What it's more likely to look like today is Venezuela.

I am not sure about the whole survivalist/bunker mentality, if everything goes down in flame, at most the bunker will only give you a few months respite, assuming you are not replaced by your head of security first.

If you are a billionaire today, it would still be better to be a millionaire in a organized society in 50 years, that being the guy with the code for the fridge in a mad max society, so I am not even sure that rationally it is a good decision to have a bunker built.

But to your point, America has long had subcultures with apocalyptic fetishes.

Too lazy to dig it up, but once read an article which tied it back to the types of Christians initially compelled to settle here. Book of Revelations and all that. Having been raised in a church, having someone point out this elephant in our room was a facepalm moment for me.

In apocalyptic scenario very easily solved by torture.

I guess these guys (who are empty inside and trying to fill it with money) never played Fallout, heh.

There are more than 2000 billionaires in the world right now. If only the richest elite of those got together tomorrow and decided to put an end to industrial pollution, they could do it.

However climate change is a direct consequence of capitalism. Halting pollution would ruin the economy. Factories would have to be shut down, entire categories of products could no longer be produced, masses would become unemployed. The global financial system would tank. Surviving this change would require abandoning capitalism.

So a naive hope might be that some of the billionaire "preppers" are planning for exactly this scenario and intent on causing it once they've set up their little luxury bunkers to ensure their "quality of life" once their money becomes worthless.

A less optimistic and more realistic view would be that they know capitalism is unsustainable but want to make sure they still get the most out of it and ensure their comfort outlasts the civilisation they're helping destroy, i.e. "screw you, I got mine".

Naw. There's a faction committed to bringing about end times to fulfill some prophesy. Wish I was kidding. How do you reason with billionaire enfant terribles?

This is naive. It might be possible that they could put a dent into it or maybe incite an apocalyptic war that could end it, but without something like that they can't change it. Industries make things for people. If you suddenly double the price of food and other goods, then what do you think people will do? They'll either just compete or riot.

>Halting pollution would ruin the economy. Factories would have to be shut down, entire categories of products could no longer be produced

And who do you think buys these products? Do you really think that the general population would just accept it when their entire life comes tumbling down? I don't think any country could survive something like that.

I believe this also. But the consequences are even more profound than they might appear: it's not just the pointless excesses of capitalism we would likely have to do without (e.g. new car on finance every 3 years, food flown halfway around the world for processing then back again, 1 zillion brands of shampoo in the supermarket) - but also many of the things we no longer view as luxuries i.e. modern housing, healthcare and medicine, choice over what we eat etc.

Keep in mind capitalism not only means producing excess junk. It also means producing unnecessary excess junk: overproduction and shredding/landfilling the surplus because selling it would harm the desired price point or create unwanted market dynamics (i.e. people waiting to buy at a discount later).

"Modern housing" often means tearing down existing McMansions in order to build new ones on top of them. "Choice over what we eat" often means importing produce that would be available locally but is currently out of season, or producing ready-to-eat meals only to throw them out at the end of the day, always stocking hundreds of an item in dozens of variations just to give an illusion of choice, etc etc.

And that's only the immediately obvious harm of "consumerism". Industry also means shipping parts around half the world to process them with cheap labor, then ship them all the way back so you can add a sticker to the finished product saying it was "made" locally. And with "just in time" production this means repeating that process dozens, hundreds and thousands of times with individual packaging, repackaging, shrinkwrapping, unwrapping, loading and unloading -- a simple cardboard box can end up going through three different factories (being itself unpackaged and repackaged at every new location) before being thrown out after a single use for, again, transport of other goods.

Recycling and renewable energy are bandaids. The current production levels are unsustainable, especially if we seek to lift the developing world out of poverty to similar levels of comfort as the average person in the West.

Sure, it'll suck for the average person and society and economy will have to change drastically. But it'll suck even more for the billionaires because their very existence is subject to maintaining the current status quo.

We can't sustain the "consumerist excess" of the middle class, but we certainly can't sustain that of the very rich. And they know this, which is why they would rather let "the Event" happen rather than give up their luxuries and join the rest. Because even if they have to protect their rusting food bunkers with armed slaves wearing shock collars, at least they'll still be better off than the rest.

The goal shouldn't be to totally halt all pollution, the goal should be to switch to a carbon-neutral global economy, and find some way to sequester carbon on a large scale.

Doing that would require a massive shift in power generation to wind, solar, geothermal, hydroelectric, and nuclear power. All vehicles would have to switch to electric or fuel cell. All of that would be enormously expensive, but it could still create many new jobs.

Manufacturing would have to change dramatically and carbon scrubbers would have to be employed to counteract carbon emissions from industry. Shipping and trade would have to undergo radical transformation. The cost of many goods would rise substantially

You'd still have some air pollution, trash, water pollution, etc. But again, the goal would be to cut greenhouse emissions.

Either way the costs of not making the shift are incalculable. The civilization as we know will end if we stay on this path.

Given the limited time frame, there's simply not enough time left to "upgrade" all production to be carbon-negative (or at least carbon-neutral). Even if we could magically swap out all factories and infrastructure, we would still be overproducing and depleting scarce resources.

Plus of course thermodynamics are working against us: burning oil is easy. Extracting carbon from the air and refining it to create a usable resource on the other hand is extremely difficult and energy intensive. Trying to ramp up recycling instead of harvesting raw materials would create a massive additional need for energy, meaning we would not only have to shift to renewables but also do so while ramping up the energy production.

Plus of course nuclear power still requires mining for raw materials and building the batteries needed to store all the variable power from wind, solar etc would require even more (and rarer) raw materials.

Basically we're talking a massive overhaul with very little financial benefit (and often quite the opposite) to those owning "the means of production".

The costs of not doing it may be incalculable but the costs of doing it are far more direct and immediate. Capitalism doesn't optimise for long-term cost reduction. An individual capitalist may prefer long-term survival over short-term profits but the economic system as a whole doesn't work that way and an individual "taking the risk" of investing will be punished (i.e. lose market share, go bankrupt or be bought out) if the market outperforms them in the meantime.

That's why I'm saying the problem is capitalism: it's not some Marxist-Leninist navel-gazing. The very way capitalism works makes it impossible for those with the power to do so (i.e. "the market") to do anything about climate change. It's one big prisoner's dilemma. The only way to win this would be either for a significant majority of wealthy people to cooperate and invest everything they have, or for a single individual to control the majority of the market and force the decision (which of course doesn't work if more than one person does this) -- guess which strategy is more appealing.

Not just those owning the means of production. There will be massive consequences to those using what is produced. Doing this in the time frame needed, without having the disruption of doing it causing millions of deaths, is not going to be easy.

Agreed. I think we're already well into a new phase in humanity where geo-engineering on a massive scale is going to be needed if we don't want to slip back into the dark ages, or worse. Unfortunately there may not be any practical solutions available to us.

I agree with a lot of what you said, I don't the markets can solve the problem. It will take wide scale government intervention. Maybe that means capitalism as we know must go away, or just a highly modified version of capitalism, I don't know. But free market capitalism is absolutely going to drive us off the cliff.