On Our Climate-Challenged Planet, Only Some Deaths Seem to Matter

by Sam Pizzigati

 September 3, 2024
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Photograph Source: Commander, U.S. Naval Forces Europe-Africa/U.S. 6th Fleet – Public Domain

Over 3,000 migrants fleeing from poverty and conflict, the Council on Foreign Relations recently noted, died last year trying to cross the Mediterranean into Europe.

Those deaths made barely a ripple in most of the world’s major news media. But this summer one single tragedy on the Mediterranean has been making globs of global headlines.

On Monday, August 19, amid a fearsome sudden storm, a boat deemed “unsinkable” sank off the coast of Sicily’s Palermo. Seven of the 22 people on board perished.

What made this sinking so newsworthy? The ship that sank just happened to be a luxury sailing yacht that sported the world’s tallest aluminum mast. And the casualties from that superyacht’s sinking just happened to include the high-tech CEO once hailed as the “British Bill Gates.”

That chief exec, the yacht’s owner Mike Lynch, had envisioned this voyage as a celebration over a decade in the making. Just weeks earlier, after years of legal battling, a federal jury in Northern California had acquitted Lynch and one of his VPs on charges they had artificially inflated the value of Lynch’s software company. That inflating, prosecutors charged, had sealed the firm’s 2011 sale to Hewlett-Packard for over $11 billion, a deal that netted Lynch personally about $800 million.

But within a year after the sale the value of Lynch’s company had tanked by some $8.8 billion, and H-P was referring allegations of accounting improprieties against Lynch to the British Serious Fraud Office and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The referrals would eventually produce a civil-suit victory for H-P and a 2019 criminal conviction of a key exec at Lynch’s firm.

The 59-year-old Lynch and his finance VP Keith Chamberlain would have much better luck in their own criminal trial on similar charges. Unfortunately for them, they’ll never get to enjoy their acquittal. Lynch drowned in the sinking of his yacht, as did Lynch’s top trial lawyer and the chair of financial giant Morgan Stanley’s international arm, a star witness for Lynch’s defense.

What made this Lynch yacht sinking particularly irresistible for the world’s media? On the same day as the sinking, reports surfaced that Lynch’s acquitted co-defendant Chamberlain had just died after a car ran him over while he was jogging. A sheer coincidence? And how could the captain of Lynch’s superyacht and all but one of his crew escape the boat’s sinking alive while Lynch and six other passengers perished? Such juicy meat for endless conspiracy speculation!

But we need not resort to conspiratorial theorizing to understand why Lynch’s $25-million yacht sank so quickly that stormy night. That blame belongs in no small part to climate change, not some cabal of his billionaire corporate rivals.

By this past June, points out a new Financial Times analysis, water temperatures in the Mediterranean had been rising for 15 straight months. Higher water temperatures invite ever more extreme weather events. One such event — a tornado-like waterspout with “ferocious winds” howling at nearly 70 miles per hour — hit right near where Lynch had last anchored his superyacht.

Only 16 minutes passed between the moment those harsh winds first hit the yacht and the moment the yacht sank. That “rapid sinking of such a large, modern and well-equipped yacht,” adds the Financial Times, “has raised concerns over marine safety as extreme weather events occur with more frequency and intensity.”

In other words, the superyachts that typically spend summers in the Mediterranean and winters in the Caribbean better beware.

But the mega-rich who own these yachts have, in one sense, no one to blame but themselves. Our globe remains in overall climate-crisis denial in no small part because our wealthiest have so much to lose if our world gets serious about ending the profligate corporate practices now driving our planet’s climate collapse.

The ranks of these richest include, of course, the fossil-fuel industry’s top execs and investors. But all our super rich, not just the kings of Big Oil, have a vested personal interest in “calming” climate anxiety. Coming to grips with the chaos fossil fuels have already created — and speeding a worker-sensitive transition to a carbon-free future — will take enormous financial resources. The world will only be able to raise those resources if the rich and their corporations start paying their fair tax share.

A tax of between a mere 1.7 and 3.5 percent on the wealth of the world’s richest 0.5 percent, suggests the UK-based Tax Justice Network, could annually raise $2.1 trillion. Most of the world’s richest nations, notes the Tax Justice Network’s Alison Schultz, are shying away from that suggestion.

Notes Schultz: “This needs to change now — the climate can’t wait, and nor can the people of the world.”

Sam Pizzigati writes on inequality for the Institute for Policy Studies. His latest book: The Case for a Maximum Wage (Polity). Among his other books on maldistributed income and wealth: The Rich Don’t Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that Created the American Middle Class, 1900-1970  (Seven Stories Press).