiscox but also of Morgan Stanley International; and of lawyer Christopher Morvillo of City law firm Clifford Chance - was not meant, it seems, to happen.
The assumption is that the rich, unlike desperate asylum seekers, are protected from such freak events. That just as the wealthy were insulated from COVID - so they can, and should be, insulated from climate breakdown.
The carbon cost of superyachts
Just 1% of the world’s population were responsible for almost a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions growth over 1990-2019, according to Carbon Brief. Those emissions that are now accelerating global warming - and precipitating extreme weather events like the mini-tornado that hit Sicily early Monday morning.
The superyachts owned by the likes of Bezos, Abramovich, the former Google tycoons Page and Eric Schmidt and by Bernard Arnault, the French tycoon at the helm of a jewellery and fashion empire, all have carbon footprints that far exceed even those of the private jets owned by the billionaires, according to Oxfam. Although the Bayesian was a sailing superyacht it carried 57,000-litre fuel tanks to give it a range of up to 3,600 nautical miles. Superyachts kept on permanent standby generate about 7,000 tonnes each of CO2 a year.
“The emissions of the superyachts are way above anything else,” Wilk said. “They have to have a crew, and they have to be constantly maintained even when they are docked. Then you have the helicopters onboard, the jetskis, the high energy-using luxury items like pools, hot tubs, private submarines and tenders, all of these require power, the air conditioning, the sophisticated electronic items. It is like having a hotel running on the water all the time.”
What makes the tragic deaths of Mike Lynch and his colleagues notable and unusual is this: the price of ever-accelerating global warming has not - so far - affected the ultra-rich. Instead it is largely paid by the “out of sight, out of mind” global poor. The devastating extreme weather events of 2023 and 2024 have hammered millions around the world with floods, droughts and heatwaves, including taking the lives of over 1300 pilgrims in Mecca this June.
But tragedies of that kind do not normally apply to, or affect the 1% safely on the other side of the carbon divide. Well aware of the threat of planetary tipping points, the world’s rich and powerful billionaires have long been taking steps to protect themselves from climate breakdown and civilisational collapse.
The ‘Survival of the Richest’
Douglas Rushkoff chronicled the security obsessions of the billionaires in his book “Survival of the Richest.” Engaged by a small group of five super-wealthy guys — yes, all men — from the upper echelons of the hedge fund world, he was tasked with advising them on how to survive the inevitable breakdown, or as they call it, the “Event”:
They were not interested in how to avoid a calamity; they’re convinced we are too far gone. For all their wealth and power, they don’t believe they can affect the future. They are simply accepting the darkest of all scenarios and then bringing whatever money and technology they can employ to insulate themselves — especially if they can’t get a seat on the rocket to Mars.
Taking their cue from Elon Musk colonizing Mars, Peter Thiel reversing the aging process, or Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had a whole lot less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether and insulating themselves from a very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic, and resource depletion.
For them, the future of technology is really about just one thing: escape.
Are the oceans giving up on humanity?
Until recently the ocean has dutifully absorbed 90% of the heat caused by human-induced climate change, according to Prof Johan Rockström of the Stockholm Resilience Centre. As scientists observe rapidly rising ocean temperatures, they are forced to ask whether the seas are starting to lose their resilience… at risk of releasing heat back into the atmosphere; amplifying, not damping the warming, in a process they call ‘the great acceleration.’
Scientists do not yet know if the seas are at a tipping point. But of one thing they are certain: the ocean is sounding the alarm.
It is not just the ocean that appears to be at a tipping point. There are others: The latest scientific evidence shows, says Professor Rockström that part of the Amazon rainforest, planet Earth’s richest biome on terrestrial land, has already tipped over and is no longer a carbon sink.
It is today a carbon source…..it is no longer helping us.
What must be done?
Governments must act. Instead of serving as “lapdogs for the billionaire class” (to quote President Shawn Fain of the UAW) British, European and American politicians need to grasp the scale of the threat, and conscious of their culpability for this crisis, use their power, and the state’s finances, for rapid and urgent transformation. It can’t be left to the greed of Elon Musk and Bill Gates. And it can’t be left to you and me. Because only governments have the financial firepower - and the social purpose - to undertake this great transformation.
In 2009 central bankers across the world coordinated action to stabilise the global economy and prevent another great depression.
They did not claim impotence.
In March 2020, as capitalism literally imploded, central bankers found the money to bail out both Wall St., and the City of London and the shadow banking system - and finance the COVID response.
They did not pretend to be helpless.
In both 2009 and 2020 no politician or technocrat was heard whining ‘there is no money’ and fretting about ‘fiscal rules’ and ‘central bank independence’.
Today they choose to sit on their hands, whimpering about their economic impotence, and watching as foolish politicians and stupid judges jail, ban, and shout down the visionaries, the realists, the Just Stop Oil messengers.
The climate crisis will spare no one - not even billionaires.
Roger Hallam, Daniel Shaw, Louise Lancaster, Lucia Whittaker De Abreu and Cressida Gethin are currently serving five and four year sentences for non-violent civil disobedience. You can support them here and here.
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I remember telling his Oxford students: "If you walk by a Rolls Royce, spit on it". But on a more mild note I think everyone should read the Pope's "Let Us Dream". It makes such an understated brilliant argument for living with nature and equity with each other. Also encourage people to have a go at The Landlord's Game that Lizzie Magie designed after reading Henry George's fulminations against landowners and the sale of land. The economically illiterate consumers bought Monopoly instead, a cynical inversion of the message that the Landlord's Game conveyed. Like the JSO protestors we have a steep wall of entitled ignorance to tear down.
Every billionaire is a failure of economics and society. This is not the inevitable result of a system we cannot escape. Like all human creations, the economy is designed, and it can be redesigned. The myth of permanence is designed by the powerful to protect their power, and propagated by a corporate media whose interests are aligned with them, not us. We must break the power of accumulated money, by destroying its ability to accumulate itself. Set government bond rates permanently at zero. Use the government capacity to create credit (cheaply) to fund the transformation we need, instead of privatising this capacity to the banks and allowing them to choose the allocation of capital. Finally, turn to Henry George to recover the social value of land. it can be done. We just need “economics” to design a better system instead of justifying the current one.