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Of course, Hugo, climate change is just a marketing angle, not a real problem, and if it was real, obviously it wouldn’t be man-made, would it?
Well, that’s a surprisingly progressive point of view for a liberal like yourself. I guess we can end this chat right now and my people can announce that you’re joining me while we go play a round of golf.
I’m being sarcastic, Hugo, of course climate change is a thing and it’s man-made too. For the love of the sweet baby beavers, it’s an existential threat to humankind.
Oh, that’s a bit melodramatic, isn’t it, Troy?
Melodramatic? Billions are going to die. There’s at least 1.5 billion people on the continent of Tarzanua alone, a significant number already living in poverty. It’s not that much of a mental stretch to see a world where half of those people lose their lives due to drought and famine from our climate change. And that’s just one continent, we could easily see that number increased five-fold across the planet, Hugo.
But those losers aren’t even Everythingers. Why are you worrying about them? Oh, I bet you’re one of those people who goes on an eco-holiday to some third-world dump and then launches a Fund-My-Whim campaign to cover the costs of transporting Paco, a psychotic monster dog with a frothing mouth, back to Everything and his forever home. Troy, get real, those other places don’t matter and nor does made up climate change.
Well, that’s just typical of you conservatives. Pretend that man-made climate change isn’t a thing.
Come now, Troy, these things have always happened throughout history. It’s all perfectly natural and not something we should be worrying about.
Don’t worry about it? The world is warming up ten times faster than it did during the Great Permian Dying and that wiped out as much as 90% of all life on the planet.
These things happen, you can’t blame mankind for it.
Have you never heard about the internal research document produced by scientists for the Whoosey Dhoosey Gas Company in 4675 that, with the benefit of hindsight, shows that they accurately predicted the global warming levels based on their sales?
Of course I have. Once daddy heard about that report and the fact that it would be suppressed and undermined by even more of their scientists, he went in big on Whoosey Dhoosey Gas Company stock. Why wouldn’t he? Anyway, you liberals have a habit of focusing on the Whoosey Dhoosey Gas Company and their internal research, but what about Snail Oil? They had their own research almost 20 years earlier that predicted the same adverse results. Why isn’t that so widely reported? Because you liberals weren’t told about it. We cleaned up with that data as well.
Okay, fine, but tens of millions of Everythingers will die because of our climate change, too, maybe more. Don’t you care about them, Hugo?
Boo hoo hoo, thirst, starvation and societal destruction. Why didn’t they buy Snail Oil stock or Whoosey Dhoosey Gas Company stock? They’d be loaded right now and could survive the worst that climate change can throw at us, along with the rest of We The People. And you’re missing the obvious point, Troy. We’re all going to die. Even me. I survived four assassination attempts last week alone. Do you think this plaster on the tip of my nose is a fashion statement?
Actually, I thought maybe you were a Sadman Pants fan. Gosh, I used to love him when I was a kid. Deliver the Hatstand is still one of my desert island discs, although I have to admit that Pantsmusic was the first dance at our wedding. That’s her favorite. Of course, it was our shared love of Sadman Pants that brought us together. We both dressed up as a roguish mailman and did his signature whipcracking dance. I looked sooooo cool. Oo oo oo oo oo oo oo, oooeeeoo, oo oo oo oo oo oo oo, ooeeeoo. I tell you, they don’t write them like that anymore, Hugo.
Maybe not, but all the same, I’ll probably pass an Executive Order prohibiting such music just to be on the safe side. But once more I fear we’ve somehow managed to drift effortlessly from the matter at hand, man-made climate change in this case.
Oh yes, climate change, what were we saying?
Well, you were sobbing your sad little eyes out about climate change being an existential threat to humankind and I was pointing out that it’s only an existential threat to some humans, and the kind that don’t matter at that. The losers.
But the losers are the ones that attend your rallies and spend their hard-earned cash on your MEGA hats and t-shirts and chant your name because you tell them you’re going to make Everything great again. How can you be so callous and say they don’t matter?
