The reason seems simple for why wealthy men do the least work on climate change issues.

…Amanda Clayton, a University of California political scientist found during her research on the topic, “the gender gap grows as a function of country wealth.”

As countries get richer, it is more likely that women will be the ones expressing greater concern about climate change. But not because they are suddenly more concerned.

“It’s actually that men tend to decrease their concern about climate change as countries become wealthier,” Clayton said. “The growing gender gap is actually men’s growing skepticism.”

The wealth creates male disassociation from their environment. The more money they have, the more their upbringing kicks in to distance themselves and care less about others. If they were raised differently, to give as well as to take, they wouldn’t confuse extraction for isolation with success.

To be fair, Clayton argued wealthy men see climate change work as having no benefit to them, but lots of risks (e.g. their jobs and investments in big oil going away). She said they disengage as their power move, an inversion of the fascist “if you don’t like it leave” mantra. Cara Daggett in 2018 warned that this could be understood as authoritarian desires of petro-masculinity.

Paul Piff is perhaps another useful reference, since he generalized that individuals who perceived themselves to have privilege of power were more likely to moralize greed and self-interest as favorable, less likely to be prosocial, and more likely to cheat and break laws when it suited them. They think they are above the law. He linked that to money, but let’s be honest, when luxury cars were four times less likely to stop for pedestrians at a crosswalk than drivers of inexpensive cars, that’s not really money. The car may have been a “gift” or even grift.