The Trouble With the Ultra-Rich’s Environmentalism

In California, the real estate developer Marisol Malibu made waves when they sold a supposedly green $23 million mansion with nine bathrooms, 20 ft. ceilings, golf greens, a heated saltwater pool, a driving range, and ocean views to boot. The home’s “zero carbon” credentials include bespoke sustainable concrete and timber, water filtration, and Tesla batteries.

These days, many luxury projects like the one in Malibu brand themselves as climate-friendly. Consider Pegasus, a “sustainable” 3D-printed superyacht designed by Jozeph Forakis. It features solar panels and electrolyzers that extract hydrogen from seawater. “Now is the time for courageous leaps toward our collective sustainable future,” Forakis beamed during the super-yacht’s unveiling. But at a cool $88 million, it is less a sign of a “collective sustainable future” than an omen of a highly exclusive one. 

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Efficiency isn’t just used to justify elite lifestyles. It’s also being used to justify highly energy intensive industries, like oil drilling and bitcoin mining. In 2021, a pair of 23-year-old sophomores from Texas A&M University, Brent Whitehead and Matt Lohstroh, made $4 million by buying a shipping container full of servers and then employing them to mine Bitcoin by using gas flares from a drilling site to generate electricity. This was touted as a green solution by capturing previously wasted energy. Sure, it’s efficient from an economic point of view, but it doesn’t really solve any problem. All it does is more efficiently exploit oil and gas reserves. And this is at a moment when humanity is on track to blow past a catastrophic 3°C degrees of warming by the end of the century, caused by the burning of fossil fuels. Efficiency is meaningless if we’re still burning more fossil fuels than ever before. We need the total amount of fossil fuels we’re burning to go down, and quickly.

It’s often assumed that efficiency is good in itself: a low-flow shower head uses less water, a hybrid car uses less gasoline. But efficiency isn’t inherently good. In fact, sometimes it can even make things worse. The English economist William Stanley Jevons noted way back in 1865 that improvements to the steam engine made coal cheaper, leading to more coal use. In an economy based on growth, any cost saving is reinvested in more growth, and, often, more resource and energy use. 

One might argue that it’s surely a good thing that at least some luxury homes are now using less energy. But marginal efficiency in a mansion is usually entirely offset by rich people’s consumption elsewhere and hugely compounded by their investments. 

The “efficiency” mantra can even be a mixed bag for the non-ultra wealthy. In one survey in Germany of 1,012 respondents, those who self-identified as being environmentally conscious also had a higher energy use than those who didn’t. Hard-won savings in efficiency can be immediately negated when people spend their disposable income on high-polluting activities, like investing in crypto or that holiday to Thailand.

Now, don’t get us wrong. Efficiency can make life simpler. But there is a difference between efficiency and sufficiency. Anything can be efficient if you look at it in isolation from everything else. You can now have efficient offshore oil drilling, efficient private jets, efficient casinos, efficient crypto-mining, or efficient indoor ski resorts in the desert.

You can even have a “greener,” cleaner, more efficient military—witness the U.S. military’s plans to slash its emissions by half by 2030 through electrifying its vehicles, or the Israeli Defense Forces offering its soldiers vegan meals and leather-free boots. 

These contradictions lead us to ask: what do we really want, how much is enough, and where do we draw the line? Strangely, in the middle of ecological breakdown threatening the very basis of human life to thrive on this planet, superyachts or luxury tourism resorts are just not up for public debate. 

Efficiency improvements in mobility, heating, agriculture, and energy use are all important if we’re going to have even a glimmer of a chance at avoiding more than 1.5°C of warming, as laid out by the 2015 Paris climate agreement. But, to beat Jevons’s paradox, this must be accompanied by overall reductions in material and energy use, especially in wealthy nations. 

Sure, electric vehicles are more efficient than conventional oil-guzzling cars—but their benefit applies only if the overall use of personal cars drops. When more efficient cars are accompanied by investments in electrified mass transit, or when we invest in social housing made with sustainable materials rather than “eco-friendly” mansions, we might actually be getting somewhere. 

Until then, be careful of the “efficiency” hype. It’s often just greenwashing for the ultra-rich.