Best odds of survival

There’s the Clinton Global Initiative, the Bill Gates Foundation working to eliminate disease, and the work Al Gore has been doing to make us aware of climate change. They’re working to save lives and prevent mass-scale deaths among vulnerable people as our world heats up.

And the rest of the rich dudes? Jeff Bezos? Koch brothers? Elon Musk?

Melissa McEwan of Shakesville noted a recently released study that concludes about 90% of the original inhabitants of the Americas, about 54 million people, died in the 100 years after Columbus opened the New World to colonization, and that huge loss of life affected the climate of the planet. The result was a drop in global temperatures.

I had heard a similar conclusion that said the cause of the Little Ice Age was the Black Death that swept through Europe in the middle of the 14th Century.

Both scenarios resulted in a large reduction of the human population. Both scenarios led to agricultural land being reclaimed by forests, which these studies say pulled enough carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to chill the planet.

Which got McEwan wondering why the extremely wealthy don’t seem to care about climate change. It looks like they believe

their best chance of long-term survival, and the survival of their descendants, is a much smaller human population with far less communicable disease and demand on limited resources.
…
They've all calculated that their best odds of survival depends on the rest of us dying.
…
People with the power to do something about climate change aren't. And I think the reason is because they have calculated letting it happen is the fastest route to the depopulation they see as the key to their own salvation, and they believe they have the resources to weather the (literal) storm, and they're making as many of us as vulnerable as possible in the meantime.

Humans have always been each other's worst enemy. Especially when they're trying to save themselves.

And right now, the humans with the most influence on the planet see the rest of us as a threat to their existence. That makes them an extremely pressing threat to us.

As I read McEwan’s words I began to realize the rich and their billions have the resources to tackle some of the big science fictiony things that could reduce global warming. I’ve seen proposals for processes to pull carbon out of the atmosphere and bury it underground. I’ve read about the idea to spread black dust in the upper atmosphere to reduce the amount of light reaching the earth (and thus the amount of heat reflected back into space that’s captured by greenhouse gases. There’s a lot that could be done with proven technology – such as covering the roof of every Amazon warehouse with solar arrays. Parking lots could also be covered with solar arrays on stilts so we could park beneath them to keep our cars cool. Yeah, it would take a few billion. Which these guys have.

But I notice the rich aren’t funding these kinds of initiatives. Not at all.