Fascism on the Rise Archives - KDA Keeping Democracy Alive Podcast & Radio Show · Burt Cohen

People and the Planet: Burned By Billionaires

·1 hr·4 clips

Trickle-down theory has never worked.

Billionaire power is the alarm bell. Bert Cohen opens on greed as a governing creed and asks whether America is being run for a chosen few instead of the public. Collins does not soften the answer. Private luxury, especially recreational private-jet use, brings heavy emissions, and that is where the democracy argument gets sharp. If everyone else is asked to sacrifice while billionaires keep polluting casually, shared responsibility starts to sound like a rigged deal. The climate future gets named in plain terms: smoke, drought, flooding, water quality, and disrupted weather, all as conditions people will have to live with. Cohen pushes the obvious question: are billionaires listening, and are they changing? Some get treated as exceptions. Tom Steyer, Bill Gates, and Michael Bloomberg come up as figures who have spoken or funded work around climate action. But Collins keeps pulling the conversation back to structure. Under Trump, he says, the country moved from weak progress on emissions toward shutting down wind plants and keeping coal plants open. Fossil fuel wealth sits close to the center of that story. Collins describes fossil fuel billionaires, plus tech and AI interests hungry for energy, as blocking a healthier green transition. Cohen sounds genuinely stunned. The issue is not only hypocrisy. It is concentrated wealth bending policy while ordinary people absorb the damage. Collins points listeners to Burned by Billionaires, The New Press, burnedbybillionaires.com, and inequality.org for more. The democratic problem remains unresolved: how common sacrifice stays believable, how polluting power gets checked, and whether the wealthiest change before public faith runs out.

As heard by us

A blunt case against wealth that shapes policy, pollution, and democratic drift.

The discussion treats billionaire power as part of the climate problem and links it to the hollow promise of trickle-down economics. It moves from the old greed-is-good story to a picture of concentrated wealth showing up in private jets, fossil-fuel influence, coal propped up,…

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You want the climate fight tied directly to billionaire power and public policy.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Fascism on the Rise Archives - KDA Keeping Democracy Alive Podcast & Radio Show