Do people in capitals not understand or believe this? What do rich people (some of whom control large parts of the media) plan to do exactly? Die? Bunker? I mean seriously.
The problem is to gain political power you have to out compete others for money and votes.
Understanding a problem, and being able to hold on to power while making the hard decisions is a classic unsolved problem in politics.
But it's infinitely harder with very few (two!?!) high centralized litmus-tested groupthink political parties, incentivized to lock up power unilaterally, and marginalize the power of other parties, not skills conducive to governing.
And also infinitely harder with unlimited spending by corporations (who are not citizens, and don't share the interests of citizens), where tiny groups of executives get to leverage all their companies resources toward tilting the political field in their favor, in order to get massive bonuses for feeding insatiable shareholder demand. But without reflecting any of the decency that shareholders might actually have.
It's the moloch beast. The whole system is the problem, but it's near impossible to improve the system's design because it will fight that at every step.
It mindlessly cares about its own survival. Which is how it came to be.
Even if every single person in the system actually wants to do the hard things that will keep the planet in good shape.
What I don't understand is how not even environmentalists seem to believe it given their opposition to nuclear power. If a climate apocalypse were upon us, shouldnt we have been building nuclear power as fast as possible for the past decades? I really don't understand
What are the options, really? Option A is business as usual. Option B is a massive cut in energy consumption.
Option A implies at some point in the future, massive social unrest due to mass migration.
Option B implies massive social unrest today due to a large decline in standard of living. And no, it won’t be the “people in capitals” suffering here.
Option C is option A plus some geoengineering that will likely be undertaken when the situation is desperate enough.
Many Western nations have substantially reduced their emissions already. This did not result in catastrophic reductions in living standards. And these reductions happened before the current exponential cost improvements in renewables really began to cross the “knee”. At the same time there are fossil fuel interests and politicians who are trying to slow down renewables and promote more fossil drilling, even when it’s not economic. (And China is burning massive amounts of coal for reasons that make less economic sense every month.) This stuff is “set the controls for the heart of the sun” levels of suicidal. We won’t survive it.
As for geoengineering, good luck. While I also think this may be necessary, a precondition for spraying stuff into the sky is convincing people that this kind of intervention is necessary. Good luck doing that while enormous financial interests are trying to convince the world that it’s safe to keep digging up and burning fossil fuel deposits. They may not object to geoengineering itself, but they can’t afford to permit the kind of consensus it would require to get geonengineering done, so they will throw resources at fighting that consensus until it’s too late.
Option D is hoping the mass social unrest will cause enough (of the right) people to die off or actively steering towards that. A final solution one might say.
They will be well enough. Maybe their mansions and yacht will be slightly smaller and they will need to find some new destination for tourism. But they will have their air conditioned and heated, homes, cars, shopping centres and so on.
