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Most people in Cape Town had a few choice words to say about the recently released report that shows Cape Town’s ‘rich people’ are hogging all the water and by default turning KZN into a desert and drowning the polar bears.

These days ‘the rich’ seems to mean anyone who has a solar panel and a splash pool.

Nobody is allowed to be better off than someone else it seems, and if you graft like a maniac for 60 hours a week for the last twenty years just to give your family some relief from the South African summer, you have become bourgeois and by default, an enemy of mother nature. Fair or unfair, who knows?

This is not to say that the really wealthy among us do not take more than they should and that access to resources is not a socio-economic disgrace, but when we begin hurling Greta-Molotovs at ‘the rich’, we should perhaps aim a little higher than the people in the burbs who just want to cool their feet in a glorified duck pond.

The superwealthy and their toys don’t get nearly enough flack for their impact on the environment, especially considering that most of them have pools on their yachts that are bigger than the ones in Bishops Court.

A recent article in DTNext pointed out that some of these superyachts actually emit more carbon into the atmosphere annually than some countries, and with 5 500 of these behemoths floating around the world, we should definitely be looking everywhere if we really want to make a difference.

The 300 biggest boats alone emit 315,000 tons of carbon dioxide each year, based on their likely usage — about as much as Burundi’s more than 10 million inhabitants.

DreamWorks co-founder David Geffen for instance sails around in a 454-foot (183-metre) dingy called the Rising Sun. The 82-roomed ‘f@#$ you to the poor’ emits 16 320 tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent gases into the atmosphere annually, which equates to about 800 times the amount the average moviegoer generates in a year.

While not ignorant of these heavy polluters, most countries are hesitant to regulate or tax them, with France’s minister of the environment even going as far as calling the idea “le buzz”.

Yes, the people who are in power to make a difference don’t like attacking the ones who fund their campaigns to obtain said power, and so they ask the ‘common guy’ to ride a bicycle and eat less beef. But this has been shown to be futile.

Research in economics and psychology suggests humans are willing to behave altruistically — but only when they believe everyone is being asked to contribute. People “stop cooperating when they see that some are not doing their part.”

People won’t change their behaviour if bigger contributors to a problem are left to dry-hump the planet in luxury.

In that sense, superpolluting yachts and jets don’t just worsen climate change; they lessen the chance that we will work together to fix it. Why bother when the luxury goods mogul Bernard Arnault is cruising around on the Symphony, a $150 million (R2.7 billion), 333-foot (101m) superyacht?

The truth is we will never get on top of our global climate and equality issues if we don’t all change the way we consume and emit. Saying that something is unfair (as we might have earlier) is often easier than taking responsibility for our own actions. But, and there is usually a but, we should perhaps start with the bigger contributors to pollution before we get to the smaller ones.

And yes, we know the connection between a report on water usage in Cape Town and some billionaire’s yacht in the Bahamas is thin, but maybe if Jeff Bezos had a smaller boat, little Tommy down the street wouldn’t have to be made to feel like a rich drol because his dad put in a pool.

[source:dtnext]