The Super Rich Know We're Doomed

They're not trying so hard to hide it anymore.

Photo by Damian Markutt on Unsplash

If you want to know what the rich really think about the future, just ask the high-class escorts at Davos. Every year, women like Salome Balthus go there for the World Economic Forum to entertain the world’s richest men. When they’re drunk and think nobody else is listening, they really open up. As Balthus recently told the press, “They say they will enjoy a few more nice years on earth.”

“They know there’s no future.”

This attitude spills out more and more lately, as the elite turn their back on the last two decades of promises about renewable energy and a sustainable future. When you see that BP has recently, officially rejected clean energy in a fallback to fossil fuels, it’s time to reassess your priorities. That’s why I’m writing this, not to slam the door on hope, but to paint a more accurate portrait of the future.

Last December, a reporter happened to stop Mark Zuckerberg to ask him what was up with his massive doomsday bunker in Hawaii. “That’s just like a little shelter,” he said. Yes, a 5,000-square-foot underground shelter that’s more than twice the size of my house. Sure, just a little storm shelter.

Honestly, I don’t think he expects anyone to believe that.

And yet, they do.

What really gets me is all the public saying things like, “He must know something we don’t.” No, dear. Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t know anything you don’t. Mark Zuckerberg and all the rest of his friends know exactly what climate scientists have been trying to tell everyone for decades now. We are doomed. They doomed us, and they’re now engaged in a rather futile endeavor to insulate themselves. There’s going to be an awful lot of town halls filled with angry MAGA voters, and they won’t be sticking around for any of that. They’re heading for their yachts.

What should we be doing with the rest of our lives, if we admit honestly and openly to ourselves that all the protests, all the climate conferences and summits, all the promises made by politicians and CEOs, were just stalling tactics that led us to the endgame, an unapologetic trashing and plundering of what’s left? I don’t think there’s any denying that’s their plan a this point. As other columnists have pointed out, our leaders increasingly act like there won’t be any consequences for their actions, and that seems to include more elections.

Who else is bailing on the future?

And what does it mean?

Let’s start with the latest news, that the energy giant BP has officially promised to “increase spending on oil and gas while sharply paring back investments on various forms of clean energy.” Oh, my. What an opener.

According to The New York Times, BP’s CEO has outlined a plan to invest $10 billion a year to “bolster output” while cutting investments in renewables by $2 billion. This decision marks a complete reversal of previous plans to cut oil and gas production 40 percent by the end of the decade.

They’re not the only ones.

The CEO of Shell told investors in 2023 the company intends on “dropping plans to cut oil production each year for the rest of the decade.” They’re abandoning their earlier promise to roll back production. Instead, they’ll be keeping it “stable,” while investing $40 billion in oil and gas by 2035. Other energy companies like Imperial Oil, Total Energies, and Suncor have also announced retreats to oil and natural gas. You might wonder what changed.

Well…

Two major things have been driving the shift back to fossil fuels. First, the war in Ukraine made countries around the world nervous about their energy supplies. Of course, Ukraine was just one factor in a destabilizing geopolitical environment. Everyone is protecting their energy now, and looking for ways to annex each other. Second, the tech industry’s push for artificial intelligence and crypto financial empires have driven energy companies to the brink of grid failure, forcing them to reboot coal and nuclear power plants to satisfy a sudden, massive surge in demand for electricity to run their data centers.

According to a piece in Forbes, AI in particular has caused most major corporations to “reconsider, even abandon” their commitments “as they struggle to balance environmental responsibility and making money.” Only 4 percent of the world’s companies are even remotely on track to meet their net zero promises, and those promises were already tepid. Most of them were looking at 2040 or even 2050 for attaining “carbon neutral” operations.

Now they can’t even do that.

Last year, Google ended its carbon offset program, capping a 50 percent surge in carbon emissions over the last five years.

The financial investment giant BlackRock also recently withdrew from its net zero goals. So have JP Morgan, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Citi, Godman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley. As Michael Goldhaber of NYU’s Center for Business and Human Rights asks, “What has inspired US institutions to drop their net zero goals—and will it make any difference?” Well, these banks and investment giants are officially citing “pressure” from MAGA politicians and state attorneys. That’s a weird move, because these banks and corporations blame them for thwarting their green initiatives and then turn right around and pour campaign money on them.

In fact, BlackRock and Vanguard both bought large stakes in Trump Media during the 2024 presidential election. We’re talking millions of shares, totaling more than $94 million from BlackRock alone. So, it looks to me like these companies are paying politicians and public officials to play the bad guy, so they can make excuses for copping out. And by the way, when latte liberals laugh at Trump’s media companies or crypto schemes, I wonder how many of them stop to recognize that these are essentially money laundering fronts.

Virtually every major company that once pledged bold action on the climate crisis has now scoffed at making good on those promises.

Here’s another example:

According to another piece in The Washington Post, insurance juggernaut AIG promised to “stop writing policies for some of the most heavily polluting fossil fuel projects.” They earned praise from activists.

Then they backtracked.

Last but not least, Amazon bailed on their goal to cut emissions in half by 2030. Their defense? According to their statement, “We remain focused on the Climate Pledge and our goal to reach net-zero carbon across our operations by 2040.” As one report shows, Amazon also cheats when they report their carbon emissions, only including Amazon brand products.

