A Pre-Commitment to Expropriate the Rich If the Climate Breaks

Most climate proposals aim at emissions. This one aims at something upstream: the fact that the people with the most influence over emissions are the people least exposed to the consequences.

The Asymmetry

A climate catastrophe is not equally bad for everyone. If large parts of the world become difficult to live in, the wealthy relocate. They buy the land that stays habitable, the water rights, the air conditioning, the private security, the second passport. Corporations restructure, write off the exposed assets, and continue.

This is not a moral accusation; it is a description of what money does. Money is, among other things, a mechanism for converting a general catastrophe into someone else's catastrophe.

The consequence is that the group with the greatest capacity to influence policy — through lobbying, ownership, and campaign finance — has the weakest personal stake in preventing the outcome. Their incentives and everyone else's diverge exactly where it matters most.

Every attempt to fix this by appeal has failed, and will keep failing, because you are asking people to act against their interests out of conscience. Some will. Most will not, and the ones who do will be outcompeted by the ones who do not.

The Proposal

So do not appeal to conscience. Change the interest.

Decide now, and announce now, what happens to concentrated wealth in the event of a climate catastrophe. Legislate it in advance: if catastrophe occurs — defined by specified, measurable thresholds — then a very large fraction of private wealth above some level, say 97 or 98 per cent, is confiscated.

The stipulation is conditional. It triggers only on the event. But it is enacted and publicised today, when the event can still be prevented.

Why the Mechanism Works

The point is not revenue. If the catastrophe happens, the expropriation is nearly irrelevant — you cannot buy back a habitable planet, and the money will be worth much less in that world anyway.

The point is what the standing threat does to behaviour now.

A credible pre-commitment of this kind puts the wealthy in the same boat as everyone else, which is precisely the arrangement the current distribution of risk prevents. Under it, the calculation changes for exactly the people whose calculations matter most. Preventing catastrophe stops being philanthropy and becomes asset protection. The lobbying capacity that currently opposes climate measures is suddenly pointed the other way — not because anyone's conscience improved, but because the balance sheet moved.

That is the whole design: align the interests rather than argue with them.

The Obvious Objections

"They will move their money." Yes, some will, and the policy has to be built with that in mind — applying to assets by location, to citizenship, to market access. This is a serious implementation problem, not a refutation. Capital flight is a difficulty for every tax; we do not therefore abandon taxation.

"No legislature would pass it." Probably true, and this is where the proposal connects to everything else I have written about political structure. A legislature funded by the people the measure targets will not pass a measure targeting them. That is not an argument against the policy. It is another instance of the argument that the current system cannot enact anything contrary to concentrated interests — and therefore an argument for deciding such questions somewhere else, by a body whose members bear the risk personally.

"It is unjust to punish people for an outcome they did not individually cause." This one deserves a straight answer: the proposal is not a punishment, it is an incentive, and it is announced in advance precisely so that it never has to be applied. A pre-commitment that works costs nobody anything. If it is ever collected, it has already failed.