Don't Worry, Humanity -- Selfless Billionaires Will Save Us All

When humanity’s dying stragglers mark up the final tapes for the time capsule, I hope they’ll call this episode A Great Week to Bail Out an Airline. Even as David Attenborough warned of Earth’s “crisis moment”, the UK government rescued ailing airline Flybe on the basis that some people can’t get to work between Wales and Scotland or wherever any other way. Eventually, surviving businessmen will be able to row between mountain peaks, but for now corporate efficiency trumped the climate emergency. Or the “climate debate”, as some still have it, even though it’s the sort of debate that should ideally ensue when I tell my children not to run in the road – ie, none.

And so to the global backdrop. The Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison, must be religious, on the basis he’s offered “thoughts and prayers” to the victims of Australia’s raging bushfires. In any reasonable theology, however, Morrison’s decision to serve in a cabinet that abolished the country’s climate commission, to slash fire and rescue budgets, and to ignore repeated concerns of fire chiefs would suggest he’s going to burn in hell. Or in Australia, which will probably be quicker.

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Musk this week claimed he wanted to put a million people on Mars by 2050, explaining that “helping to pay for this is why I’m accumulating assets on Earth”. Sure. Boss it like a space pharoah. Alternatively, America might recall it’s seen guys like this before. Despite bewitching the government into giving him multi-multimillion-dollar contracts for warplanes throughout the second world war, Howard Hughes never produced and delivered a single one. According to Musk, there will be “plenty of jobs” on Mars. I bet there will. But given how absurd anyone connected with space exploration will tell you his scheme is, it’s probably time to accept that Elon’s more realistic 400-seater spaceship will be filled with female pop stars half his age who haven’t read the small print about their half of his contract to supply them with sustenance on Mars. The rest of us can look forward to his thruster engines scorching a simple farewell message into the last remaining bit of Earth yet to be burned: “BYE PEDOS”.

The ludicrous trust placed in Musk or Jeff Bezos or even Bill Gates derives from the fact we don’t really know what to do with the planet’s billionaires, who are richer by several orders of magnitude than Gilded Age titans like Andrew Carnegie. The obvious answer would be to tax them, but our stunning failure to do so is forcing us to insist they’re just perfect for the role of saviours. It’s difficult to think of a worse casting decision, except maybe that Bond movie where Denise Richards plays a nuclear physicist.

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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/17/selfless-billionaires-earth-burning-elon-musk-mars