The Super Rich Aren't Just Preparing for Collapse. They're Betting on It.

If you’re still wondering what the future holds, big banks have quietly offered the final answer. They’re definitely preparing for collapse.

According to a new piece in Scientific American, “Wall Street institutions are preparing for a severe future of global warming that blows past the temperature limits agreed to by more than 190 nations a decade ago.”

The SA team looked at internal reports published after Trump’s inauguration. Major investors are now predicting 3C of warming, and they include JPMorgan Chase as well as Morgan Stanley, who said this:

“We now expect a 3C world.”

However, they’re taking a few pages from Naomi Klein’s Disaster Capitalism and working out plans to “continue operating profitably as temperatures and damages soar.” Klein’s book showed us how corporations collude with governments to exacerbate or even trigger conflicts. When disasters strike, they monopolize the rebuilding process. In that vein, institutions like Morgan Stanley are advising their clients to invest in energy and air conditioning. They have no plans to mitigate or prepare the public sector, only to benefit from the chaos.

Add to that the fresh purges at public health agencies, with tens of thousands more FDA and CDC workers showing up to work this week only to find out their badges don’t work and they’ve been put on indefinite leave. These layoffs pile on the ones they’ve already conducted. For some of us, this only underscores what we’ve increasingly learned: we’re on our own.

It’s important to understand that financial institutions and fossil fuel companies have known about our 3C trajectory for a long time. They might be citing recent setbacks, but they’re simply using the current administration as a cover story to hide their own intentions. For years now, they’ve secretly planned to surge their emissions during the 2020s. The tech elite’s obsession with artificial intelligence, in particular, indicates they were never serious about sticking with 1.5C.

If big banks are preparing for collapse…

Shouldn’t we?