The End Of The World™ - a poorly considered theory

I've been thinking about the end of the world since way before it was fashionable. In January 2010 my new year's resolution was to stop worrying about it, since there was nothing I could do and stress gives me belly ache. But I never stopped being interested; I've been keeping my eye on the New Scientist  and I still live here.

Somehow in 2011,  I ended up as a low-level project manager for some of the End Of The World's most prolific advocates which, alongside the Mayan calender thing, means I've been thinking about it more than usual.

Yesterday I watched Inside Job (narrated by Matt Damon) and that got me thinking about why it's got to be this way.

While we were watching Inside Job it occurred to me that all those greasy-lipped, lizard-faced fuckdroids knew full-well what they were doing. No 'perfect storm' or 'unpredictable outcome' or 'just hadn't thought about it.' No, they really knew what they were doing, and they knew what would happen if they kept doing it. It was as if they planned it.

Watching/reading/hearing/witnessing all the stuff about Credit Default Swaps and homes foreclosure, political payoffs,  Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Cameron (and most gutting) Obama's appointments and tall cartoonesque men in suits give gut wrenchingly dishonest testimonies while the General Public picked up the tab and started doing things tramp-style was all just a few shades beyond the pale. This isn't new information to me, I'm not naive or anything, I knew they were corrupt, greedy assholes who knowingly ruined global economics and gave themselves bonuses for it, but seriously, like, you guys?

Anyway we're watching all this go down (admittedly Inside Job actually 'went down' in 2009 but I had to brace for it and let's face it nothing's changed in finance since then anyway) and I'm thinking, 'this is what the guys I deal with are like.'  The big companies are knowingly doing to the environment what bankers did to economics. They are going to BURN THE FUCKING WORLD DOWN.

'Scuse me, I get heated....

That brings me to my new and poorly considered theory about what is really going on at the top.

Before I lay it on you here are some not terribly accurate facts:

• People have known about the effects of industry on the environment since the '70s (at least)
• The banking industry started to 'deregulate' in the '70s
• The rich have been getting steadily richer since the '70s
• Ditto poor people and being poor
• Oil production is increasing 
• Global industry is growing exponentially 
• Carbon mitigation attempts are bullshit
• They're drilling in the arctic
• THE ARCTIC
• In extreme climate change scenarios the rich are the most likely to survive
• The current environmental scenario is directly comparable to the finance scenario that lead to the banking crash but this time instead of money, jobs and homes, it will be food, water and weather
• WE HAVE BEEN WARNED, over and over again, for ages. 

Here we all are, right now, watching these companies behave in ways which explicitly spell doom, and thinking 'Why are they doing this? Why behave so shortsightedly? Why act so fervently on the side of evil? How can they be ignoring SCIENCE so blatantly? What can they possibly hope to gain out of having EVERYBODY die? Is this really happening? Why isn't anyone doing anything about it? What the fuck are we thinking?'

So here's my theory, The top tier (financially speaking) have decided to get rid of poor people. And I don't mean people below the poverty line, I mean anyone who isn't a super rich tycoon, oligarch, magnate, mogul, businessman, financier, captain of industry, billionaire, merchant prince, big shot, bigwig, honcho, fat cat or politician.
They've decided that the world will be a nice quiet place for them to hunt, quaff and generally slime about, if they don't have to share it with the rest of us oiks. And they've decided to make this happen by burning down the world, and charging us for the privilege. It's evil genius at it's most thorough.

In the not that distant future (my money's on a decade but I'm a pessimist) all the non-super-rich people will be proper-poor, homeless, underwater, starved, obese, illiterate, droughted, diseased, frozen, burned, poisoned, hunted, mutants... you name it, we'll suffer it, and all the while we'll be paying civilian-sucker tax to the 'democratically elected' government (who will be (already are) made up of JP-Chase-Stanley-Fannie-Citi-Bear-BarclaysWest-Stern-Loyds Associates being advised by WalMartShell-ConocoGlaxo-MacNewsCorp consultants) while they're on their yachts, in their bunkers, up their watchtowers and all round snug (smug) as bugs (thugs) in rugs (heavily weaponised mansions).
And that's how I see this panning out.


Boom. Theoried.

On the upside we won't have to live with the smarmy cunts.