That’s 1 percent of sales.

According to a report by the Sierra Club, utility companies don’t really care about their climate pledges anymore. They’re happy to build more fossil fuel plants and want to bulldoze any regulation stopping them. As they clarify, most of this demand comes from three central companies:

Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.

These tech giants and their fan clubs have also rebooted carbon capture as the thing that’s going to make up for their ludicrous reverse course on their promises. If they’re not talking about carbon capture, they’re talking about geoengineering, injecting sulfur compounds directly into the atmosphere.

It’s highly contested science, and nobody actually knows if it will work or if it will ultimately cause even more damage.

So, why are they doing it?

Well, honest journalists have caught on. Just like these CEOs and hedge fund managers confess to their high-class escorts at Davos, they don’t actually believe in a future anymore. They believe in living it up, and that includes “juicing billions in short-term profits for shareholders from the oil sands.” A declining demand for oil in particular is driving companies like Shell and BP into a kamikaze crash. As Toby Heaps writes for Corporate Knights, they’ve essentially decided to max out their operations for as long as they can “and give the money to shareholders as the company disappears into the sunset.”

While the world’s richest men lament the end of the world at hotel bars, here’s what the World Economic Forum would like you to believe about AI: According to a press release they put out last year, “the use of artificial intelligence can contribute to the fight against climate change” by helping us predict storms and identify pollution, while improving agriculture. Their report goes on to emphasize, “the technology is already being used to send natural disaster alerts in Japan, monitor deforestation in the Amazon, and design greener smart cities in China…”

Meanwhile, Google and the Boston Consulting Group cheerfully tell us that AI “can potentially be used to mitigate between 5 and 10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.” Google’s chief sustainability officer proudly declares, “AI has a really major role in addressing climate change.”

So, our tech overlords are going to intensify their carbon emissions and drain the last of our planet’s resources, so they can make supersmart computers to warn us about all the category five hurricanes and devastating heat waves they brought down on us by refusing to tamp their energy use. We can’t stop the collapse of our ecosystems, but we can make Skynet to narrate it for us?

Sounds great!

An AI model already predicted the planet will breach 1.5C targets in the 2030s. Even that pessimistic chatbot was wrong.

It’s happening now.

As I wrote in a previous post, our climate future looks bleak. The Copernicus Climate Change Service confirmed 2024 to be “the warmest year on record, and the first calendar year that the average global temperature exceeded 1.5C above its pre-industrial level.” While optimists are trying to spin this as a single year, they’re clearly doing their best to ignore the wider context—that emissions have continued going up, energy demand has surged, and the world’s major corporations are, if anything, walking back their plans and trying to pitch AI as a solution, when in reality they all know it’s the last nail in the coffin.

As much as we would like to blame those evil MAGA Republicans for all this, it’s just not true—and that’s an important thing to remember if you’re actually interested in understanding the roots of our problems.

From a story in Vox:

For the last six years, America has outstripped Russia, Saudi Arabia, and other OPEC countries in crude oil production. And it has picked up the pace under Biden, who had approved more permits for oil and gas drilling on public lands by last October than former President Donald Trump had by the same point in his presidency.

It was disappointing to see many of Biden’s champions praise him for breaking records in oil production, even as activists expressed a stark sense of betrayal over his expedition of pipelines and oil projects. The contradictions in policy generated all kinds of excuses and defenses. In the end, it was all for nothing—because Trump still managed to paint Biden as an enemy of fossil fuels, regardless of all the concessions he made to the oil and gas industries.

Here’s the bottom line:

At this point, it simply doesn’t matter what any politician, CEO, or presidential candidate says they’re going to do. Every single one of them has been lying to us for decades now, and perhaps they were lying to themselves as well. The average American consumer can’t seem to wrap their head around the fact that saving the planet ultimately required commitments that were antithetical to the comforts, conveniences, and privileges welded to their notion of American life. Now, they don’t even want to talk about it anymore.

It’s dead.

It’s neither pessimistic nor optimistic to say the truth: We’re not going to stop 1.5C. We’re not going to stop 2C. The billionaires have already made up their minds. They’re going to burn up everything they can. They’re going to live it up as much as possible. They’re going to meet up with their escorts at Davos, and they’re going to brag about their bunker plans.

Where do I think things are headed?

I’ll be surprised if we have midterm elections in 2026. I’ll be even more surprised if there’s an actual, honest election in 2028.

Democrats might run flunkie candidates to preserve the illusion of democracy for a little longer, but I doubt anyone will emerge to truly turn things around. Our window to avert the worst of the collapse will close in a few years. We’ll reach net zero by 2050 all right, when we’ve depleted our resources.

So, I think there’s a lot of value in admitting the truth. We tried. Boy, did we try. Now it’s time to focus on building resilient, sustainable lives for ourselves and doing what we can to protect each other. Don’t be like the billionaires who’ve abandoned any pretense of an effort to live better, but don’t beat yourself up too much for the little bit of energy you use for your creature comforts.

And if you don’t want to do any of that, you can always fly to Davos and hook up with a sad lonely billionaire for a night.

Maybe he’ll sweep you away to his bunker.

There’s always a chance.