Yes, humans are by-and-large assholes. Still these 100 shoulder much, much more blame than almost everyone else. They should be in jail, not fantastically rich. If somehow they were put in jail, the next 100 would be less keen to take their place.
I'm curious, how do you propose that would work? Their businesses are legal, and post hoc criminalization is obviously unjust. If they broke some existing laws, sure, they should face the consequences, but membership on a "top 100" list is a very dubious crime. In what world is targeting business leaders of a legal activity with criminal prosecution even possible without rejecting the culture of consumerism first?
Their businesses are legal, and post hoc criminalization is obviously unjust.
Obviously post hoc criminalization is a thing nonetheless, and is perfectly just when the law itself is unjust. It's amusing to see you write that something is "legal" and think that that means anything.
Trying to rank the world's worst climate criminals is an approximate thing. Wouldn't it be nice if rejecting the culture of consumerism started at the top, with those who benefit most from it, rather than with the morons in the middle who don't really do any damage at all individually.
If it weren't these 100, another 100 would gladly step into their roles for massive payouts.
The problem is one of scale and greed: it's not that there are 100 mega-evil humans or companies out there destroying the planet, it is that nearly all humans would do the same and will selfishly consume whatever they want buying cheap, disposable Chinese crap and electronics all the time and taking an uber or buying whatever latest stupid fad is pushed on social media. The problem is the entirety of the materialism lifestyle the rich lead (and that includes nearly everyone in US, Canada, Europe, etc) and that the rest of the world is trying to emulate. But telling people that they are the problem isn't a very effective strategy for winning over their beliefs, so we get these misdirection attacks that imply we can keep the whole system going if we just reform a few things here and there and stop these handful of really bad people. It's not very honest.