“Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” Samuel Johnson
The four hottest years in human history have occurred during the years of 2015-2018 with 2019 expected to be even hotter. Deputy Secretary-General Elena Manaenkova of the World Meteorological Organization noted that “every fraction of a degree of warming makes a difference to human health and access to food and fresh water, to the extinction of animals and plants, to the survival of coral reefs and marine life.’’ Those fractions are adding up.
Even scarier is the fact that the world’s despots have begun to gain the upper hand over global environmental policy now that Trump has declared war on the earth - the only place where we can survive and, I might add, the only place that has chocolate.
How do we rapidly decarbonize if we have any chance of preventing catastrophic damage from climate change with them in power?
We are in an extremely worrisome situation. For decades the powerful have ignored the code red warnings from climate change scientists, and now, the chickens have come home to roost to the detriment of us all. Perhaps not all of us, at least for a while. The rich have deluded themselves they can escape the repercussions, temporarily avoiding some of that life-ending heat that some on earth is currently experiencing. Can they survive economic collapse and migration? The jury is out.
Those that have benefited most from our fossil fuel addiction, who lied to us for years that we can always fix the problem later, the media, the cowardly politicians and other elites (but not all of them) have sticked us good.
Many of the elites, like Trump, who is dumb as shit and Mike Pence, who is a religious zealot, are unable to see the proverbial elephant in the room.
But many of them do believe, and the knuckle draggers in the Trump base know what’s coming too. They believe economic and social collapse will happen, they’ve been preparing for it in white nationalist enclaves for years. They don’t call these disasters what they are — climate change impacts to our human civilization. No never that, libtards believe that, not true Americans like themselves. They are convinced that city folk will be roaming the countryside looking to rape and pillage and, they are making sure they have enough supplies and weaponry to survive the onslaught.
Founded by Peter Theil, libertarian and Trump buddy, the Seasteading Institute aims to build floating cities off the coasts of ‘friendly nations’. Apparently they did not get the memo that the energy of ocean waves has been growing globally with a direct association between ocean warming and the increase in wave energy.Evan Osnos of the New Yorker writes:
Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich.
Some excerpts below, but to understand the full story, be sure to read it all.
In private Facebook groups, wealthy survivalists swap tips on gas masks, bunkers, and locations safe from the effects of climate change. One member, the head of an investment firm, told me, “I keep a helicopter gassed up all the time, and I have an underground bunker with an air-filtration system.” He said that his preparations probably put him at the “extreme” end among his peers. But he added, “A lot of my friends do the guns and the motorcycles and the gold coins. That’s not too rare anymore.”
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Fear of disaster is healthy if it spurs action to prevent it. But élite survivalism is not a step toward prevention; it is an act of withdrawal. Philanthropy in America is still three times as large, as a share of G.D.P., as philanthropy in the next closest country, the United Kingdom. But it is now accompanied by a gesture of surrender, a quiet disinvestment by some of America’s most successful and powerful people. Faced with evidence of frailty in the American project, in the institutions and norms from which they have benefitted, some are permitting themselves to imagine failure. It is a gilded despair.
As Huffman, of Reddit, observed, our technologies have made us more alert to risk, but have also made us more panicky; they facilitate the tribal temptation to cocoon, to seclude ourselves from opponents, and to fortify ourselves against our fears, instead of attacking the sources of them. Justin Kan, the technology investor who had made a halfhearted effort to stock up on food, recalled a recent phone call from a friend at a hedge fund. “He was telling me we should buy land in New Zealand as a backup. He’s, like, ‘What’s the percentage chance that Trump is actually a fascist dictator? Maybe it’s low, but the expected value of having an escape hatch is pretty high.’ ”
There are other ways to absorb the anxieties of our time. “If I had a billion dollars, I wouldn’t buy a bunker,” Elli Kaplan, the C.E.O. of the digital health startup Neurotrack, told me. “I would reinvest in civil society and civil innovation. My view is you figure out even smarter ways to make sure that something terrible doesn’t happen.” Kaplan, who worked in the White House under Bill Clinton, was appalled by Trump’s victory, but said that it galvanized her in a different way: “Even in my deepest fear, I say, ‘Our union is stronger than this.’ ”
That view is, in the end, an article of faith—a conviction that even degraded political institutions are the best instruments of common will, the tools for fashioning and sustaining our fragile consensus. Believing that is a choice.
"Some people say that that the climate crisis is something that we all have created. But that is not true—because if everyone is guilty, then no one is to blame. And someone is to blame,"... "Some people, some companies, some decision-makers, in particular, have known exactly what priceless values they have been sacrificing to make unimaginable amounts of money, and I think many of you here today belong to that group of people.” Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old climate activist, speaking directly to the faces of the global elite gathered in Davos for the World Economic Forum. 1During Dubai's long summer, stretching from mid-April through October, temperatures make it unbearable to be outside for more than a few minutes. Temperatures are regularly around 105 degrees Fahrenheit (41 degrees Celsius) and have gone as high as 119 degrees Fahrenheit (48 degrees Celsius), with plenty of humidity.
The city's adaptation to that climate? A proliferation of interconnected climate-controlled spaces, including more than 65 malls, residential and office buildings with entire indoor cities attached, metros, and indoor parking lots.
For a certain social millieu — I'm talking native Emiratis and the wealthy expats with white-collar jobs — one could go entire days or weeks during the summer without stepping outside. You go from your air-conditioned apartment in a residential skyscraper to the indoor parking lot, and then drive to your office, park in the indoor lot, and head upstairs to the office skyscraper.
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Meanwhile, for the hundreds of thousands of migrant workers in Dubai who aren't lucky enough to live in air-conditioned megacomplexes, Dubai can be a hellscape during the summer — just as the climate might be for the developing countries that will be hardest hit by the effects of climate change.
Dubai is getting so good at simulating the outdoors inside that its next megaproject is dedicated to just that. Dubai Square, set to become the world's largest mall, is built around a four-lane "boulevard" that mimics a wide city street, a piazza, and an entertainment center for concerts and theater shows. It will even have the Middle East's largest Chinatown.
The net effect of this kind of development is that nearly all "public" or "social" space in the city is a corporatized shopping destination.
For further reading.
Silicon Valley super-rich head south to escape from a global apocalypse