If I accept your assessment of the motivations of Twiggy and the...

If I accept your assessment of the motivations of Twiggy and the other billionaires, then I have gone a long way down the road to summarising their position as... um, what is the right word? Amoral doesn't quite seem right. Perhaps evil is the word I'm looking for.

But that aside, there is a contradiction here and it emerges from the short-termism of the market. You talk about the dividends that matter to you, and that is a traditional idea of wealth which for centuries has been something which will can last your whole life and, for most people, beyond, because they can pass it on to their children or whoever they name in their wills.

But the worth of dividends and all monetary wealth is diminished massively if there is a climate-induced economic collapse in 2030 or whenever it is, caused by the very activity which earned those dividends. The compulsion for wealth and power of the ultra-rich is not for a bit of fun for the next seven years, it's much greater than that. And likewise, the compulsion for me to set my kids up with a house and a bit of cash, is a longer project than for seven years.

Now, I don't KNOW that it's going to be seven years, but I'm talking risk management here. There is a range of probabilities that something very bad is going to happen, and every new set of figures makes the probabilities worse and the time scale shorter. We actually have Austin Powers in reverse. Doctor Evil lifts his little finger and gleefully declares his plan will get him one thousand TRILLION dollars, and his insecure son has to do an "OK boomer" on his Dad and get him to wind it all the way back to one hundred....CENTS!