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Guest essay by Eric Worrall
New Statesman author Eleanor Penny believes she has worked out why rich people don’t appear to care about the imminent climate catastrophe.
Who gets to survive climate change?
19 March 2019
As the waters rise, the rich are readying their arks to escape oncoming environmental crisis.
In November, as wildfires ripped through California, Kim Kardashian hired a squad of private firefighters to protect her $50m estate in Calabasas. During the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Blackwater security guardsdefended the houses of the hyper rich against feared hordes of looters while their occupants were quietly helicoptered to safety.
Elsewhere, the hyper rich make plans to flee the planet altogether. From Elon Musk’s SpaceX programme to the would-be citizens of space-based micro nation Asgardia, venture capitalist space exploration is being packaged as humanity’s pioneering attempt to save itself from destruction.
These are not anomalies. Private insurance companies like AIG and Chubb have boasted about their increased provisions against the rapidly increasing numbers of natural disasters like wildfires. Others are scrambling to offset their exposureto the gathering effects of climate chaos. As the waters rise, the rich are readying their arks – quietly preparing themselves for climate chaos. If history teaches us anything, it’s that elites build their castles high above the filth.
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At its root, elite denial isn’t a result of ignorance or suspended disbelief. Concentrated wealth warps perceptions of crisis and immunises elites against the practical and psychological threats of catastrophe. They are convinced of their own ability to survive the apocalypse: cataclysm is a preoccupation of the poor.
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Read more: https://www.newstatesman.com/world/2019/03/who-gets-survive-climate-change
My first thought was to make some wisecrack about hoping Anthony saves me a seat on the final evacuation mission to Asgardia, but I’m worried climate activists might take my joke seriously.
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Launch the Golgafrincham B Ark!
Ben Elton wrote a book based on this idea. It’s called “Stark” and is quite funny if you like his kind of humour/social commentary. He’s a rabid lefty, but I like his writing.
In the book, all these megarich knobheads end up living on the moon, and quickly discover that all their peers are complete knobheads too, and end up killing themselves out of boredom.
Didn’t know we could leave. I was just going to my second floor of my home with a cooler of beer. Paint me silly.
I’m disappointed that a self-described thought provoking publication is ignorant of the fact that this whole climate fantasy was the handiwork of the Champagne socialist billionaires who don’t plan to go anywhere. They intend to run the whole global governance show, and even much multiplied abject poor class are part of their plan. The only thing the Statesman girl got right was that they aren’t concrmerned about the cost of things. Sea level, temperature, and the whole climate shitteree are just fine. The clime skim will soon be over.
Oh the efforts he mentioned are quite real. I haven’t quite figured out why Musk wants to go to Mars, but he’s serious about it.
He thinks he’s D. D. Harriman, of course.
I burn incense at the altars of Fineline (God of engineers), Zeemoff (God of automation and building contractors), M’affrey (Goddess of Dragons)…
Reminds me of the movie Passenger.
The basic plot is Chris Pratt (the actor) is on 100+ year trip to colonize another planet with 4,000+ other people in suspended animation including the several hundred crew asleep as well. His pod wakes him up like 80 years early. That plot gimmick is this early wake-up is way too soon, and he can’t control the spaceship, so he’s gonna die in space with the place all to himself over the next 80 years. SO he spends a the first year having the run of the place to himself, with only AI-robot bartender to talk to. Free booze, lots of video games, but no sex.
So he wakes up the lovely Jennifer Lawrence (the actress) to have some companionship and sex. When she finally finds out what he did (intentionally woke her up early, they can’t go back to sleep), she’s beyond furious, but then they go on to save the spaceship and everyone sleeping it away blissfully but themselves (and one poor schmuck crewman who woke up to help them).
Think of Passenger then as a allegory of Saving the Earth – Millennial style.
And then Chris and Jennifer apparently spend the rest of their long lives living it up in this enormous space ship, free booze, lavish foods and probably lots of sex and ZERO responsibility, while everyone else sleeps.
So that movie is a lot like today’s Millennials. They see themselves as heroically saving the Planet from Climate Catastrophe and maybe Trump. Yet they want no responsibility, just a free ride on someone else’s dime for the rest of their life.
So I say, let’s blast them all into space in tin can headed for the outer reaches of nowhere and tell them, “It’s just like that movie Passenger, trust us.”
They aren’t going anywhere. Most of them said they would leave the U.S. if Trump was elected President and they are still here.
So Eleanor Penny is intelligent enough to write complete sentences and even put together a series of articles on current issues. There is no sign of a mental handicap in the way she uses the English language. I would guess that her IQ is at least average.
So it boggles my mind to imagine anyone with at least an average IQ could be so utterly ignorant of, well, just about everything. Is it possible that Eleanor really doesn’t know that the ‘climate’ of all other known planets in the universe, not to mention the space between them, is instantly fatal to humans? Does she really believe that the rich have someplace better to go? Can she really be that stupid?
