Why do the rich not care about this, don’t they want a habitable world at least for their children and grandchildren if not everyone else?
That’s why they’re building doomsday ranches and climate redoubts in places more sheltered from climate change.
They want their children and grandchildren to be kings and feudal lords, and they’ve decided the way to get that is to let global society collapse and send out private armies to rule the ashes.
I mean, the American billionaire junta has made destroying the Center for Disease Control one of its top priorities. They’ve joined the war against contagious disease on the side of the diseases. What does that say about their priorities?
They have some vague idea that the structures that make money matter will continue into what’s coming.
They may be right, but I would anticipate that they will enter the new age as Montezuma falling from his litter, as wealthy Jewish families in the 1930s desperately trading scraps of gold jewelry for a slightly increased chance to stay alive. My guess is that the coming upheaval is going to be so massive, and their doomsday bunkers so reliant on a million systems of food, information-exchange, weather prediction, safety, all sorts of stuff that’s so baked into the structure that they’re not thinking about it right now, that all they are building for themselves is expensive tombs. I don’t think the monster cares how big your ranch is. Lots of people live on ranches, and the ones with deep knowledge of the biological systems that surround them, and on friendly terms with their neighbors and already knit into resilient communities, have a much better chance at it.
Think about Biosphere 2. Think about that libertarian cruise ship that was supposed to free them from the nation-state. These guys think their money privilege is going to continue into the post-money society, just because it always has, but there’s no reason at all to think that it would.
Have you ever seen billionaire who cared about their children? Just look at Musk and Bezos.
Exactly. Those heirs are placeholders, they give the oligarchs some degree of comfort that all the wealth they’re hoarding won’t go back to the filthy plebs. The money will still be ‘theirs’ even after their death, to fund their dynasties for generations to come. They’ll be lionized on a painting above the fireplace in the palace that their riches built centuries prior. Or something.
My parents are not rich in the typical sense of the word. They do very well, and they have a degree of comfort and financial stability that the vast majority of people can’t even imagine*. There are significant indications that they don’t really understand how the majority of people struggle.
They are very clearly in the “I got mine, fuck you” mindset.
I asked them about the climate crisis and their response was, “we’ll be dead before it happens”
I asked about their children (including me) and their grandchildren and great-grandchildren and all the pain and suffering they’ll go through. The response was to ask me if I believe in God.
They said if they believe in God, they’ll get to go to heaven when they die.
That’s it.
They’ve abdicated any responsibility for anything and they are leaving it up to God to deal with.
* Full disclosure: I do pretty well myself considering. I’m in debt, and every week I panic about paying my bills, but I have a home, a job, very good health insurance, and no food anxiety. There are probably an enormous number of people who can’t imagine having it as well as I have it. However, I strangely managed to get empathy. I don’t want people to suffer. I think the problem is I actually paid attention to what was being taught in the church I was forced to attend. I don’t believe in God, but I believe in a lot of the philosophy of Jesus. Compassion, mercy, empathy, etc. It turns out that wasn’t the lesson I was supposed to get from Church.
Stupid. Arrogant. Etc.
No
The world will continue to be habitable if you have enough money.
I think it’s 50/50 between not caring about anyone other than themselves and thinking that it’ll magically solve itself. The latter is usually some fancy tech invention that solves climate change without needing to change society more broadly.
