The Religion of Escape

Every religion in this chronicle has had the same three components: a story about why the present order is legitimate, a messiah, and an eschatology, an account of how it all ends and who is saved. The system that now organises the planet has all three, and this chapter takes them in order.

The legitimating story is that markets allocate justly and that wealth is earned. The eschatology is science fiction: an escape from a used-up Earth to other worlds. And the messiah, for about a decade, was a man who sells cars.

They knew

Start with the fact that settles the moral question, because it is documentary rather than interpretive.

Exxon's own scientists modelled global warming accurately in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Not vaguely; accurately. A 2023 study in Science by Geoffrey Supran, Stefan Rahmstorf and Naomi Oreskes digitised and reanalysed the company's internal graphs and reported that between 63 and 83 per cent of their projections were consistent with subsequent observations, with an average projected warming of about 0.20 °C per decade, as good as or better than contemporaneous academic and government models. Internal documents also show the company correctly rejecting the idea of a coming ice age and correctly estimating the carbon budget.¹

What the industry then did with that knowledge is equally documented. The Global Climate Coalition lobbied against the Kyoto Protocol while its own technical advisers told it the science was well established. A 1998 American Petroleum Institute memo (the "Global Climate Science Communications Plan") set out an explicit strategy whose stated measure of victory was that average citizens and the media would come to recognise uncertainties in climate science. Robert Brulle's research has traced the funding of the counter-movement across foundations and trade associations.²

This is not a case of collective human short-sightedness. It is a case of specific firms knowing, and buying doubt.

"Anthropogenic" is true. "We all did it" is not.

Two claims are often run together and must be separated.

Climate change is caused by human activity. That is settled physics and this chronicle does not dispute it for a moment. The isotopic signature of the added carbon identifies it as fossil in origin; the mechanism has been understood since Arrhenius in 1896.

"Humanity" is nevertheless the wrong unit of responsibility, and treating it as the right one is itself an ideological achievement. The distribution is extraordinarily unequal:

• By producer. The Carbon Majors work attributes the majority of industrial greenhouse gas emissions since 1988 to a hundred fossil fuel producers.³
• By nation, cumulatively. The United States is responsible for roughly a quarter of all historical CO₂ emissions and the EU for something like a sixth, while the entire African continent (around 18 per cent of the world's population) accounts for a low single-digit percentage.
• By class. Oxfam's analysis finds the richest one per cent of humanity responsible for as much emissions as the poorest two-thirds. A single superyacht or private jet schedule can exceed the lifetime emissions of many people.
• And the harms run in the opposite direction. The countries least responsible are, with grim consistency, the most exposed: the Sahel, the Horn of Africa, low-lying Bangladesh, small island states. Rwanda's per-capita emissions are around a hundredth of an average American's.

There is even a documented origin for the framing that spreads the blame. The concept of a personal "carbon footprint" was popularised by a large advertising campaign run for BP in the mid-2000s, complete with a personal footprint calculator. It is a very effective piece of work: it turns a question about production and policy into a question about your commute.⁴

So the correct formulation is not that climate change is natural, and not that everyone is equally to blame. It is that climate change is the atmospheric expression of the global caste system this chronicle has been describing since chapter 8: the same few extracting, the same many paying.

The eschatology

Every extractive order eventually needs an answer to the question of what happens when the extraction runs out. The answer currently on offer is that we will leave.

Elon Musk has made the claim in its strongest form for two decades: humanity must be a multiplanetary species, Mars is the target, and the goal is a self-sustaining city of a million people. The pitch is explicitly eschatological: a backup for consciousness, a lifeboat, a light against the long dark.

Take it seriously enough to check the numbers, because the physics is not close.

Why Mars is not a lifeboat

Radiation. Mars has no global magnetic field and almost no atmosphere, so the surface is exposed to galactic cosmic rays and solar particle events. The radiation detector on the Curiosity mission measured the dose during cruise and on the surface, and the estimated total for a round trip with about 500 days on the surface comes to roughly 1 sievert, a substantial fraction of, or above, career limits used by space agencies, and an appreciable increase in lifetime cancer risk. Shielding is possible but heavy: the serious proposals involve living under metres of regolith or inside lava tubes, which is to say living in a hole.⁵

The soil is toxic. The Phoenix lander found perchlorates at roughly 0.5 per cent by weight in Martian soil. Perchlorate interferes with thyroid iodine uptake in humans; and laboratory work has shown that under Mars-like ultraviolet flux, perchlorates become strongly bactericidal, which is bad news for both astronaut health and any hope of straightforward agriculture in native soil.⁶

The dust. Fine, electrostatically clinging, and chemically reactive; the Apollo experience with lunar dust in the cabin was already alarming, and Mars adds perchlorates and a planet-wide dust storm season.

