Look at the money that came out of the woodwork for a building — a lovely old building but still a building. What people are complaining about is a sense of proportion.
Our planet is on the boil. The consequences will be with us for generations. A million other species are endangered. It’s by far the biggest problem that humans have ever faced, and we’re entirely failing to deal with it.
The top 1% of the world owns half the world’s wealth. If overnight the world’s billionaires decided that climate change was of primary importance, they could fix it — and probably still make money doing it, just a lot less.
They aren’t doing it. They won’t be bothered. Indeed, for many of them, the idea of “everyone else desperately poor and suffering, them even richer” is the best positive outcome in their world.
Many of them are building escape holes in New Zealand and other distant places high above sea level so they can escape the consequences of their own actions.
Others have delusional plans of moving human beings to Mars or “space”, as if destroying the only planet humans have ever lived on and moving to a dark, cold, airless, arid, and completely lifeless desert tens of million of miles away is some sort of positive outcome.
Our species is encountering our first global existential crisis. Previous population die-offs like the Black Plague were part of a typical healthy population dynamic. But the ongoing destruction of our own biosphere at an exponentially increasing rate is unprecedented even in the fossil record.
And our “captains of industry” and our spineless “leaders” are not rising to the task — are barely admitting that the problem exists — have given up and are planning to run away.
But they can come out when they want to — like when some building which represents France (and Catholicism) burns down!
Hey, perhaps we could convince the billionaires that destroying the planet is a matter of national and religious pride!
Maybe then they’d act to save the world’s future, instead of continuing to serve the world-destroying machine that is exponentially growing industrial capitalism.
