Selfish and stupid

The johnsonites are not a death cult: they're just extremely selfish and rather stupid.

Think of it from the perspective of Rishi Sunak, say: he's 41. His period life expectancy in the UK has him dying in 2062, but he will have access to very good health care, so let's give him until 2070.

So let's assume we do basically nothing about climate change (the likely scenario, and certainly Sunak's likely scenario). Well, things will be bad by 2070, but the worst things won't have happened by then. For instance the ice sheets will be beyond saving, but it takes a long time (hundreds of years) for them to melt so the real sea-level rise won't have happened by 2070: flood defences for London will still probably work. London is certainly doomed at that point, because flood defences really don't work against tens of metres of sea-level rise, but it's not gone by 2070: not anywhere near.

And other bad things will be happening: lots of people will be dying of starvation, thirst, heat. But Rishi Sunak won't: he has at least hundreds of millions of pounds to spend, and perhaps billions. He can live anywhere he wants, he can pay for food and water at almost any price. So he can just pick wherever is still comfortable, and move there. He's fine. New Zealand is the fashionable place for kleptocratsplutocrats, I understand.

He'll know that there's no future – his children will be in trouble, their children will be in really big trouble, his relations in India will be in really big trouble already. But Rishi Sunak will be fine. And, if he does not care about anyone but himself – not even his own children and immediate relations – that is enough for him.

This is even more clear for Johnson himself: he's 57 so his period life expectancy has him dying in 2047 (and he's not healthy, so let's assume that's when he will die): he's just fine. And I think we can all agree that, of all people, Johnson cares about no-one but Johnson: he probably does not really understand that other people even exist in any real way.

So from their very selfish point of view, the johnsonites simply need not care.

Except of course they do have to care, but they haven't realised that: johnsonites are not very bright people, after all. They have to care because the thing that will kill people as a result of unchecked climate change isn't, in fact, climate change: it's political instability on a scale we probably can't easily imagine. In particular it's the flat-out nuclear war that is the obvious end-point of where we're headed. So in fact Sunak will have nowhere to go, because there will be nowhere to go. He'll die of the after-effects of the war, like almost everyone else.