I like George Monbiot, who writes for The Guardian, and here is something he said in an opinion piece published on April 23, 2026 (emphasis added):
The poor and middle pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the very rich pay lawyers – and the ultra-rich pay politicians. It’s not an original remark, but it bears repeating until everyone has heard it. The more money billionaires accumulate, the greater their control of the political system – which means they pay less tax, which means they accumulate more, which means their control intensifies.
One of the symptoms of the pathology known as “billionaire brain” is an inability to see beyond their own short-term gain. They would sack the planet for a few more stones on the pointless mountain of wealth. And we can see it happening. Last week delivered the biggest news of the year so far, perhaps the biggest news of the century. But partly because billionaires own most of the media, most people never heard it. We might find ourselves committed to a civilisation-ending event before we even learn that such a thing is possible.
The real message of Monbiot's opinion column, in other words, is captured in Monbiot's headline:
If you don't immediately know from this headline what Monbiot must be talking about, please take a few minutes to read his entire column. What Monbiot is talking about is a crucial oceanic circulation system known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). This is the main ocean current system in the Atlantic Ocean, and it plays an important role in the climate system. I have written about the AMOC before, and here's a bit of what Monbiot has to say about it:
The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) – delivers heat from the tropics to the North Atlantic. Recent research suggests that if it shuts down, it could cause both a massive drop in average winter temperatures in northern Europe and drastic changes in the Amazon’s water cycles. This could help tip the rainforest into cascading collapse and trigger further disaster.
AMOC's shutdown is likely also to cause an acceleration of sea level rise on the east coast of the US, threatening cities. It could also raise Antarctic temperatures by roughly 6C and release a vast pulse of carbon currently stored in the Southern Ocean, accelerating our ongoing climate catastrophe.
Even when the countervailing effects of generalised global heating are taken into account, a further paper proposes, the net impact in northern Europe would be periods of extreme cold – including events in which temperatures in London fall to -19C, in Edinburgh to -30C and in Oslo to -48C. Sea ice in February would extend as far as Lincolnshire. Our climate would change drastically, with the likelihood of far greater extremes, such as massive winter storms. Rain-fed arable agriculture would become impossible almost everywhere in the UK.
This shift, on any realistic human scale, would be irreversible. Its speed is likely to outrun our ability to adapt. Amoc shutdowns, driven by natural climate variability, have happened before. But not in the era of large-scale human civilisation.
The first paper proposing that AMOC might have an on-state and an off-state was published in 1961. Since then, many studies have confirmed the finding and explored potential triggers and likely implications. Until recently, AMOC collapse caused by human activity fell into the category of a “high impact, low probability” event, devastating if it happens, but unlikely to occur. Research over the past few years prompted a reassessment: it began to look more like a “high impact, high probability” event. Now, in response to last week’s paper, Prof Stefan Rahmstorf – perhaps the world’s leading authority on the subject – says the chances of a shutdown look like “more than 50%”. We could pass the tipping point, he says, “in the middle of this century.”
The reason that democratic self-government is the only political system worth having is the fact that so-called "political" decisions have life and death impacts which affect all of us - everyone in the world. In other words, spending our time and money on "politics," instead of letting the billionaires make all the decisions, is to our immense, personal advantage - and that is why it is so important.
This is not the first time I have made this point.
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