The passenger pigeon. The Tasmanian tiger. The Baiji, or Yangtze river dolphin. These rank among the best-known recent victims of what many scientists have declared the sixth mass extinction, as human actions are wiping out vertebrate animal species hundreds of times faster than they would otherwise disappear.
That’s all too abstract and too emphatic. They have the power and the money and so far any problem they’ve had, they’ve been able to solve by using either their power or their money. Clearly, they believe that will be the case in the future as well. And so they cling to their sources of wealth and power because they think those will keep them safe.
That indeed doesn’t bode well for our future, whether it’s about the climate, AI, nuclear power or anything else.