I enjoyed your last sentence. Here's something I wrote before COP26 in Glasgow.
Revolutions can happen very suddenly in societies that are under pressure. One of the things that people don’t appreciate about the French Revolution is that it was caused by bad weather. There was a string of bad years when the crops failed, and all the reserves were eaten up. The population started starving.
The French 1% had drained so much wealth out of the economy that they were the only ones who might have been able to ameliorate the disaster. If they had sacrificed some of their wealth for “the common good” and used the funds to purchase and distribute food perhaps revolution might have been averted.
Instead, many of them took the opportunity to profiteer and sell food at ever increasing prices. They understood about supply and demand and to anyone with food stocks in warehouses this famine was a windfall opportunity for big profits. So, instead of aiding the working classes they gouged the hell out of them. Because like all “vulture capitalists” they understood that people must eat and will literally sell everything they have to keep doing so.
We all know how Marie Antoinette responded when informed of the plight of the starving population. The phrase, “let them eat cake” has become synonymous with callous, aristocratic, cruelty. It’s actually a misinterpretation of what she meant.
She was told that the peasants were starving because they could not afford bread. To which she replied, “well let them eat cake”.
Not out of cruelty or indifference, but because she thought cake must be plentiful and cheap. There was so much of it at the palace she assumed it was plentiful everywhere.
She wasn’t being cruel; she was revealing her complete cluelessness about the seriousness of the crisis and her total inability to respond to it in a meaningful way.
This years G20 and COP26 together have been a “let them eat cake” moment. The existing elites clearly intend to do nothing but profiteer on the deteriorating climate situation while clinging to a fanatic belief that “the market” will solve the problem on its own without any sacrifice on their part.
They are holding on to power now, but their days are numbered. Collapse and revolution are coming.
Because, it’s going to get hotter. Because, now we live in bomb time.
Bomb Time — The hyper accelerated rate of warming and climate change that will compress 1,000 years of normal inter-glacial warming into the next 20 years of human time as the thermal pulse from our “climate bomb” hits the planet.
