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If you say "I can juggle 10 balls" and only juggle 3 in your shows, people will want a refund and will stop giving you balls. Excess consumption is just them trying to live up to all the money they have.

It's why we see companies who don't return money or try to stay as small as possible as "virtuous". They accurately tell people how much capital they can currently manage effectively.

Rich kids and all the Suddenly Billionaire Chinese Peasants are just trying to do what's expected of rich people. They're expected to Do Something With All That Stuff.

It's easier to be rich in the U.S. because there's a longer history of wealth and more social scripts to follow. Start a charity or non-profit, name a bridge or a town after yourself, start a war, etc... Without these social scripts the default is to Buy Luxury Goods.

You could make the argument that burning a giant pile of money this way at least allows the money to "pass through". A miserly scrooge who just amasses money is like a constipated asshole, locking up energy and vitality in limbo.

The consumption of luxury goods at the very least passes the money back into the economy even if you can argue that the work created from this energy isn't particularly Useful.

(The counter argument is Life as Art and that not everyone is suited for rocketing cars into space or developing nuclear fusion energy)

What something like a basket of index funds does is that is allows misers to contribute to society. It realizes assholeness is a form of energy just like that time when a someone picked up a black rock and called it Coal.

So that's a connection between global warming and the financial system. We have this energy source called "Coal" that we can burn for Energy to Do Stuff and it generates "Pollution" and at some point we need to ask if that Stuff is worth the Pollution.

Because the coal is infinite, and there's only so much pollution (physical and mental) living things can take before they just die o kill themselves.