The article has to be a hoax, or some kind of deep state psychology attempt to control people by spreading ignorance, antiscience and class envy like a virus. I personally feel like I am a little dumber for having read this article. I was tempted to read some of her other articles, just to see if they were as equally inane, but stopped myself hopefully before suffering any permanent brain damage.
What’s holding them back, they’re so convinced, they should check out now ! 😉
The worst place in the world is more hospitable — and cheaper to live in — than outer space.
Didn’t this article come out a bit bit early? It is still 12 days to the beginning of April.
Yes, I wondered if it was an Early April Fools Joke. But if Eleanor isn’t serious she’s doing a really good job of faking it.
The closing paragraph from the quotes above:
“At its root, elite denial isn’t a result of ignorance or suspended disbelief. Concentrated wealth warps perceptions of crisis and immunises elites against the practical and psychological threats of catastrophe. They are convinced of their own ability to survive the apocalypse: cataclysm is a preoccupation of the poor. ”
Strangely, once you get past all the paranoia and Left on Left Hate in the rest of the article, this is actually rather profound.
Our Elite are usually the first to put their Twitter account behind whatever Moral Cause will get them the most free drinks at the next red carpet – or whatever actually motivates them, I speculate – but never seem to grasp why the common masses seem so against the idea. Why?
Concentrated wealth warps perceptions of crisis and immunises elites against the practical and psychological threats.
Increased power prices? Tis only a little bit of extra money. What is $2000 a year anyway?
Decreased travel? Well that will clearly be only for non-important travel. My travel is important.
Uncontrolled migration? These people are humans. They deserve dignity. Also have the gardeners trim the trees again, they are blocking the camera views on the west gate.
The ‘needs’ of our Elite are different, hence the concerns of our Elite also do not match.
The rest of the article looks like paranoid class envy drivel, but the conclusion is worth a second glance.
We need to convince the elites that it makes sense to go to the nearest planet. Once they agree, we send them off to that planet. If there are a real scientists they won’t get in cos a trip to Mercury wouldn’t be fun. Those thinking they are going to Mars, well that’s a few less expensive mouths to feed and news feeds to fill. Yeah! Course we will still be left with the pseudo scientists who didn’t get on because they thought venus was closer than Mercury and Mars. For them we will offer a trip to the closest planet to saturn, which is also mercury 🙂
If they are real scientists, they’d know that which of those three planets is closest to earth varies depending on where the three are in their relative orbits about the sun. When Earth and Venus are on the same side of the sun and Mercury is on the Far side, than Venus is closer to Earth at that point in time. whereas when Venus is on the opposite side of the sun to the Earth, Mercury is closer regardless of where it is in it’s orbit. Thus, on average, mercury is the closest due to it’s orbit not taking it far from the sun.
Average, however, does not mean always.
Same with which planet is closest to Saturn, it all depends on where they are in their orbit. While on average that will be Mercury, it isn’t always Mercury (when Mercury is on the far side of the sun and Mars, for example, is on the same side as Saturn then Mars is closer.)
Again, average does not mean always.
If only infamous Kim, of uploading my private experience to become famous, would hop aboard with any other elitist hyprocrite and join MUSK – good luck and good riddens to ……………….
If only all the twitterati would go forth & multiply “Planeta Exitum”, the better life would be for the rest of us.
Finally, an explanation for all of the “Great Jobs: In SPACE!” ads we’ve been seeing coming from the skilled trades recruiters and guild halls.
If you’re going to build that thing, why go to all the trouble to do it in space? There are less expensive ways to keep out the unwashed masses.
Is there something in the air that are making people stupid?
Shades of ‘Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’
Someone magnanimous should inform them that in order to comply to the GND’s constraints, their spaceships will travel in the intergalactic space thanks to windmills fueled by solar energy and with training bikes as a backup system.
So the rich go to Mars and terraform it because that’s way easier and more sensible than scrubbing a bit of CO2 from the Earth’s atmosphere. Or are they going to live in sealed-off colonies? In that case why not just build those on Earth?
There’s so much stupid in this that it actually makes Flat Earthers look intelligent.
No, just fleeing NY, NJ, CA, and IL…. plus London and Paris is the economical approach.
Who knew that Ben Elton was the great profit of his generation, rather than an overweight comedian who was quite funny when he avoided banging on about his utterly predictable politics, then faded from notice when he became unable to do so?
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Stark-Satirical-Thriller-Ben-Elton-ebook/dp/B0031RS7JU/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1553180490&sr=8-1&keywords=ben+elton+stark
What kind of rag is the New Statesman?
It is notorious in the UK.
The real New Statesman?
God bless John Dunne.
If they think life on earth is hard (and getting harder) they have no idea what awaits them on the red planet. Natural selection lives on.
It was an article by David Whitehouse (GWPF) in the “New Statesman” December 2008 that first made me question the climate-change-narrative of that time. The article has since been disappeared by the New Statesmen but the finger print of the article remains at this link. . .
https://www.newstatesman.com/environment/2008/01/global-warming-lynas-climate
. . . the link in this article to the original by David Whitehouse goes to dead air . . .