There is tremendous evidence that people deeply invested in fundamental system preservation do consciously proceed with “business-as-usual” knowing with a reasonable degree of certainty the likely climate outcomes. I often jokingly call this the Rex Position, after Rex Tillerson, CEO of ExxonMobil from 2006–2016, and Secretary of State under Donald Trump for parts of 2017–2018. Tillerson famously proclaimed “my philosophy is to make money. If I can drill and make money then that’s what I’ll do.” Tillerson is not a climate denier per se. He just doesn’t share the urgency of his many critics. Tillerson is more than willing to talk about a shift to renewables, but there’s no rush. People will adapt to climate change, there are “engineering” solutions. It’s only those trapped within a different temporality who think otherwise. There are many clear and bright futures for business-as-usual in the meantime. There’s a certain clarity and precision even in Tillerson’s public arguments: “Our view reflects the reality that abundant energy enables modern life.” The Rex Position is not one single positive political ideology but the convergence point of the politics of right-now for a panoply of right-wing climate realism.

The Rex Position is not shortsighted or irrational once one accepts that climate change does not “produce” a universal human subject. One does not have to construe Tillerson as “evil.” Tillerson and those he works with are not in some kind of shadowy conspiracy. The Rex Tillersons of the world have taken a look at the same data, the same trends, the same underlying social and political conditions, and they have noticed that in the probable world in which nothing changes for them, business-as-usual, they end up on the “winning” side of a sharp global and local dividing line. Every structural incentive serves to reinforce such thinking. The best outcome in such a position is to push on with business-as-usual; the costs of climate change will largely be borne by those who already bear the cost today. Indeed, as I will argue, that other people will be bearing those costs helps keep the system going as long as possible and makes the Rex Position of maximal extraction for maximal maintenance, or cashing out, that much better. Even modestly successful climate mitigation and adaptation for the vast majority of people would require socioeconomic and political changes that would pose a steep loss to the Rex Position.

Neofeudalism is also a steady-state economy—one in which growth is essentially nil or close to it—but characterized not by some harmonious socially sustaining socioeconomic life. Rather, it would be one in which the rate of return on “capital” lies at its historic norms of 4 to 5 percent for a rather much larger and much more comfortable ruling class than existed in pre-modern periods across the world, coupled with the conditions for at least a handful of distinct—if almost certainly overlapping—surplus populations: First, a massive number of socioeconomically expendable people (no longer needed for the basic stable reproduction of the sated and well-off) who face direct, permanent ecological adversity. (Think about the UN’s estimate of one to two billion who may “no longer have adequate water” if the world warms by 2 degrees Celsius.) And second, an over-large body—also facing severe economic and ecological constriction—of what one might term “neoserfs”: people who work in basic production and extraction, maintenance, and non-essential service functions. In between these groups and a ruling class would be a third mass: loyal retainers, if you will. Those who perform high level services, especially governance and security.

This is absolutely possible, pace the doom-mongers. But, in the same way, right-wing climate realism is hardly “bound to fail.” It is perfectly imaginable because the world as we know it already absorbs the scaling horrors of the Anthropocene. It is perfectly imaginable because the colonial relation has, necessarily, adapted and spread over time. It is perfectly imaginable that, per Parenti, even a modest amount “of walls, guns, barbed wire, armed aerial drones, or permanently deployed mercenaries will be able to save one half of the planet from the other.” It’s perfectly imaginable because the world we actually know and the one we can observe through the historical record makes the “politics of the armed lifeboat” far from a bad gamble for those whose stake promises a payout.

Based on this discount rate model, Nordhaus suggested a relatively high social cost of carbon that grows at 3 percent per year from approximately now till 2050. In that time, this would suggest a carbon tax starting at approximately $19 per metric ton of CO2 and topping out around $53. This is only a minute difference from his most well-known critics in the Stern Report, whose proposals would differ by as little as a few dollars per metric ton of carbon to about a $150 difference. The recent IPCC special report on staying within a 1.5 world, in contrast, suggests costs as high as $14,300 by the end of this decade. The point isn’t the comical difference between these numbers. Nor how carbon taxing and cap-and-trade systems will never work or are ludicrously inadequate measures. Nor even how the IPCC models incorporate “Negishi weights” and their consequences which, as the economist Elizabeth Stanton notes, “freeze the current distribution of income between world regions,” and without which “IAMs [integrated assessment models] that maximize global welfare would recommend an equalization of income across all regions as part of their policy advice.” But rather how the very idea of “the discount rate” is so perfectly a “victor’s” story; how wonderfully it obfuscates reality. There is no universal “we” whose present benefits are being maximized. Profits, rather, are maximized for the few at extraordinary socioeconomic and ecological costs to the vast majority. Climate change does not negatively affect only prospective “future” generations but is already exacting costs from most people currently alive while benefiting a rather smaller number immensely.