Nairobi – A week before shareholders at the Tesla Annual General Meeting are expected to sign off a pay package that could make Elon Musk the world's first trillionaire, Greenpeace is urging governments to lay the ground for a global tax reform at the upcoming UN Tax Convention negotiations in Nairobi, Kenya.
Greenpeace criticises that billionaires and their polluting industries are hoarding extreme wealth, while there is a lack of funding for climate action. From the UN Tax Convention negotiations in Nairobi to the COP30 in Belém, Greenpeace is sending a clear message to governments: to meet their climate and nature commitments, they must start by taxing extreme wealth – a step that could help tackle growing inequality and be used to benefit people and the planet.
Fred Njehu, Greenpeace Africa Fair Share Political Lead, said: "Instead of enabling one person to become a trillionaire, governments should unlock that same scale of wealth – the $1.7 trillion, which a billionaire and multi-millionaire tax could generate per year globally – to protect lives and secure our common future. A fair billionaire tax could fund climate flood prevention, clean air, green cities, affordable housing, and nature protection.
"There is no lack of money, only a failure to make the richest of the rich pay their fair share. Governments must act on behalf of the majority of people and listen to what many economic experts suggest: tax the super-rich and their polluting corporations to finance a fair green transition."
To illustrate the issue, Greenpeace Africa and Greenpeace International today launched an interactive, video game-like tool called The Billionaire Taxometer which allows players to get an idea of how much taxes they pay compared to the amount reportedly paid by the richest man on Earth, showing how unfair the current tax system is in most countries.[2]
The aim is also to call attention to the absurdity of companies that reportedly have paid only US$48 million in the last 3 years in corporate income taxes while proposing to give multi billion pay packages to their CEO.[3] The environmental organisations argue that tax rules benefit billionaires at the expense of the environment and people, and as the climate and nature crisis is disproportionately driven by the consumption and investments of the richest individuals it should be common sense to make the super-rich pay according to their 'ecological moral dues.'[4]
