Barack Obama and Jeff Bezos recently shared a difference of opinion about how humans should be directing their productive energy. Obama echoed the sentiments of Gil Scott-Heron’s 1970 poem “Whitey on the Moon,” saying “I would rather us invest in taking care of this planet here.” Bezos, on the other hand, offered the take that going to space is actually the path to saving the planet, explaining that “there’s one thing that is moving backwards, and it’s the natural world. We have traded some of that pristine beauty for all of these other gifts that we have as an advanced society. And we can have both, but to do that, we have to go to space.”

Given Bezos’s influence, it’s important to deeply consider both the context and the ramifications of his comments here, rather than falling into the frighteningly common trap of believing everything billionaires say simply because, “hey, they were smart enough to make a billion dollars, so they probably know lots of stuff.”

First of all, Bezos is not as high-minded as he is trying to make himself out to be. He says he wants to save the world, but maybe he just wants to play with rockets. This is the guy who took celebrities on a sight-seeing trip to shallow space. We know he’s investing in space at least in part because it’s a thing to do. In 2018 he mentioned in an interview with Axel Springer that his space company Blue Origin was a way to spend his cash. His words were as follows: “The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel. That is basically it. Blue Origin is expensive enough to be able to use that fortune.” Of course, the truth is that spending cash really isn’t that hard. You just buy stuff and people take your money. Easy as pie. Bezos is extremely wealthy, but acting like he can’t go through his cash by spending it on less sexy things than space travel is an insult to our intelligence. He could, for example, spend that cash on clean energy and carbon sequestration projects that would have a lasting benefit on our ailing planet. After all, wind turbines and solar farms don’t exactly come for chump change… but I guess you don’t get to wear a cowboy hat and a spacesuit for those things.

Furthermore, those types of climate improvement projects would be a step in the direction of what Bezos fears most: moderation. Well, he calls it “stasis civilization,” but its basically the same thing: Bezos notes in that same interview with Springer that people in our developed world use more energy than a primal human, and that that amount of energy has been continuing to rise. If it keeps on rising, there won’t be enough room on the planet for the solar panels needed to create the required energy. And, Bezos figures, since we’ve been working on energy efficiency for a while, and the numbers are still going up, it’s time to play rocket man.
But the reality is that we can reduce the amount of energy we use in developed countries. We don’t have to give up on that goal because some rich guy (who uses many thousands of times more energy than the average person) said so. The notion that we can’t decrease the amount of energy we use even as technologies vastly reduce the amount of energy required to do the things we do is tantamount to surrendering to greed and excess.

More importantly, there will be dire consequences if we don’t succeed in this goal. Even if Michael Strahan, William Shatner, and the rest of Blue Origin’s crew figure out all the space stuff, we are a long way from relieving Earth of our burden by sending people to live elsewhere in the solar system. Google it if you want, but I think it’s common sense. There are currently over 8 billion people on the planet, and space ship construction and rocket fuel expenditures are not only not cheap, they also hasten the very degradation of the planet that we are supposed to be alleviating by departing. That’s not to mention all of the prep work that would have to be done to make space an inhabitable environment.

Meanwhile, our planet is in trouble now. Bezos might be chagrined by the loss of “pristine beauty” (his yacht daily pollutes our planet as he sails in search of its vestiges), but for most of us there is more at stake than mere photo ops. The climate crisis is already costing humanity dearly. People are dying. People are suffering. Shifts in weather patterns are not only dangerous because of the damage inflicted by storms and wildfires, but also because agriculture will be increasingly affected. Work we do to decrease our greenhouse gas footprint not only alleviates these issues in the immediate future, but it also pushes back the date, if it is to come, when we need to jump ship.