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This is a cool piece, but I think the extent to which doomsday bunkers, Martian colonies and other escape hatches are cast as the 1 percent's plan for the climate crisis can get a little overstated 1/ bloomberg.com/features/2018-…
On climate, what's the point at which a doomsday is declared? It's a slow burn, so we're a little more like boiling frogs and some places are boiling way faster than others. I don't think we'll reach any moment, all of a sudden and altogether, of declaring climate apocalypse 2/
The rich, especially in the North, will be able insulate themselves for a long time but not forever. And it seems legitimately hard for them to imagine something could *ever* threaten them. But part of the bunker theory is that they'll retreat and leave everyone else to suffer 3/
That seems a little... optimistic. Big sections of capital already see warming as a threat and are trying to take advantage of it. They're going to try and protect business as usual, at the exclusion of everyone else. And we already have some idea of what this looks like 4/
In other words, the escape hatch doesn't happen in a vacuum or all at once. If it does become clear to a critical mass of elites that CO2 is an urgent problem, the push will likely be to blame the public as wasteful, enforce emissions austerity & roll back democracy to do so 5/
This is all a little speculative! Main point is that the comfort of the ultra-rich has always come at the expense of lots and lots of other people, and that will only get more true as temperatures rise & elites start seeing a carbon budget in zero-sum terms 6/
All that's to say, we're better off looking to real-life than science fiction to get a sense for what's coming. Katrina, Sandy, Maria, etc., even the financial and EU debt crises, are better reference points than Elysium 7/7
(Coda that the 1 percent aren't a monolith, have different motivations among them, will respond in varied ways, etc. etc.)
