There’s a reason billionaires aren’t scrambling to stop climate collapse: they’re not planning to suffer it. At least, not in the same way the rest of us will. They’ve gamed out the ending, and they don’t intend to be here when it arrives. Not here as in “Earth,” but here as in “the public world.” The one with fire seasons, collapsing hospitals, and tap water that tastes like rust. While ordinary people sweat through blackouts and evacuate flood zones, the ultra-rich are buying land in New Zealand, building bunkers in the Rockies, and dreaming of private islands and space stations with drone security and desalination plants. Survival, for them, is a luxury commodity.
This is disaster profiteering. While scientists issue red-alert warnings, fossil fuel CEOs are rewarded with record-breaking bonuses. While the climate breaks down in real time, the political class greenlights new pipelines, approves new drilling leases, and subsidizes destruction with taxpayer money. In 2022 alone, the world’s 60 largest banks invested over $669 billion into fossil fuel expansion. That’s after the Paris Agreement.The message is unmistakable: catastrophe is legal. And legality is no longer moral.
That’s the rot at the core. We live under a system where laws are written not to prevent harm but to normalize it. Where ecological collapse isn’t a wake-up call but a line item in someone’s quarterly earnings. Where billionaires don’t just dodge responsibility—they monetize it. Let the forests burn—they’ll invest in carbon credits. Let the oceans rise—they’ll develop “climate-proof” real estate inland. Let the food system crash—they’ll patent synthetic protein and sell it back to us as progress. This isn’t negligence. It’s premeditated indifference. A business model built on the assumption that everyone else is expendable.
Government has functioned like a concierge service for the donor class for decades. Not just tolerating inequality, but institutionalizing it. Not just failing to stop the climate crisis, but actively fueling it. We don’t just have a political problem. We have a moral collapse disguised as policy. A civilization hollowed out and sold back to us as “freedom.”
Extreme wealth, left unchecked, is not just corrupting—it is psychotropic. It warps the mind, shrivels the soul, and inoculates its holders against any sense of common fate. What happens to a person when every consequence can be outsourced? When suffering is a spectacle, and survival is purchasable? You get Jeff Bezos proposing to offload industry to space instead of raising warehouse wages. You get Elon Musk selling Mars as an escape plan. You get Davos billionaires congratulating themselves on “climate resilience” strategies that mean armored compounds and vertical farms while billions of others face famine and fire. Their solution to collapse is to survive it privately.
But there is no private survival. The atmosphere is not a gated community. The oceans are not compartmentalized. The biosphere does not negotiate. You cannot bribe a drought. You cannot sue a heatwave. You cannot build a bunker deep enough to escape ecological feedback loops. The idea that wealth offers immunity from collapse is the most expensive delusion ever sold.
Yet it persists—because we’ve let it. Because we were taught to confuse legality with legitimacy. Because we mistook the market for a moral compass. Because we allowed billionaires to buy the future out from under us and call it innovation. We didn’t just drift into oligarchy. We were herded into it—through deregulation, defunding, privatization, and a thousand little lies whispered by lobbyists and think tanks in expensive suits.
So now, democracy totters—not from some external invasion, but from decades of internal looting. Piece by piece, the public realm has been dismembered and auctioned off. Public health, public education, public trust—devalued until the word “public” itself became suspect. And in the wreckage, a new authoritarianism takes shape—not in tanks or jackboots, but in IPOs and campaign contributions. The new dictator doesn’t seize power. He buys it.
This isn’t just a governance failure. It’s a failure of collective imagination. We treated democracy like infrastructure—something you only notice when it collapses. We assumed it would run on autopilot. That the system, whatever its flaws, would self-correct. But human-crafted systems don’t correct themselves. Humans must correct them.
We had a different path. Bernie Sanders offered it—modest by global standards, radical only in a country that thinks dignity is dangerous. He offered Medicare for All, a livable planet, free public college, and the audacity of fairness. For this, he was repeatedly undermined by the Democratic establishment—not because he was wrong, but because he threatened the racket. Because he reminded people that decency is possible.
Instead, we chose feudalism with better branding. We chose to believe that if billionaires were happy, we’d eventually feel it. We swallowed the lie that there was no alternative—that justice was unaffordable, and climate action too ambitious. And now, the world burns while lobbyists debate tax incentives for carbon sequestration.
So what now?
Now we take power back. Not symbolically. Literally. Fossil fuel companies don’t get to draft legislation. Politicians who answer to billionaires don’t get to govern. The era of “market-based solutions” is over. We need laws rooted in reality, not shareholder value. We need to treat wind and solar not as alternative energy, but as the baseline of survival. We need to dismantle the machinery of legalized plunder before it buries us. Because this is not about ideology. It is about extinction. It is not red versus blue. It is life versus death.
Folklaw begins here—not with a campaign ad or a court ruling, but with a rupture in obedience. It begins when we say: the current rules are invalid. Not because they’re unpopular—but because they are immoral. Because a law that enables ecocide is no law at all. Because silence in the face of systemic harm is not neutrality—it is complicity.
The good news? No one is coming to save us. And that means no one can stop us. The pen is still in our hand. The rules are still unwritten. The future is still up for grabs—if we have the courage to reclaim it.
Let’s make law sacred again—not in robes and marble halls, but in the sacred trust between generations. Let’s write laws that bind us to the earth and to each other. Let’s define civilization not by GDP, but by what we refuse to destroy.
Because the billionaires may think they own the exits. But there are no exits. There is only this world. This chance. This sacred obligation to begin again—together.