“Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God” (Matthew 19:24).
Superyachts are defined as yachts longer than 24 meters, with some as long as 70 meters or more. A study conducted in 2019 concluded that only 0.0027 percent of humanity had sufficient means to purchase even one of the smaller models. Jeff Bezo’s super sailing yacht, built at the cost of $500 million, has its own “support vessel,” a second superyacht measuring 75 meters long. In 2019, there were only 300 superyachts in operation, and yet when operating, those 300 superyachts produced more carbon emissions in a year than the entire 10 million inhabitants of Burundi (Malm 2021, 86).
When it comes to mitigating greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, author and activist Andreas Malm argues that it is important to differentiate between luxury emissions and subsistence emissions. While it is true that rice paddy produces methane, as does keeping an ox to plow your fields, why would we target poor Indonesian or African farmers whose emissions support their subsistence, while ignoring the luxury emissions of the uber-wealthy? I’m not the first to say it, though I’ve been slow in saying it publicly: climate action is on a collision course with capitalism and class struggle, and we are as ill-equipped to navigate these waters as Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen analogously was when his superyacht crashed into and destroyed 80 percent of a protected coral reef off the Cayman Islands in 2016.
“Under the current balance of class forces,” Malm writes, “the average capitalist state with some pretension to care about the climate will rather be inclined to begin at the opposite end: with an attack on subsistence emissions. This is what Emmanuel Macron, king of climate diplomacy and private luxury, did in France in 2018” (93). The fuel tax which triggered the Gilets Jaunes protests targeted cars popular with the working classes and “weighed five times more heavily on the bottom ten percent than on the top—effectively a regressive tax on subsistence, while luxury was released from all restraints by le Président des riches” (93).
At least Macron was making a nod to climate action. The “Big Beautiful Budget Bill” that Republicans just passed in the U.S. House and that Donald Trump hopes to sign will not only reverse much climate action in the States but also be what some journalists and economists are calling “a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, from the young to the old, and from the future to the past.” Additionally, the French at least have a tradition of taking to the streets, though many Americans will have their chance at the “No Kings” protests scheduled for June 14.
Back when I was a Bible college student in Chicago in the early 80’s, I had a part-time job cleaning the house of a wealthy commercial photographer on the side of LaSalle Street that marked the beginning of Chicago’s Gold Coast. On the other side of LaSalle were the neighborhoods that hosted Chicago’s most notorious housing project, Cabrini Green. Moody Bible Institute sat right between them, just as today in the climate crisis, we followers of Christ sit between luxury emitters and subsistence emitters while being emitters ourselves. One day I found myself in the car with this man, and seemingly out of the blue, he wanted to exegete a biblical passage for me: Matthew 19:16-30, the story of the rich young ruler. After the rich young ruler had turned away from Jesus, Jesus said to his disciples: “Truly I tell you, it is hard for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” My employer explained to me that, actually, Jesus was referring to a gate that existed at the time in the walls of Jerusalem which was so small that, if a merchant wanted to bring his camel through it, he had to remove all the baggage from the camel. The camel could then be dropped to his knees and then slowly pulled, pushed and walked through the tiny gate. “See!” my employer wanted me to acknowledge, “it’s hard but it’s not impossible.” I remember having three thoughts at the time: 1) yeah, I’ve heard that interpretation before (and have subsequently seen it even in an illustrated children’s book); 2) yeah, but then I take it that the baggage gets shoved through too, so that the rich person gets the kingdom of heaven and his riches as well; and finally, 3) wow, you are really trying hard to convince a poor, young employee about this. I remember feeling sorry for his lurking desperation.
The disciples didn’t make the same interpretative error. Immediately, we read: “When the disciples heard this, they were greatly astonished and asked, “Who then can be saved?” Jesus looked at them and said, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible” (Matt 19:25-26). Even Jesus ups the ante from how he previously characterized it: it’s so hard as to be effectively “impossible.”
What hope is there for converting the rich, either unto eternal life, or to drop their luxury emissions at 2025’s tiny gate and leave them there, lest the rich, their families, and certainly the poor and vulnerable of countries like Burundi perish in the heat? Jesus says, “with God all things possible.” I think this has something to say to us, whether we are old-fashioned evangelists or newly-minted climate messengers, or whether—as I can see happening among us—we are both, having expanded our horizon of what the Gospel is, and of what it means for a rich person to be truly “converted” and “saved.” If it is hard and impossible for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God, then much of what we consider to be our best efforts to help them must surely come across as silly. How (literally) would you pull a (real) camel through the eye (of a sewing needle)? Would you grab his muzzle, pinch one of his nostril hairs, and then thread it through first? Would you then pull on that nose hair, while on the other side of the needle, a colleague tries to compress the camel’s head? And look at the manure-splattered staffs of so many NGOs pushing diligently on the camel’s backside.
I can’t imagine this newsletter goes out to any superyacht owners, for whom the words of Jesus would mean one thing. No, we are fisherfolk, like Jesus’s disciples. “Who then can be saved?” we cry out. At some point, arguing climate economics with the fossil-fueled addicted and the endless-economic-growth possessed feels like a ridiculous affair, like I’ve got a camel’s nose hair pinched between my fingers. To instead surrender yourself to the impossibility, means—according to Jesus—surrendering yourself to God. It means—according to our Climate Intercessors network—surrendering yourself to prayer. It means opening yourself up to new approaches, because while “with God all things are possible,” he works out those possibilities through humble fisherfolk like us.
You are very dear to God,
Lowell Bliss,
On behalf of Climate Intercessors Leadership Team
Reference: Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline (London: Verso, 2021).
