What 20% of Billie Eilish’s net worth is going to do for our planet and society
Billie Eilish Calls to All Billionaires, “Give Your Money Away.”
Billie Eilish’s Hit Me Hard and Soft tour made around $82.3 million. She then announced that she would be donating $11.5 million of it to support various environmental and societal causes affecting our world, with a focus on addressing food insecurity and the climate crisis.
In Billie’s speech accepting the Wall Street Journal Innovator of the Year Award, announcing this donation, she comments on the state of the world:
“We’re in a time right now when the world is really, really bad and really dark. People need empathy and help more than, kind of, ever, especially in our country. I’d say if you have money, it would be great to use it for good things and maybe give it to some people that need it.”
She goes further in calling out the unequal distribution of wealth and empathy in our country,
“Love you all, but there’s a few people in here who have a lot more money than me. If you’re a billionaire, why are you a billionaire? No hate, but yeah, give your money away, shorty.”
Billie has radicalized music for her generation, and now she has taken on part of the burden to fix our deteriorating society for them as well.
The climate crisis isn’t new, and food insecurity isn’t either. Still, it is hard for some to see a problem when it doesn’t directly affect them, especially billionaires who will not be here long enough to see our planet melt or question where their next meal will come from. Even in a polarized society, I think that some common ground we can agree on is the need to fix where we all live: Earth.
NASA states that “It is undeniable that human activities have produced the atmospheric gases that have trapped more of the Sun’s energy in the Earth system. This extra energy has warmed the atmosphere, ocean, and land, and widespread and rapid changes in the atmosphere, ocean… have occurred.”
There is evidence of climate change everywhere, through increased temperatures, the oceans rising, glaciers retreating, snow cover decreasing, and natural disasters being more intense and frequent. All of these things affect every single person on the planet, but because they have been happening slowly, some people think we have time; we don’t.
And the people inhabiting our planet don’t have enough food. The USDA stated that 11.2 million families had only just enough food to avoid disrupting their normal eating patterns, but were not receiving the actual well-rounded nutrients they needed to grow. Eighteen million families didn’t know if they would be able to feed everyone in their homes. 6.8 million families went without meals for certain times of the year.
We see the detrimental effects of food insecurity when children struggle to focus in school, go to bed hungry, and fail to grow properly if they cannot access regular, nutritious meals. The future generations won’t be able to thrive if they can’t learn and grow.
Greta Thunberg said in 2019 at the U.N. Climate Action Summit,
“This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you!
You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!”
Greta Thunberg is 22, Bill Eilish is 23. Both Generation Z.
Gen Z has stood up for themselves. 20-year-olds are having to stand up in rooms full of people old enough to be their parents and grandparents, and scold them. Our generation is having to give away their money, freedoms, and childhoods to fix what we didn’t break. We are willing, able, and determined; that is not the problem. The problem lies in the generations that disregarded scientific fact and empathy. Fixing this starts with acknowledging these discrepancies that both Greta and Billie point out.
We will fix what they broke, but maybe they can still help us.