I had a thought in the shower and I realized the mega wealthy have no real incentive to fix climate change. To fix climate change would be expensive and necessitate the abandonment of this form of capitalism at a minimum, if not moving away from all forms of it. The 1% will just lose, there is nothing in it for them. I had hoped the mounting desperation would motivate the rats to save themselves and the rest of us by extension, but they have no reason to.

Instead they could ride out the rest of the clock, let 97% of us die and profit off it the whole way. Make bunkers or floating city yachts, hire and enslave some security that they use to keep actual slaves making the consumables they have become addicted to. A mass death serves them, with our modern tech, a small cadre of workers could support the mega rich living luxuriously in their vaults while we all starve. The mass die off would basically eliminate entire philosophies, and make humanity more conservative as a survival measure. This combined with our knowledge of psychology, future generations could be utterly indoctrinated in this system, allowing the 1% to rebuild a fully autocratic society that keeps them and their heirs elevated for centuries to come.

Picture 120 degree F (48 C) springs and Bezos and Musk are competing to see who can fill their vaults while Gates stocks his floating city, making all of us fight for the few slots to survive the coming firestorm. The 3 thousand or so per billionaire would celebrate their savior. They would gladly toil for their god-billionaires, happy to serve for generations. It wouldn't be hard to brainwash them.

Why would they fix their mess, when they can make it so all threats to their hegemony disappear in that mess? Why risk losing all in the great upheaval when they can just use extinction as their weapon of mass destruction? They don't even have to do anything. nothing that would look evil or like they did it on purpose, they just wring their hands and drag their heels long enough and all of us leftists disappear. Meanwhile they pay their cronies to tell everyone the science is blown out of proportion, and all the toadies hopeful that they will be the next billionaires will fall all over themselves pointing out how Big Tech has to come up with a solution, it will make more profit. All of this to distract and cloud the conversation about climate change. They will never wake up and realize destruction is coming for them, because they want it this way, this is already going perfect for them.

“The Civil War in France” - Karl Marx 1871.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/ch06.htm

It’s pretty funny that this quote has to be used in reference to France… again.

Sources:

"Millionaire CEO wants unemployment to jump by 50% because workers have become ‘arrogant’" https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/tim-gurner-property-developer-australia-b2411998.html

"But if a surplus labouring population is a necessary product of accumulation or of the development of wealth on a capitalist basis, this surplus-population becomes, conversely, the lever of capitalistic accumulation, nay, a condition of existence of the capitalist mode of production. It forms a disposable industrial reserve army, that belongs to capital quite as absolutely as if the latter had bred it at its own cost. Independently of the limits of the actual increase of population, it creates, for the changing needs of the self-expansion of capital, a mass of human material always ready for exploitation.

[...]

The industrial reserve army, during the periods of stagnation and average prosperity, weighs down the active labour-army; during the periods of over-production and paroxysm, it holds its pretensions in check. Relative surplus population is therefore the pivot upon which the law of demand and supply of labour works. It confines the field of action of this law within the limits absolutely convenient to the activity of exploitation and to the domination of capital." - Karl Marx, Capital Vol. One

"The character of a bourgeois government isn’t determined by the personal character of its members, but by its organic function in bourgeois society. The government of the modern state is essentially an organization of class domination, the regular functioning of which is one of the conditions of existence of the class state. With the entry of a socialist into the government, and class domination continuing to exist, the bourgeois government doesn’t transform itself into a socialist government, but a socialist transforms himself into a bourgeois minister.

The social reforms that a minister who is a friend of the workers can realize have nothing, in themselves, of socialist; they are socialist only insofar as they are obtained through class struggle. But coming from a minister, social reforms can’t have the character of the proletarian class, but solely the character of the bourgeois class, for the minister, by the post he occupies, attaches himself to that class by all the functions of a bourgeois, militarist government."

• Rosa Luxemburg, The Dreyfus Affair and the Millerand Case