A sect of billionaires, devoted to death, has its fingers tightened around the throat of humanity. It both causes and minimizes our existential crisis. The oligarchs are not only an enemy of class, but as they have always been, an enemy of society. A few thousand people are capable of destroying entire civilizations. Billions of people against billionaires. And there can hardly be a greater bet than this.
By George MONBIOT
Poor people and the middle class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the very rich pay lawyers, and the ultra-rich pay politicians. It’s not an original observation, but it’s worth repeating until everyone has heard it.
The more money billionaires accumulate, the greater their control over the political system, which means they pay less in taxes, accumulate more money, and their power grows even more. They redefine the world to serve their needs. One of the symptoms of the pathology known as “billionaire brain” is the inability to see beyond short-term personal gain. They would sacrifice the entire planet for a few more stones on their meaningless mountain of wealth. And it’s happening right before our eyes. Two weeks ago, the most important news of the year, maybe even of the century, arrived. But since billionaires own most of the media, most people have heard nothing about it. We could end up involved in one of those events that ends a civilization before we even realize that such a thing is possible.
The news, published on April 15, is that some scientists have reexamined the ocean circulation system and are convinced that, as a result of climate degradation that is changing the temperature and salinity of seawater, this system is more likely to collapse than not. This system, known as the “Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation” (AMOC), distributes heat from the tropics to the North Atlantic.
Recent studies suggest that if this system were to stop, it could cause a sharp drop in average winter temperatures in Northern Europe and drastic changes in the water cycle in the Amazon. This could contribute to starting a chain reaction in the rainforest, until it collapses, causing other disasters.
Stopping the AMOC could also accelerate sea level rise along the east coast of the United States, threatening entire cities; raise temperatures in Antarctica by about six degrees; and release a tremendous amount of carbon dioxide, currently stored in the Antarctic Ocean, accelerating the climate crisis. Even taking into account the offsetting effects of overall global warming, another study notes, the net impact in Northern Europe would translate into periods of extreme cold, with temperatures in London dropping to -19 degrees, in Edinburgh to -30, and in Oslo to -48 degrees. By February, sea ice would extend as far as Lincolnshire. Our climate would be drastically transformed, with extreme events like severe winter storms more likely.
Rainfall-based agriculture would become virtually impossible across the UK. This change, on any realistic timescale for humanity, would be irreversible. Its speed could exceed our ability to adapt. AMOC shutdowns, driven by natural climate variability, have happened before. But not during an era of large-scale human civilisation.
The first study to propose that the AMOC could have an “on” and an “off” state was published in 1961. Since then, much research has confirmed this finding and deepened the analysis of the factors that could trigger it and the possible consequences. Until recently, the collapse of the AMOC caused by human activity was considered a “high-impact, low-probability” event: devastating if it happened, but unlikely. Research in recent years has brought about a reassessment. It is starting to look more like a “high-impact, high-probability” event. Now, in response to the study published on April 15, German professor Stefan Rahmstorf, perhaps the world’s leading authority on the subject, says that the probability of a shutdown appears to be “over 50 percent.” We could pass the tipping point, Rahmstorf says, “by the middle of this century.”
And then, why isn’t this on every newscast? Why isn’t it a priority of governments that claim to want to protect us from danger?
In large part because the oligarchic government has supported a model of climate change that has little to do with reality, that is, they have an idea of how the world works that is far removed from scientific discoveries. This model undermines official responses to the climate crisis. It all started with the work of economist William Nordhaus, who tried to estimate the economic effects of global warming. His model suggests that a “socially optimal” level of warming would be between 3.5 and 4 degrees Celsius. Most climate scientists consider such a temperature increase catastrophic. Even a 6-degree warming, Nordhaus suggests, would only result in a loss of 8.5 percent of GDP. For climate science, such a scenario would be much more like the end of civilization.
As economists Nicholas Stern, Joseph Stiglitz, and Charlotte Taylor have argued, the relatively mild effects that Nordhaus predicts are simply a product of the model he used. For example, his model assumes that catastrophic risks do not exist and that the impact of climate change increases linearly with increasing temperature. But no climate model suggests such behavior.
Climate science predicts nonlinear dynamics and an increasingly intense risk. Among the possible consequences of high levels of warming are: the flooding of major cities, the disappearance of the conditions that support human life in large areas of the planet, the collapse of the global food system, and chain changes in ecosystems that could release natural reserves of carbon dioxide and lead to a “greenhouse Earth” in which very few would survive. At that point, it would no longer make sense to talk about a few percentage points less GDP, because we would no longer even have the instruments to measure it, and there would barely be an economy to measure it. The strangest thing is that the model also applies “discounts” to future populations: it assumes that their lives are worth less than ours. In other words, it took a method used to calculate the return on capital and applied it to human beings.
As the three economists note, “it is very difficult to find a moral philosophical justification for this.” Moreover, the climate crisis disproportionately affects the poor, but according to these models, their lives are also attributed less value. It is no wonder that such models, Stern, Stiglitz and Taylor note, have been used by the fossil fuel industry to justify minimal responses to the climate crisis.
And it’s not just the oil companies. Bill Gates, who claims to want to protect the planet, has donated $3.5 million to a think tank run by Bjørn Lomborg, who has made a career promoting Nordhaus’s model, thereby helping to minimize the need for climate action. Nordhaus even won the Nobel Prize in Economics for these dangerous absurdities, which are deeply rooted in government decision-making processes. A sect of billionaires, dedicated to death, has its fingers tightened around the throat of humanity. It both causes and minimizes our existential crisis. The oligarchs are not just an enemy of class, but, as they have always been, an enemy of society.
A few thousand people are capable of destroying entire civilizations. Billions of people against billionaires. And there can hardly be a bigger bet than this.
(George Monbiot is a journalist and expert on environmental issues)