There’s a reason the billionaires aren’t panicking about climate change: they’re not planning to be around when the worst of it hits. At least, not in the same way the rest of us are. They’ve got their eyes on fortified estates in New Zealand, sealed bunkers in the Rockies, plans for private islands and space colonies and floating cities with desalination plants and drone security. They’re preparing for lifeboats while the rest of us are still trying to pay the electric bill.
And what about those of us without tunnels and helipads? We’re stuck on the main deck, sweating through record-breaking heatwaves, watching once-in-a-century hurricanes arrive every season, and wondering why the air smells like fireworks in October. While scientists deliver the same increasingly desperate warnings year after year, the people holding the levers of power respond with a shrug—or worse, another round of subsidies for oil companies. The message is clear: survival is a private service, and it’s not taking new clients.
Take Donald Trump, for example. While the IPCC begs the world to shift to renewables, Trump tours the country mocking wind turbines and pledging his loyalty to the fossil fuel industry. He’s stocked environmental agencies with oil executives, slashed protections, and rolled back regulations that were already too weak to prevent catastrophe. It’s not a governing philosophy so much as a fire sale.
But Trump isn’t the problem. He’s a flare, not the fire. The deeper issue is the system that made him possible: a world where wealth has consolidated to such a degree that it no longer has to justify itself. A world where billionaires don’t just influence policy—they write it. They don’t just invest in media—they own it. They don’t just fund politicians—they are politicians. In that world, climate collapse isn’t a threat; it’s a business opportunity.
Let the forests burn—they’ll invest in carbon capture. Let the fisheries collapse—they’ll manufacture synthetic seafood and sell it as sustainable. Let the cities flood—they’ll buy up inland property and rebrand it as climate-resilient real estate. They don’t need to stop the fire; they just need to stay one step ahead of the smoke.
That’s why tackling climate change can’t be separated from the fight for democracy. Because you cannot build a sustainable future while a handful of billionaires have veto power over every serious solution. You cannot transition to clean energy when fossil fuel interests underwrite both parties. And you cannot count on the ultra-rich to grow a conscience when they’ve built entire lives around avoiding consequences.
Extreme wealth reshapes the human mind. It teaches that rules are optional, accountability is for other people, and anything can be bought—including escape. That’s why Jeff Bezos talks about moving industry off-planet instead of raising wages. That’s why Elon Musk treats Earth like a test site and Mars like a backup drive. That’s why the billionaires at Davos talk about “climate resilience” instead of “climate prevention.” Resilience, to them, means luxury bunkers with full-time staff and underground pools. Prevention, on the other hand, would require cooperation, humility, and fairness—things in short supply at the top.
But here’s the thing: there is no true escape. The air is shared. The oceans are connected. The planet doesn’t care about tax brackets. You can’t pay a hurricane not to hit your house. You can’t bribe a drought to rain on command. There is no premium service tier when the ecosystem crashes.
And yet, we go on behaving as if the future is negotiable. As if there will always be time to fix things later. As if the worst won’t happen—at least not to us. But the window for pretending is slamming shut. We are running out of “later.” And the people in charge, the ones with the money and the microphones, are running out of excuses.
This is the context in which democracy is faltering—not just in faraway countries with histories of dictatorship, but in places that once saw themselves as immune. Today, authoritarianism is on the rise around the world. In many places, it no longer wears a military uniform. It wears a business suit, smiles for the camera, and insists it’s just trying to restore order. In the United States, democracy teeters. Not because it was attacked by some outside force, but because it has been hollowed out from within—sold piece by piece, deregulated, discredited, and drowned in cynicism.
This isn’t just a failure of governance. It’s a failure of imagination. A belief that our systems were permanent by nature, that democracy was a kind of weather pattern, not something that required constant work. But no system runs on autopilot forever. Not even the good ones.
The 21st century presented a choice. As inequality soared and institutions stumbled, people looked for alternatives. Bernie Sanders offered one: a democratic socialism rooted in human dignity, public goods, and ecological sanity. He wasn’t selling utopia. He was offering a future that still had hospitals, drinkable water, and a working biosphere. And for that, he was ridiculed, sidelined, and called “radical” by a political class that considers the status quo—collapsing infrastructure, endless war, climate breakdown—a mark of maturity.
We chose oligarchy instead. We chose to let the market decide, even when the market was owned by fewer and fewer people. We chose to believe that if billionaires were happy, prosperity would trickle down. We let them buy the narrative that climate action was too expensive, while the cost of inaction rose by the day.
And now, here we are. The rich are building lifeboats. The rest are bailing water with their hands. The planet is warming faster than predicted, and the political response is slower than anyone can afford.
So what comes next?
We take power back. Not metaphorically. Literally. That means fossil fuel companies don’t get to write climate policy. That means we end the era of politicians whose main skill is fundraising from billionaires. That means we stop treating wind and solar as “alternatives” and start treating them as the standard for civilized life. That means breaking the grip of the donor class before they drive us off a cliff and bill us for the ride.
Because this isn’t just about ideology. It’s not left versus right. It’s not red versus blue. It’s about survival versus collapse. It’s about a habitable planet versus a gated one. And oligarchy, when given the chance, will always choose the latter.
Folklaw begins here. Not with a speech or a slogan, but with the decision to no longer accept the unacceptable. It begins with the recognition that no one is coming to save us—and that, in a strange way, this is good news. Because it means the work is ours. The rules are ours to write. The future is still a blank page, if we have the courage to pick up the pen.
So let’s do it. Let’s make law sacred again—not in the sense of robes and gavels, but in the sense of shared values. Of obligations to each other. Of drawing a line and saying: no further. Not with our land. Not with our air. Not with our children’s future.
Because the billionaires may think they own the exits. But the truth is, there are no exits. There is only this world, this moment, and this chance to turn things around.
“Extinction Rebellion, London 2019” by Janitors is licensed under CC BY 2.0. (cropped)