This in spades. Just like oligarchs’s plan for the inevitable collapse of the financialised global capitalism that has made them filthy rich, is to build billion dollar bunkers and plan to hide in them while everyone else starves and fights over the wreckage.

There are always two ways to deal with a general or public problem. One is to go out and do something, the other is to hide your head under the blankie and try to make sure it does not touch you personally, or your family. The US has been valorising and praising cowardice and selfishness for so long that they now genuinely accept them as virtues…

But most of the grotesquely wealthy people have been made so morally grotesque by their wealth (or only acquired it by being so) that they almost all seem to be on the other side, bankrolling climate denial and soothing media pabulum. Where are the multi billionaire good guys, the eccentric oligarchs who actually want everyone’s kids to have a decent future?

I often think of an alternative timeline in which the manufacturers of slide rules spent fortunes demonising and smearing the pocket calculator… or the barons of the great hemp, cordage, and sailmaking firms tried to hold back the incursion of internal combustion engines into the shipping business.

That is just how futile and stupid this seems to me.

I guess the difference is that no other industry has ever been so huge, so central, so heavily subsidized by governments, so deeply infiltrated into governments. The fossil fuel industry is unique in human history in its reach, power, and resistance to change.