Kottke links to a proposal that one could significantly alleviate the rush toward climate catastrophe by billionaires all chipping in and buying heat pumps for their fellow-citizens. In fact, the report suggests, the impact would be so positive that it would eventually be cost-neutral.
Probably so, but this masks the greater problem, namely, that by allowing the simple existence of billionaires, we have invited on ourselves an era of Bond supervillains — many of them passive supervillains, malevolent only in holding back monies that the government should be taxing and using for public good.
I’m not begrudging anyone 999,999,999 of whatever the local currency might be; if you need that much, bless you poor soul grasp those pennies hard. But ‘billions’-scale finance belongs always and only in public interests, and not in the hands of private individuals. That much power warps public governance (witness the scale fo political donations in the US presidential elections, and the private interests pumping money to Supreme Court justices), and allots individuals the prerogative to conduct such vast projects as space exploration for their own benefit.
Nuh-uh.
I’ll get cranky and gripe about the climate costs of ‘AI’ research another day.