Because they don’t. Have you ever looked closely at the crowds at one of my rallies? Not the ones standing behind me or the ones to the side, where the camera might catch them in the background of a passing shot of me. We’re careful to position the beautiful ones carefully. No, I mean the ones right in front of me that the cameras never capture, except occasionally the back of their heads. Those ones, Troy, I can tell you, they’re a hideous bunch of munter-ugly freaks and weirdos born from a limited gene pool. Seriously, you look at some of them and you’d think it’s a miracle their papa’s sperm was ever able to find an egg, instead of just swimming around in circles, blowing bubbles. So no, they don’t matter and I don’t care about them.
What, even the beautiful ones?
I’m a married man, Troy, beautiful people are nothing more than a disposable vape. Sure, it’s fantastic when the sucking’s going on, but you don’t feel any emotion or sadness when you ditch it in the gutter. If you want to see me emotional about climate change, forget about people and focus on insurance. Trust me, Troy, the most stressful thing about this whole global warming malarkey is working out when to sell my shares in various insurance companies to make the maximum profit. Over the next few decades, there’s going to be a delicious bump in profits as the losers who can afford it will spend more money for insurance, even as premiums rise, in the desperate hope that they can maintain their standard of living through the next catastrophe. But premiums will rise and fewer people will bother with insurance as once-in-a-century floods or fires or tornadoes start repeating every few years. The holy grail for We The People is to get our money out right before the companies all collapse after one disaster too many and it turns out the money needed to put everything right has disappeared into the gilded wallets of people like me who can afford not to need insurance. You see, Troy, We The People don’t worry about climate change because it can’t hurt us. We’ll always be able to afford to buy homes in the places around the world where the weather isn’t laying waste to everything. And we’ll probably buy plane tickets for those we displace to fly back to Everything so they can struggle to stay alive with the losers that we leave behind. Do you know the definition of a crime against humanity, Troy?
Oooh, ooooh, funnily enough, this came up in the pub quiz last night. Six, yes, there are six species of sloth in the world.
Right. Was there possibly also a question in the pub quiz last night that required you to know how many different species of sloths there are in the world?
By the power of Grayskull, yes, there was Hugo, how on earth did you know that?
It was the lead story on Dox News this morning. By any chance, was there also a question about, oh, I don’t know, maybe the definition of crimes against humanity?
Fudge me, Hugo, this is getting really rather uncanny now, yes, there was. Is there a mirror behind me?
Yes, that’s right, a mirror, and what was the answer to the crimes against humanity question? Please.
Well, we thought it was chocolate-covered peanuts and we actually kicked up quite a fuss, because the quiz master wouldn’t give us that, not even a half point for being close.
Really, so what did the quiz master think the answer was, pray tell?
Well, that utter simpleton seemed to think the answer was ‘a deliberate act, typically as part of a systematic campaign, that causes human suffering or death on a large scale,’ and he wouldn’t give us a half-point for chocolate-covered peanuts. What a complete barsteward.
A complete barsteward indeed, but don’t worry, Troy, when I’m First-Best-Guy, I’ll have him stuffed and mounted and you can use him as a hatstand in the Second-Best-Guy’s office. Now I asked about crimes against humanity because you seem surprised that I should feel such complete and utter contempt for the losers. You have to understand that if you’re going to join We The People, you need to focus 100% on getting what you want, no matter the cost to the losers. More than 50 years ago the leaders of the world’s petroleum companies realized that the product they were selling had already started to change the world’s climate and that if they continued to sell it, potentially billions of human lives would be lost. What did they do? Did they warn the world and use their vast financial reserves to start working on creating new ways to create and use energy, and so save the world and all its inhabitants? No, of course they didn’t. Despite the fact that continuing to sell oil clearly constituted a crime against humanity, they continued selling oil because that was the easiest way for them to continue to make vast amounts of money. And what devastating punishments were handed down to them?
Smacky bottoms all round?
An interesting and, if I might be so bold as to venture, eccentric guess given the globally devastating consequences of their actions, but no, surprisingly, not even smacky bottoms all round. In fact, their only punishment has been ever-increasing immense wealth and power.
