[This is a draft chapter from Social Murder, a book I am now writing for Monthly Review Press. Suggestions, comments and corrections are very welcome.]
The timing could not have been more exact, or more damning.
In the last week of June 2025, a major heat wave hit western and southern Europe. Temperatures soared over 40°C, and 2,300 people died. Climate scientists have concluded that the intense heatwave would have been nearly impossible without human-caused climate change.1
In the same week, Amazon owner Jeff Bezos was married in Venice, a world heritage site whose very survival is threatened by rising sea levels caused by global heating. The ceremony took place aboard Bezos’s superyacht, a $500 million sea-going mansion that is over a third longer than a U.S. football field. It was attended by 200 or so of the multibillionaire’s closest friends, many of whom arrived in their own superyachts.
It might seem hard to match the symbolism of massive CO2-emitting boats visiting Venice while millions suffered from global heating, but exactly one year later, in June 2026, the U.S. ambassador to Italy announced that he would visit Venice in his $450 million superyacht—during an even worse European heat wave, one that may have killed 20,000 people.2
Two multibillionaires in superyachts, visiting Venice during intense heat waves, one year apart.
Those aren’t just coincidences. The number of billionaires in the world has increased radically in the past decade. Coastal cities on the Mediterranean are favored gathering places for the obscenely rich, and their favored means of travel are private jets and superyachts. As intense heat waves become the “new normal,” the geographic convergence of billionaires, superyachts and deadly heat becomes inevitable, not coincidental.
Superyachts are environmentally destructive and multiplying fast. They should not exist.
Superyachts = Super Emitters
Let’s be clear: we are not talking about the 25-foot cabin cruiser that your doctor takes out on weekends, or the sport fishing boats that vacationing groups can rent. Such vessels may deserve criticism, but the environmental damage they cause is infinitesimal compared to the planetary impact of the world’s growing fleet of superyachts, megayachts and gigayachts.
The yacht building industry defines a superyacht as a privately owned vessel over 24 meters (roughly 80 feet) long. Below that threshold lies mere wealth. Above it lies something categorically different. A yacht owned by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, for example, was described in Architectural Digest.
Inside the vessel, 11 staterooms can accommodate up to 19 guests with access to a lengthy list of lavish amenities that includes a heated swimming pool with a hydraulic-powered mosaic floor that can raise and lower, a parquet floor salon complete with a limestone fireplace and a bar, a movie theater adorned in red velvet, a beauty salon, a gym, two helicopter pads, a sunbathing and diving area decked out with a blue-tiled spa, bulletproof windows, a fleet of jet skis, multiple 43-foot tenders, and a crew of 31 to oversee it all. The owner’s quarters include a private deck, two dressing rooms, and an observation lounge with a private galley, all spanning across two of the ship’s five decks, which are all accessible via elevator.3
The smallest superyachts sell for tens of millions of dollars; the largest for hundreds of millions. Annual operating costs, including crew salaries, fuel, maintenance, and insurance, are typically 10 percent of the purchase price.
These are not the pleasure craft of the ordinarily wealthy. They are the toys of a tiny global elite, items of conspicuous consumption so extreme that sociologist Grégory Salle has labelled them a form of “ecocide” and “conspicuous seclusion,” terms that capture both the ecological violence and the deliberate self-isolation of their owners.4
There are now roughly 7,000 superyachts in the world, and shipyards deliver another 200 to 250 new ones every year. There are even shipbuilders that specialize in “shadow vessels” that travel with the main boats, providing crew accommodations, extra guest suites, and large accessories such as speedboats and helicopters.
A superyacht is by far the largest greenhouse gas emitter among any billionaire’s personal possessions. A 2021 study of twenty prominent billionaires found that their yachts accounted for 64.3 percent of their personal emissions, dwarfing private jet travel (33.4 percent) and dwellings (2.3 percent). The average superyacht in that sample emitted 7,018 tonnes of CO₂ equivalent per year.5
Of curse, the biggest yachts emit much more. Launchpad, the $400 million boat custom built for Facebook owner Mark Zuckerberg, has a helipad, a theater with reclining seats and surround sound, an AI-controlled climate system, a gym and an infinity swimming pool.6 According to Yacht CO₂ Tracker, Launchpad emitted 11,100 tonnes of CO 2 in just six days in April 2025.7 And that doesn’t include its shadow, the $100 million Wingman.
