Building Apathy

‘We have spent our entire existence adapting. We’ll adapt,’ he said. ‘It’s an engineering problem and there will be an engineering solution.’” says Rex Tillerson, Chairman of the Board of Exxon Mobil.

Those who spend their lives building bank accounts and privilege have nothing but their certainties about the universe to guide them.

To call climate change an engineering problem, susceptible to an engineering solution is like an arsonist calling a gigantic forest fire a chemical reaction.  He might as well say, "dump water on it" as he races to the next forest to set a fire for which he receives lavish reward from fire fetishists everywhere.

Simply build a giant umbrella  to shield earth from the sun's heat.  

What could be more simple?!  

Problem: heat.

Solution: less heat.

We can seed the atmosphere with sulfur or shoot some mirrors into space.  These solutions are called Geo-engineering.

Now let's talk about something more complicated like tax shelters. 

So as the earth heats and the icecaps and glaciers melt, a vaunted noble who jets above the common rabble says, that people would be able to adapt to rising sea levels and changing climates that may force agricultural production to shift."[ibid]   

Those people? The ones who "will adapt" (and die by the hundreds of millions, oh by the way) come the many disasters accompanying radical climate change?  

You and me.

Well, me, anyway.   You might be one of those billionaires who thinks you have the ability to avoid the ordinary fate of commoners -- like the nobles of Europe who moved to their estates to wait out the Black Death as it ravaged through the population.  (We'll adapt ... we'll adapt ... poor things ... we'll adapt though, we always do.)

You may think you'll be saved because you're wealthy enough to move from the drought-stricken US to the relatively verdant slopes of Switzerland or the tropical paradise of Belize.  This is what Tillerson means by "able to adapt".  Adapt to new locales and new locals, new crops and new peasants, new trade routes and new foods -- in short, new areas to dominate and exploit.   You may think you won't be affected tomorrow because you're not affected today.  You may think you will be one of the lucky ones who, by cleverness or wealth or good luck, survive the worst of it.

Maybe you will survive it.  Maybe you'll grow gills like Kevin Costner in Waterworld.  Maybe aliens will land and whisk you off to safety like the aliens in Octavia Butler's series of books.  Maybe you think you can build an estate in Uruguay to escape the worst of it.  Maybe it won't happen to you but to your children or, (better still no doubt), your grandchildren.

I'd like to tell Exxon-Mobil chairman Tillerson that he won't survive it.  He won't adapt,  His children won't adapt because the problem isn't an engineering problem.  

It's nature:  like gravity or hurricanes, unmoved by the privileges of wealth, deaf to the prayers of all, especially the most devout, merciless to the arrogance of the stupid, and and indifferent to all the propaganda spewed by those who've turned  the world predatory and ruthless.  

As the earth spins through the cosmos, circling an anonymous sun, among a few planets on the fringe of the Milky Way, there is no quibbling with the universe.

Yet this liege lord among mankind, a master of society, a grandmaster moving pieces on the chessboard of Earth, casually reiterates the prevailing, defining, fatal arrogance of most of the humans species for the last ten thousands years:   

"We can fix it." 

A boast. 

An epitaph.