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It’s said that a frog in a slowly heating pot of water won’t notice it’s being boiled alive. You hear this as an apologue for a shortcoming of mankind, our tendency to ignore impending catastrophe because we’re not in immediate danger. But in real life the frog realises what is happening and, if it can, jumps to safety. A better metaphor for humanity would have the frog understand its situation perfectly and choose to remain in the pot while giving lucrative tax breaks to the men doing the boiling as these men become trillionaires like Elon Musk briefly this month.

The recent heatwave had me thinking about that frog. In Dublin people looked uncomfortable, all sweat patches and red faces, the occasional iced coffee in hand. Met Éireann described it as “exceptionally hot and humid" and last month clocked the hottest temperature for May in Irish history – 30.6 degrees, breaking a record that stood since 1997. Across Europe the weather is literally killing people, with at least 48 dying in France alone.

If you don’t believe in climate change by now – despite the overwhelming scientific consensus that the planet is heating up and humans are largely responsible – it strikes me as unlikely that I’ll convince you. But here’s something to consider: the one percent – those with their hands on the hob, many of whom publicly dismiss the crisis and have an interest in you doing the same – behave as though the end is nigh. It seems like they believe the 15,000-odd scientists across 161 countries who in 2023 said in the journal BioScience that climate-driven societal collapse is a feasible and dangerously underexplored risk.

One man getting ready for the apocalypse is Peter Thiel. The billionaire venture capitalist and Palantir co-founder, who became a citizen of New Zealand in 2011 despite having spent just twelve days in the country, has tried to erect an “elaborate bunker-like lodge" in a remote part of the country’s South Island. In the event of a pandemic or societal collapse he plans to fly there together with his friend Sam Altman, according to what Altman told the New Yorker in 2016,. Other billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg have similar ideas, spending more than $270 million on a compound of his own in Hawaii. The rest of us aren’t welcome to come along.

It’s time to stop kneeling before people betting against humanity

This month The Ditch reported that Thiel’s secret society Dialog is hosting an event in the Powerscourt Hotel in county Wicklow this August. Leaked session titles include Bring Back Nuclear, Battlefield Technologies and Navigating WWIII. Responding to the report and a public backlash, Powerscourt said it would cancel the event “if it was within their remit,” but that it may not be possible.

Thiel and his fellow tech oligarchs, together with the data centres they continue to build – of which Ireland now hosts more than 100 – are helping to undermine the planet’s capacity to sustain organised human life. And they’re doing so at an accelerating pace.  Indirect carbon emissions from Amazon, Microsoft, Meta and Alphabet rose by an average of 150 per cent between 2020 and 2023, according to a UN  report, driven by data centres’ energy demands.  In exchange for hosting this infrastructure the Irish public is now paying the highest household electricity prices in the EU, 40 percent above the EU average.

None of this particularly matters to the likes of Thiel. He sees humanity as an impediment to his aspirations. In a 2009 Cato Unbound essay Thiel wrote that he no longer believes freedom and democracy are compatible. Later in the same piece he said the extension of the vote to women, alongside the growth of the welfare state, had rendered “capitalist democracy" into “an oxymoron”. Two years before that, in an essay titled The Straussian Moment, he argued that liberal democracy was obsolete and that elites were entitled to lie to keep the rest of us in line.

Increasingly these oligarchs don’t bother trying to hide their intentions. Palantir is openly creating a global infrastructure for mass surveillance while its founder spends his time giving lectures on the coming of the Antichrist.

Instead of fighting for a world in which billionaires are not the only ones guaranteed long-term survival, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have chosen to ingratiate themselves with this milieu. In April public expenditure minister Jack Chambers checked into a $760-a-night Washington DC hotel, courtesy of the taxpayer, while attending the Bilderberg conference – another elite, invite-only gathering with NATO head Mark Rutte, arms industry representatives and Palantir CEO Alex Karp.

What Chambers talked about, and with whom, is a mystery. But if we’re paying for him to go the public has a right to know what he discussed.

Though the global elite meet in secluded places their aspirations are clear: to accrue as much wealth as possible, whatever the damage to the planet, while ensuring their own escape from the consequences. It’s time to stop kneeling before people betting against humanity – and profiting handsomely as they do so.

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