Sam Pizzigati: Ego-space-tripping billionaires want more tax breaks
Jeff Bezos’s space-project production facilities near the Kennedy Space Center, in Florida
— Photo by MadeYourReadThis
Via OtherWords.org
BOSTON
Three of the richest billionaires on Earth are now spending billions to exit Earth’s atmosphere and enter into space. The world is watching — and reflecting.
Some charmed commentators say the billionaires racing into space aren’t just thrilling humankind — they’re uplifting us. The technologies they develop “could benefit people worldwide far into the future,” says Yahoo Finance’s Daniel Howley.
But most commentators seem to be taking a considerably more skeptical perspective.
They’re dismissing the space antics of Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk as the ego trips of bored billionaires — “cynical stunts by disgustingly rich businessmen,” as one British analyst puts it, “to boost their self-importance at a time when money and resources are desperately needed elsewhere.”
“Space travel used to be about ‘us,’ a collective effort by the country to reach beyond previously unreachable limits,” writes author William Rivers Pitt. “Now, it’s about ‘them,’ the 0.1 percent.”
The best of these skeptical commentators can even make us laugh.
“Really, billionaires?” comedian Seth Meyers asked earlier this month. “This is what you’re going to do with your unprecedented fortunes and influence? Drag race to outer space?”
Let’s enjoy the ridicule. But let’s not treat the billionaire space race as a laughing matter.
Let’s see it as a wake-up call — a reminder that we don’t only get billionaires when wealth concentrates. We get a society that revolves around the egos of the most affluent and an economy where the needs of average people don’t particularly matter.
Characters like Elon Musk, notes Paris Max, host of the Tech Won’t Save Us podcast, are using “misleading narratives about space to fuel public excitement” and gain tax-dollar support for various projects “designed to work best — if not exclusively — for the elite.”
The three corporate space shells for Musk, Bezos and Branson — SpaceX, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic — have “all benefited greatly through partnerships with NASA and the U.S. military,” notes CNN Business. Their common corporate goal: to get satellites, people, and cargo “into space cheaper and quicker than has been possible in decades past.”
Branson is hawking tickets for roundtrips “to the edge of the atmosphere and back” at $250,000 per head. He’s planning some 400 such trips a year, observes British journalist Oliver Bullough, about “almost as bad an idea as racing to see who can burn the rainforest quickest.”
The annual U.N. Emissions Gap Report last year concluded that the world’s richest 1 percent do more to foul the atmosphere than the entire poorest 50 percent combined. Opening space to rich people’s joyrides would stomp that footprint even bigger.
Bezos and Musk seem to have grander dreams than mere space tourism — they’re looking to colonize space. They see space as a refuge from an increasingly inhospitable planet Earth. And they expect tax-dollar support to make their various pipe dreams come true.
How should we respond to all this?
We should, of course, be working to create a more hospitable planet for all humanity. In the meantime, advocates are circulating tongue-in-cheek petitions that urge terrestrial authorities not to let orbiting billionaires back on Earth.
“Billionaires should not exist…on Earth or in space, but should they decide the latter, they should stay there,” reads one Change.org petition nearing 200,000 signatures.
Ric Geiger, the 31-year-old automotive-supplies account manager behind that effort, is hoping his petition helps the issue of maldistributed wealth “reach a broader platform.”
Activists like Geiger are going down the right track. We don’t need billionaires to “conquer space.” We need to conquer inequality.
Sam Pizzigati, based in Boston, is an associate fellow and co-editor of Inequality.org at the Institute for Policy Studies. He’s the author of The Rich Don’t Always Win and The Case for a Maximum Wage.
This op-ed was adapted from Inequality.org and distributed by OtherWords.org.
Llewellyn King: Electric revolution to upend transportation
An electric-vehicle charging station, powered by solar panels, in Segovia, Spain
Bright boys and girls are flooding into transportation. It is the place of cutting-edge invention: not cell phones, they were so last year; not computers, they were, er, so last century. The smartest students leaving university may well find the adventure of creating in transportation.
A science-led revolution is in the making in transportation. Leading this revolution is the electric car. It is no longer a drawing-board dream. It is here and gaining market share, albeit miniscule at present.
The surge to electric-powered transportation goes beyond the Tesla and Elon Musk — although Musk has been a catalyst. All manufacturers are now making or investigating electric cars. But the electric car is only a beginning: buses, trucks, trains, small boats, ships and even airplanes are in the mix.
China is throwing government and private resources into an electric future. France, Britain and eight other countries have declared that they will ban the internal- combustion engine by mid-century. Volvo has said that it will stop making fossil- fuel-powered cars.
At the extreme end of the electric-car excitement are automated vehicles. These have caught the imagination — and the dollars — of Google and Uber. But Detroit is also is coming to realize that it has to go electric. General Motors has paved its way with the EV1 and the Volt. Others are scrambling.
The political pressure behind the urge to go electric is clean air, reduced noise and, for many countries, the end of a huge oil bill.
One hundred and forty years after Thomas Edison first perfected a light bulb, electricity is once again a major disruptive technology – and not just on the surface of the Earth. Electric aircraft are in design with short-haul, small-load passenger versions flying in Dubai. Mighty Boeing has teamed up with innovative JetBlue to work on an electric-powered aircraft, although these might have to wait for much better electric-storage batteries than now exist.
Naysayers are quick to point up the inadequacy of batteries — lithium ion are the workhorses in this revolution — and the difficulty of charging them.
These arguments point up a fork in the road for electric enthusiasts: Will the future depend on today’s charging technology where a car has to be tethered to the charging apparatus by a wire, or will electromagnetic fields be used in inductive charging, eliminating the wire? This is known as Wireless Power Transfer (WPT).
Enthusiasts see WPT charging in two ways: either a plate set in a driveway or parking lot with the vehicle at rest or a strip in a roadway which can charge vehicles in motion – a grander idea. If the latter is successful, it opens the way to smaller batteries in lighter vehicles, cheaper trucking.
The disruption is going to be very large.
Gas stations would largely disappear or be very few. Automobile technicians might want to look for alternative employment, as will, eventually, many truck drivers.
The search for new batteries is frenetic and international. New, longer-lived batteries will, in large measure, determine the rate of growth in the more advanced electric vehicle applications.
Another big imponderable is who will provide the electricity? There is a general assumption in the electric utilities that they will do this. But will they? The new owners of the charging networks may choose to make their own with wind, solar and small modular nuclear reactors.
What will the role of government be? Local government will have to deal with the road-use issues. But what of the federal government? It has always been involved in transport. As Peter Morici, the economist and columnist, points out, it stimulated the railways with right-of-way grants and the airlines with mail-hauling contracts. Will it find a similarly elegant way to stimulate the flow of electrons into transportation, and a whole new way of getting ourselves and our stuff around? Maybe it will be led by the military: the Navy wants electric ships.
No wonder the best minds out of colleges and universities are getting wanderlust.
On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS.