The signs that the IPCC's deeper message is not getting through the media obfuscation are clear.
No one abhors Richard Branson and his rich "astronaut" customers for frittering away many millions on a few seconds in space when the oceans are choked with plastics, the insects are disappearing and burning forests are not storing but pouring carbon into the atmosphere.
Instead, the BBC reports uncritically Branson's fairy-dust, ecological justification for the massive waste of resources - and addition of even more carbon to the atmosphere -- jetting the wealthy into space:
"Why shouldn't they go to space? Space is extraordinary; the Universe is magnificent. I want people to be able to look back at our beautiful Earth and come home and work very hard to try to do magic to it to look after it."
Similarly, Bezos' endless chatter about colonizing space is treated seriously rather than greeted with the only rational response: revulsion. Both because Bezos is diverting attention away from a real-world crisis with a preposterous fantasy that, if he and his fellow billionaires get their way, no one will be around to benefit from; and because his ideas of space colonization are either evidence of his desire to off-shore the rest of us into cylinders floating in space to become the human equivalent of battery chickens or, if his ambition is more limited, so that he and his retinue can flee the very planet he has played a key role in destroying.
Light-bulbs and cyclingBut there are other ways the discourse around climate breakdown is being gradually manipulated to assist the super rich.
Over decades, the media's interest in addressing climate breakdown has hewn closely to the corporate elite's interest in it. First, the science -- evident more than half a century ago, even to the fossil fuel companies -- was ignored because it would be bad for business. Then, through the 2000s, environmental concern became a niche interest among more liberal media, which promoted cycling to work and energy-efficient light-bulbs to save the polar bears -- actions that were the individual consumer's responsibility. At the same time, the benefits of climate change were played up: warmer summers in temperate countries like the UK would mean new opportunities for growing wines and the staycation economy.
The corporate elites bought themselves time as their media arms ostentatiously disagreed over the seriousness of climate change and offered, at best, coverage that framed it as some distant crisis our grandchildren would have to deal with. By the time a stream of extreme weather events arrived in the here and now, and could no longer be dismissed as aberrations, the billionaires were ready. They had reinvented themselves as guardians of the future, having diversified into supposedly green technologies -- technologies designed to continue and expand our planet-destroying consumerism rather than curb it.
Even some of the preferred responses of western states to the pandemic - socially distanced living, increasingly as digital beings online, combined with surveillance capitalism and increased powers for the police -- disturbingly foreshadow the "longtermist" fantasies of the super rich. It is not simply conspiracy thinking to be wary of where ideological adaption may take us, especially when corporations control our means of communication and have the power to impose consensus by silencing anyone, even experts, who challenge the dominant ideology that serves the interests of the super rich.
The public discourse echoes the thinking of the billionaires in other ways. We have rushed headlong past the stage of a proper reckoning with the causes of the unfolding climate catastrophe to the global equivalent of the children's game of musical chairs. If the super rich are pondering where to build their bunkers, and which islands to buy or planets to colonize, to escape the coming collapse, we are being conditioned to think in similarly deranged, if cut-price, terms. New studies are assessing the countries best placed to ride out climate catastrophe. The winners apparently will be New Zealand, Iceland, the UK, Ireland and Tasmania.
Four years ago the supposedly liberal Independent newspaper offered, with a straight face, an eco-porn travelogue article suggesting "25 places you should visit before they vanish from the face of the Earth". Now, just a few years later, we are playing the reverse game: where can we hunker down most safely as the world vanishes? This is cognitive dissonance in over-drive.
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