There’s this card game “Pairs” that I love playing and we’ve been playing a lot lately. You flip up one card at a time and if you get a pair you lose that many points and first to lose twenty one points loses the game. (Or sixteen points at four players, thirteen points at five players and so on.) You only have two choices in the game: fold, which definitively loses you a small amount of points and helps everyone else by clearing their boards, or to flip up a new card in the hope of not blowing up yet and hope someone else folds before you do.
This models climate change. If your corporation/country/city stops profiting first, that punishes you relative to everyone else who can keep on robbing for a little bit longer.
The problem in Pairs is that once you have lost enough points you can’t fold anymore. You’re locked in to keep having to flip cards and risk it. You don’t have a choice because you lose either way.
The only way out is to change the rules.
People who has made it their identity to lurve market capitalism get skeptical when we say that we need to change things urgently and drastically, even making changes at the root of things. Even as the corporations are heading towards an own goal of epic proportios, set to lose trillions of dollars due to the same climate change that they orchestrated through their reckless exploitation.