Belleza Palida

Part 2 of my "transgender social contagion" series just dropped!

Anti-trans campaigners increasingly raise fears about "the rising number of 'young girls' transitioning." This essay delves into the actual statistics, and critiques the sexist & ableist presumptions that inform such framings.

no-paywall link, please share widely & give it lots of "claps" (up to 50) so others see it!

Consider Bill Gates: After being the hated Microsoft monopolist at the turn of the millennium, he deployed the fortune he accumulated from capturing software markets to reinvent himself as the “good” billionaire, spending his wealth on health, agriculture, and, more recently, climate action. The Gates Foundation has spent millions promoting him as an expert on these topics, such that media constantly turned to him to opine on Covid-19 early in the pandemic, especially before he was tarred as a promoter of vaccine apartheid or colonialism for arguing against lifting the intellectual property protections on the vaccine. (After immense criticism, the Gates Foundation said it would support a “narrow waiver.”)

On climate change, Gates takes a similar approach to his vaccine work. His focus is on empowering entrepreneurs and investors, and getting governments to fund more basic research that wouldn’t be profitable for the private sector. He’s not interested in mundane technologies that we can deploy today to make a big difference, which he considers the “easy stuff,” but on more speculative pursuits that may or may not ultimately pay off. Once new technologies are developed, they should be for companies to exploit for profit — not to be shared with the world to accelerate the shift to a more sustainable way of living, let alone a more equitable economy. For Gates, the climate crisis is a technological problem, not a political one. It doesn’t require foundational changes to the way we’ve set up society; it just requires us to deploy cutting-edge technologies that reduce the emissions of things we already do, so everything else can stay virtually the same.

For example, the idea that he shouldn’t be flying around the world in a private jet is unconscionable. In a recent BBC interview, he argued that since he funds a direct air capture company and spends “billions of dollars on … climate innovation,” he should be able to live however he wants. Last year, his private flights alone emitted an estimated 3,058 tons of CO2, compared to total emissions of 15.5 tons for the average person in the United States. The rich have a massive environmental footprint, so it’s no surprise this is the argument they make.

As I explained earlier this month, Elon Musk’s vision for the future of transportation and cities isn’t so different. He wants us to electrify cars, add solar panels to our homes, and switch to renewables — with as much of that economic activity going through Tesla as possible. Expanding renewables is essential to addressing the crisis and electric cars are part of the solution, though their impact depends on how they’re implemented. But Musk’s vision is one where we keep driving personal vehicles, living in suburban communities, having long commutes, and where he can keep flying his private jet as much as he wants. To make that possible, he exaggerates the degree of future CO2 removal that will be necessary because he doesn’t want us to pursue structural changes that would alter the social and economic dynamics that benefit him. It’s fundamentally conservative vision, and regardless of what Musk says, it won’t get us to the rapid emissions reductions we need if we’re to head off the nightmare scenarios the IPCC is warning us about.