You have often heard about Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Sergey Brin, Mukesh Ambani, Gautam Adani and many popular celebrities. These personalities are some of the biggest polluters on the planet.

Welcome to the filthy lives of the ultra-rich! This is a world of helicopters, jets, mansions and rockets. The luxury lifestyles of the ultra-rich are pumping out air full of pollutants. 

Cutting these people's emissions is the easiest win for the climate. It comes at zero cost to anyone except them. And well, they can afford it. These billionaires, they are aware of the social capital of caring about the environment. But we don't see them doing anything about it, at least in their personal behaviour.

It's not just celebrities who are the problem. Inequality is failing between countries but growing within them. And in cities across the world, the widening gap between the rich and the rest also applies to emissions.

It's not just about rich people's lifestyle but things like space travel, private jet and yachts and stuff are absurd. But a bigger problem is really the way they exert political influence through campaign donations and influence in general on the lifestyle of everyone else.

So how can we clean them up? Don't let the uber-rich get so rich in the first place. But bear in mind it's not just the ultra-rich who emit way too much. We are also spending money on luxuries the climate can't afford. 

Rich, unsurprisingly want to stay rich and that's why the progress is slow. Rich people across the world buy electric cars, invest money in sustainable pension funds and vote for parties with climate-friendly policies. But a lot of them are also doing the exact opposite. And given how well the system works for the rich now, particularly the ultra-rich, it's going to take more than they are goodwill to change them.

Cleaning up the lifestyle of the rich is a clear-cut win for the climate. But for the most part the rich aren't going to just decarbonize themselves. Policies that redistribute their wealth need to gain social acceptance. Policies that target the emissions need to avoid a backlash from people who look up to their lifestyles. And yeah, getting there might take some systemic shifts to reduce the influence rich people have on policymakers and the media.

But recognising that the wealthy have more power to stop climate change is the first step to tackling there outsize pollution.