Humor
How Global Warming Affects Me, Wealthy White Man
Countenancing the horrors of elite deprivation
Just this morning, my butler informed me that 2023 was the hottest year on record. And while I constantly hear how this will affect poor countries who continue to suffer from the droughts, war, and hurricanes caused by climate change, for some reason no one is giving proper attention to me. My yachts, endless miles of lawn, expensive mansions to heat, access to caviar, and other lifestyle necessities will be at the greatest risk.
Now, I know what you’re saying: “Hey! There’s opportunity here as well. Buy up beachfront property in Canada, which rising temperatures will turn into a modern-day Florida soon enough.”
Granted, there are certainly potential profits, and I’ve been having my financial guy shift my stock portfolio and other investments into what I call my “Armageddon fund.” But this doesn’t obviate the pressing concern that global warming will significantly degrade my quality of life and ability to go down to the club on a daily basis. I worry that we’ll have to start using solar-
powered golf carts or that there’ll be meat shortages, making it impossible to get prime rib after every round.
How exactly am I to adjust? Switch to solar-powered limousines? Not take my private jets anymore? What am I to do, then, when I get a sudden urge for the bluefin tuna prepared by my personal Taiwanese chef in Japan? Or when I grow tired of managing my trust fund manager who manages the trust fund my parents left me and I need to relax for a week or two at my
private island off of Bermuda?
Do you really expect me to fly commercial and sit between some sweaty working-class slobs who issue flatulence like my factories pump out carbon while an old lady complains how the pollution in her neighborhood is contributing to her emphysema?
Please! I’d rather be caught at Davos wearing last year’s styles.
So, as you can see, a private jet is a necessity not a luxury for me, whose choices are truly limited by my superior upbringing and need to constantly buy very expensive products in order not to fall behind the Lexington Avenue crowd. Truly, the common American has no idea how difficult it is for me. Sometimes I have to talk to people, do four or five soirees a week,
and my vacation appearances can truly be exhausting!
Climate change will create other problems for me as well. We may, for instance, see same-day delivery prices rise due to taxes on fuel. This won’t be a major inconvenience for you common folk, but I get constant deliveries and this may cause me to have to cut down from, say, 68
servants to 67. That means that one of my already poor domestics may lose her job as a maid, waitress, or toenail trimmer — a trickle-down effect.
Yet there is an even worse potential problem for me: If those people working in sweatshops overseas die in a climate change-caused hurricane, who will I hire to make my iPads, LCD TVs, and the other electronics, gadgets, and gizmos? Who will pick my fruits or collect the clothing
materials I need for my fine suits?
In the end it becomes obvious that someone of my class and caliber — a go-getter and winner if I’ve ever seen one — will suffer the most. True, poor people in Third World countries may have to deal with drought, but who likes rain anyway? I, on the other hand, will have to contend with
threats to miles of private beachhead, criticisms from whiny liberals who complain about my daily private jet flights, and occasionally missing out on having the freshest sushi the best Taiwanese chef in Japan can fish himself.
In other words, hell. Totally unbearable. I need a coal-high just to get over it all.
