We Will Run the Experiment

Doomberg, my new source for capitalist thinking around energy, wants us to accept reality. He asserts that there will be no stopping the juggernaut and so the only relevant question is one of adaptation. Like Nordhaus, he hopes the wealth created by fossil energy will help us adapt to future impacts. This is magical thinking, but since the current (and mostly future) impacts fall on poor black and brown people, who gives a shit, right? According to research out of Cornell University, 1.6 billion people may become refugees due to global warming by 2060. By 2100, one billion deaths may be attributable to the climate crisis. These are the subjects of the "experiment" Doomberg accepts as inevitable. Laboratory rats. And capitalism is the laboratory. Do we count the dead in the latest LA fires? The 219 killed by Helene? It is unclear when the count begins and what metric is used to determine the success or failure of the experiment. I suppose you could come up with a formula: deaths per point of GDP growth? Again, we are only talking about humans, as if theirs are the only lives which count. Doomberg's investment strategy is astute. As the experiment is run, lots of money will be made by those making the smart bets. The gambling part is on the temporal plane: how long can you go before the experiment's failure- climate chaos - puts the kabosh to the accumulation and profit. Bet long, bet short. Winners and losers. The world runs on contracts. But physics eventually has its way.