An Oxfam study of 23 billionaire-owned superyachts found an average annual footprint of 5,672 tonnes per yacht.8 It would take the average person on Earth 860 years to emit that much.9
Devouring the Commons
The world’s atmosphere is a global commons, a shared resource that is essential for all life. We don’t just breathe it, we depend on it for the climate conditions that have made civilization possible. And the science is absolutely solid: increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the air is increasing global temperatures and destabilizing the global climate.
Every tonne of fossil fuels burned forecloses options for billions of people who have not yet been born and imposes costs on billions alive today who had no part in creating the problem.
According to the latest scientific calculations, to have even a 50% chance of keeping the global temperature increase below 2.0°C, global carbon emissions must not exceed 640 gigatons. At present rates that carbon budget will be used up by 2050. If everyone produced the lifestyle emissions of a typical billionaire, the budget would be exhausted in six days.
Fossil fuel companies and their apologists like to claim that everyone is responsible for climate change because everyone emits CO 2 in their daily lives. As Andreas Malm points out, drawing on work by the philosopher Henry Shue, such arguments confuse two very different things, luxury emissions and subsistence emissions.
The former happen because rich people like to wallow in the pleasure of their rank, the latter because poor people try to survive.
If a peasant family in India uses coal to cook their food, or light up their house with electricity from a coal-fired power plant, the only available alternative might be no stove and no lamp. Because they are locked in a fossil economy they have little choice but to use the CO 2-emitting energy on offer. Someone who drives a superyacht cannot be thus exonerated: he could easily abstain from his boat without foregoing a vital need or right, indeed without experiencing any discomfort whatsoever.10
The atmosphere belongs, in every meaningful moral and physical sense, to all living things. Superyacht owners are not simply making private lifestyle choices. They are unilaterally drawing down a shared inheritance thousands of times faster than their fellow inheritors.
They cannot claim ignorance. The science of climate change has been settled for decades. The carbon footprint of superyachts is public knowledge. Atmospheric tipping points, ecosystem collapse, and the projected death tolls from heat, flood, drought, and famine in the world’s most vulnerable regions are part of the global public record.
In these circumstances, continuing to operate these floating behemoths deserves to be labelled as anti-social, sociopathic behaviour.
The superyacht is not a neutral object. In the 21st century, after five decades of scientific warning, it is an arrogant declaration that the owner’s comfort is worth more than the stability of the planet.
Of course, banning superyachts won’t solve the climate crisis alone. But, as Malm writes,
if we cannot even get rid of the most preposterously unnecessary emissions, how are we going to begin moving toward zero?11
References
1. Ben Clarke et al., “Climate change tripled heat-related deaths in early summer European heatwave,” Grantham Institute report, 2025.
2. Christopher W. Callahan, “Death toll exceeds 20,000 across Europe in June 2026 heat wave,” Non-peer-reviewed preprint,
3. Katie Schultz, “Inside Paul Allen’s Former Yacht on Sale for $90 Million,” Architectural Digest, September 16, 2022.
4. Grégory Salle, Superyachts: Luxury, Tranquility and Ecocide (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2024), 3—5, 87—92.
5. Beatriz Barros and Richard Wilk, “The Outsized Carbon Footprints of the Super-Rich,” Sustainability: Science, Practice and Policy 17, no. 1 (2021).
6. “Mark Zuckerberg Yacht: Inside the $400 Million Launchpad,” De Yachting, November 11, 2025.
7. yachtco2tracker.bsky.social on Bluesky, April 2025.
8. Oxfam International, Carbon Inequality Kills: Why Curbing the Excessive Emissions of an Elite Few Can Help Everyone (Oxfam International, October 2024), 11—14.
9. Oxfam International, Carbon Inequality Kills, 15.
10. Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline, (Verso, 2021), 88.
11. Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline, 92, Emphasis in original.