The Climate Conversation We Keep Avoiding
- Feb 19
- 2 min read
By Diana Colleen
There’s a baleful contradiction at the heart of how we talk about climate change. We tell billions of ordinary people to recycle more, drive less, and feel guilty when they fall short, while largely avoiding a much smaller, more powerful group whose decisions shape the planet’s future far more than individual habits ever could.
Roughly 3,200 billionaires control outsized shares of capital, production, and political influence. Meanwhile, the dominant climate narrative pressures more than seven billion people to be perfect. This framing is intellectually dishonest.
Individual responsibility matters, but it doesn’t operate evenly across society. One billionaire’s private jet emissions can exceed the lifetime footprint of thousands of people combined. A handful of corporate decisions can lock in fossil fuel dependence, deforestation, or plastic pollution for decades. No number of reusable grocery bags offsets that.
Climate discourse also confuses consumption with causation. We are asked to stop using things without telling producers to stop making them. Plastic pollution is blamed on consumer behavior rather than the corporations that manufacture it. Individuals are told to reduce their use while executives demand mass production, aggressive marketing, and political lobbying to prevent regulation. Consumers can only choose from what exists. When harmful products remain cheap, abundant, and unavoidable, responsibility has already been mis-assigned.
This misalignment becomes impossible to ignore when we look at where excess capital actually goes. The 1% now spends tens of billions of dollars on private space exploration, and vanity missions framed as “human progress,” while the planet that made that wealth possible, burns. These are not scientific necessities. They are prestige projects. The resources used to send a few people briefly beyond Earth’s atmosphere could fund renewable infrastructure, and large-scale environmental remediation right now.
The question is not whether we have the technology to fix the planet, it is why those with the power to deploy it are not required to do so?
Renewable energy, alternative materials, carbon capture, regenerative agriculture, and plastic eating fungi already exist. What remains underdeveloped is not innovation, but accountability.
Capital continues to flow toward extraction and spectacle rather than repair because the systems governing investment reward short-term profit over long term survival.
Media coverage has helped normalize this dynamic by treating climate change as a consumer problem and billionaire behavior as incidental. That framing protects power while exhausting the public.
The result is this: the people least able to change outcomes are asked to sacrifice the most, while those who shape production, policy and investment are framed as untouchable.
Shifting the climate conversation moves responsibility back to the systems causing the damage. Climate change is not a personal failure. It’s a leadership failure by design.
Billionaires sit at the center of that failure. They decide where capital flows, which technologies scale, and which narratives dominate public discourse. When they choose short-term profit over long-term planetary stability, the rest of us inherit the consequences.
These themes are explored further in my novel They Could Be Saviors, which imagines what happens when those with the most power finally face consequences.
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