Surely this would help with the decaying birthrates.

I think the ultra rich are preparing for the collapse of global civilization in our lifetimes. And they're preparing by extorting as much wealth from the people as possible, now, to build redoubts to retreat to, and hire private armies to defend themselves, to bunker down until the wars are over.

Their long-term priority is not the financial health of their companies or their countries. Their long-term priority is surviving World War III and global mass starvation on an unimaginable scale.

Look. Climate change is really fucking bad. However bad you think it is, it's worse. And the global economy is really fucking fragile.

Think about what happens when China or India get hit with a major drought and hundreds of millions face death by famine. Or when the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets go and a billion people in coastal cities are flooded out. Economic disruptions, supply chain breakdowns, a refugee crisis beyond anything the world's ever seen. And as nations get more and more desperate to feed their own people, as the world produces less and less food and less and less clean water, war becomes inevitable.

And war will break supply chains even more. People who aren't locally self-sufficient in food and water won't be able to get food and water from outside their area. Even people who are self-sufficient will become less so as climate change fucks with agriculture. Result? Billions dead of starvation.

(In this interpretation, Trump's obsession with Canada and Greenland makes a lot more sense. When the ice caps melt, that'll be some of the most valuable real estate on the planet.)

Who will they sell to? Nobody. The ultra rich are planning for a future where global population is under a billion and most survivors have been knocked back to subsistence farming. They're setting themselves up to be the techno-feudalist lords of a post-capitalist, post-democracy society.

Deleting science education just helps keep the peasants quiet, so they don't realize what's happening until it's too late.

(Okay, alternate explanation: the people in charge are old men who want to make as much money as possible before they die and don't care about the long-term future at all. That's a much more banal explanation, but more likely to be true - after all, the environment is collapsing now because oil executives in the '60s and '70s looked at the very accurate predictions of climate change their scientists gave them and thought "who cares, I'll be dead by then". But Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, the other young-ish technocrats? I think they know collapse is coming and are using it as an opportunity to build a new post collapse world in their image.)

We're moving towards an economy of low volume luxury good vs mass produced goods for the average person. Basically the floor will just keep rising until less and less people can afford things. The people who still can afford things will be getting nicer and more expensive stuff as time goes on.

It's probable that they're betting on technological innovation to bring about a post-scarcity economy where profit and capital are irrelevant. And relatively speaking, that could a good thing.

The issue is instead of taking a reasonable utilitarian approach, these people would rather lean on things like:

unmitigated greed

racism

a romanticization of historical imperialism

the social construct within the Western capitalist mindset to incessantly seek new frontiers of exploitation

and the insidious belief that other people don't deserve to participate in such a society; either because of their beliefs or because of immutable characteristics that deem them unworthy or otherwise burdensome to the system.

IMO, the tragedy is that while the rich want to bet on consolidating enough capital to shoot themselves out into space, the statistical likelihood that they will find anything within reach that even remotely resembles the beauty and habitability of our planet is very low. Too bad they will kill all of us first before realizing that.

Something something, when we cut down the last tree and poison the last river...

The suffering is just a side effect. Massive death is the goal, they just don't want to have to get their hands dirty.

Here's to hoping for a similar result.

I'd argue Nixon started it.