A well researched Greenpeace* investigation reveals that the group made up of the two Koch brothers, who together are worth 30 billion dollars, has spent 44 million dollars to finance disinformation campaigns on global warming and its causes.
The American tycoon Steve Forbes announced on FOX TV, a demagogic television channel, ‟To change what we do because something is going to happen in one hundred years is, I would say, profoundly weird” (October 18, 2009), and the head of the U.S. meat industry said that what matters is that they sell their meat and that what happens in fifty years is none of their business (BBC World Service, January 8, 2010).
In short, the motto of exalted individualism goes like this, ‟My money now; I don’t care a dam for what happen after I am gone.”
In France, a former minister, Claude Allege, despite being supposedly a sound intellectual, adopted a Sarah Palin style to denounce global warming relying on irrelevant scientific sources and attributing to some distinguished scientists opinions that they denied.
All of this comes from a deep-rooted tendency toward a complacent laziness in the face of danger because our egotism is for the moment not at risk of being bruised. The future does not hurt, at least not yet, so we might as well pat ourselves on the back for ignoring it.