Oil and gas executives from the world’s most polluting companies — such as BP, Chevron, and Saudi Aramco — were among the 1,500 business leaders in attendance. Also on the guest list: chief executive officers from JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo, banks that are top financiers of oil and gas and which have recently come under fire for funding a group lobbying against climate efforts, as well as theCEO of BlackRock, which despite its green rhetoric still holds $133 billion in shares and bonds of top oil and gas companies.

In a speech at Davos on Thursday, activist Greta Thunberg told attendees that trusting a class of people who are “mostly fueling the destruction of the planet” to willfully help slow climate change is “absurd.”

“Somehow these are the people that we seem to rely on solving our problems when they have proven time and time again that they are not prioritizing that,” she said. “They are prioritizing self-greed, corporate greed, and short-term economic profits above people and above planet.”

Study after damning study also shows the world’s wealthiest people have far more emitting lifestyles than the rest of us. Take, for instance, their propensity to travel by private jet, which according to one estimate emits up to 14 times more than taking a commercial plane.

Last year, more than one thousand private plane trips to the World Economic Forum generated four times the CO2 emissions that such aircrafts create worldwide in an average week,…