So I don’t imagine they’ll be doing that again in a hurry.
No, probably no need to. Oh, the wonder of We The People’s next-level conspicuous consumption. The greater the waste, the greater our status. I said before that money is just a way of keeping score. Well, the amount that we can afford to waste is yet another way of keeping score. The more that we can afford to waste, the greater we are. And we’re literally wasting an entire planet. We’re the greatest generation history has ever seen.
But hang on a second, Hugo, here’s what I don’t understand, if things are going to be so disastrous for tens of millions of Everythingers, why on earth don’t they seem to care?
Partly because We The People don’t care. They see us, We The People, as their betters and when they see that we aren’t worried about the huge negative impacts of climate change, they think that they don’t need to worry about it either. Even the ones who say they believe in the science don’t actually do anything of substance to save the planet. It just doesn’t click with them that even the poorest of We The People have at least tens of millions of spondoolicks and often much more just jangling around the back of the sofa. They simply don’t understand that we can afford not to worry about it and that they most definitely can’t. Fortunately, the idea of a global catastrophe scares the living daylights out of them, so they do their best not to think about it. If they did, they might just realize their only hope of survival is to join together and force We The People to use our vast amounts of money to save them as well as ourselves. Now that really would be a global catastrophe.
Oh, I wouldn’t worry, Hugo. The only dark storm clouds seem to be forming over the heads of the losers.
Stop being such an old woman, Troy. Look on the bright side, those clouds you’re moaning about all have silver linings. We wouldn’t be having this jolly little chat if it wasn’t for climate change.
But why? You clearly don’t care about it.
Of course I do, but not in the way you expect. I want to take advantage of it. It’s changed everything for the National Party. And most of We The People, too. For more than a century, the National Party has accepted that the losers get a say in who governs them. Even in the decades after the second Wopp-Off War, when the government enacted various social security programs, subsidized healthcare and housing and established a program of food stamps. All of these initiatives at the expense of We The People. But the National Party and the wealthy accepted them, even as they trampled over our myth that Everything has a unique and proud heritage of rugged individualism. Climate change, though, has scared the wealthy sheepless. Subsidizing a bit of healthcare and food stamps is one thing, but the costs of preventing climate change is on a completely different level. As I said, We The People can never accept our wealth being used to save losers from the climate catastrophe. And it’s this broad fear among the wealthy that has finally made autocracy possible in Everything.
That’s crazy, Hugo. Not even the wealthiest Everythingers support autocracy.
They’d be crazy not to. The cost of preventing climate change would be massive. And it would fall squarely on our shoulders, as we’ve taken almost all the wealth from the losers now.
But the cost of dealing with the damage caused by extreme weather events will be many times greater.
Have you not been listening to me, Troy? We’re not going to deal with the damage caused by extreme weather. That’s the beauty of autocracy. We don’t have to govern for everyone, we govern for ourselves. The losers will have to sort themselves out under Everything’s new political system. But without the threat of climate change hanging over us, most of We The People would have been happy to carry on as we have for a century. So, that’s the silver lining for us to celebrate. Climate change heralds the death of democracy across the whole planet. And good riddance to bad rubbish.
That may be wonderful for you, Hugo, but don’t you care about your children and grand-kids?
Those barstewards? Both literally and figuratively. The latter will have all my wealth to comfort them. The former are just losers. As the leaders of the oil industry taught us, there’s no room for sentimentality at the top.
It all seems rather harsh. And while you’re comfortable with how this is all going to play out, what about the losers? What will they say to their children and to their children’s children?
Oh, Troy, they’ll be fine. In 50 years time, they’ll know exactly how to respond when their grandchildren look at them and ask “Why didn’t you do something?” It’ll be an embarrassing mix of I didn’t know or there was nothing I could do or the politicians let us all down. But they’ll know that they chose to look the other way and do nothing. And just like us, they really won’t care. We got what we wanted and in return we gave them peace of mind.