Terraforming is not available. A 2018 analysis in Nature Astronomy by Bruce Jakosky and Christopher Edwards inventoried all accessible CO₂ reservoirs on Mars (polar caps, adsorbed in regolith, locked in carbonates), and concluded that releasing all of it would raise atmospheric pressure to well under a tenth of Earth's: nowhere near enough to warm the planet or permit liquid water at the surface. Their conclusion was blunt: terraforming Mars is not possible using present-day technology.⁷

And we do not know whether humans can reproduce there. This is the point that should end the discussion and rarely gets raised. Mars surface gravity is 0.38 g. There has never been a mammalian pregnancy carried to term in partial gravity, and there is no facility anywhere that can test it; no variable-gravity research station exists. What we do know from microgravity is not encouraging: bone loss on the order of one to one and a half per cent per month, muscle atrophy, immune dysregulation, and a syndrome of vision changes and intracranial pressure affecting a majority of long-duration crew. Development is exquisitely gravity-sensitive: vestibular formation, bone mineralisation, fluid distribution in a fetus. A colony that cannot have children is not a colony. It is an expedition.⁸

Set beside all of that: after any conceivable catastrophe on Earth (full nuclear exchange, worst-case warming, asteroid impact) the surface of this planet would still have breathable air, liquid water, a magnetic field, 1 g, and a biosphere. Post-catastrophe Earth is more habitable than Mars on its best day, by an enormous margin. As a lifeboat, Mars is strictly worse than the ship.

The messiah

Prophets should be judged on their prophecies, so here is the record.

The Hyperloop. Musk published an "alpha" design paper in 2013 for a vacuum-tube transport system between Los Angeles and San Francisco, claimed it could be built for a fraction of the cost of California's high-speed rail project, and never built it. His biographer Ashlee Vance reports Musk acknowledging that part of the motivation was to disrupt the high-speed rail programme, which he considered wasteful. Twelve years later, there is no Hyperloop; the best-funded company pursuing it shut down at the end of 2023; the Boring Company's demonstration project in Las Vegas is a tunnel with cars driving through it, with human drivers.⁹

Full self-driving. Promised as imminent, publicly and repeatedly, from 2016 onwards, including the specific claim that a car would drive itself coast to coast by the end of 2017. It did not.

Mars dates. The target for a first crewed landing has been restated many times, each time receding by roughly the elapsed interval.

On the politics, the record is also public. Musk grew up in apartheid South Africa; his maternal grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, was a Canadian political activist who moved his family to South Africa in 1950 (the year after the National Party began legislating apartheid), and whose published writings have been examined by historians and journalists and found to contain conspiratorial and antisemitic material. In November 2023 Musk publicly endorsed a post advancing the "great replacement" claim that Jewish communities promote hatred against whites, calling it the actual truth; a major advertiser exodus followed, and he later called the post the dumbest he had ever made. He has repeatedly amplified racial statistics associated with far-right accounts, and used his ownership of a major platform to reinstate accounts previously removed for racist content.¹⁰

The chronicle states this because the chapter's argument requires it: the man selling humanity a lifeboat has, on the public record, a specific and narrow idea of who is in it.

What the promise is for

Compare the structures and the resemblance is exact.

Both function to make the present bearable to those benefiting from it. Both direct energy away from repair. Both cast their leaders as visionaries rather than as beneficiaries. And both are, in the end, chapter 1's boundary at maximum extension: a moral community that has drawn its line so tightly that it now excludes not only other peoples but the planet itself.

The one habitable world we have is being wrecked by a specific, identifiable, and rather small group of people, who knew what they were doing, who have been paid extraordinarily well for it, and who are now selling tickets off it. That is the last chapter of the argument that began on a Portuguese beach in 1444.

Two questions remain before this arc can close. The tickets are being sold along a boundary this chronicle has watched being redrawn for five centuries; chapter 20 follows that boundary's renovations down to the doctrine the seller himself endorsed. And a system this coordinated demands to know who is coordinating it; chapter 21 answers, and the answer is nobody. Then the chronicle turns to a small country that was flattened by all of it, and what it has done since.

Footnotes

1. G. Supran, S. Rahmstorf and N. Oreskes, "Assessing ExxonMobil's global warming projections," Science 379:6628 (2023), eabk0063; Neela Banerjee, Lisa Song and David Hasemyer, "Exxon: The Road Not Taken," InsideClimate News (2015). ↩
2. American Petroleum Institute, "Global Climate Science Communications Plan" (1998), reproduced by the National Security Archive and quoted in the New York Times, 26 April 1998; Robert J. Brulle, "Institutionalizing delay: foundation funding and the creation of U.S. climate change counter-movement organizations," Climatic Change 122 (2014), pp. 681–694; Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, Merchants of Doubt (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010). ↩
3. Richard Heede, "Tracing anthropogenic carbon dioxide and methane emissions to fossil fuel and cement producers, 1854–2010," Climatic Change 122 (2014), pp. 229–241, and the subsequent Carbon Majors databases. ↩
4. On the BP campaign, Mark Kaufman, "The carbon footprint sham," Mashable (2020), and the campaign materials themselves, run by Ogilvy & Mather from 2004. On distributional analysis, Oxfam, Climate Equality: A Planet for the 99% (2023); Lucas Chancel, "Global carbon inequality over 1990–2019," Nature Sustainability 5 (2022), pp. 931–938. ↩
5. C. Zeitlin et al., "Measurements of Energetic Particle Radiation in Transit to Mars on the Mars Science Laboratory," Science 340 (2013), pp. 1080–1084; D. M. Hassler et al., "Mars' Surface Radiation Environment Measured with the Curiosity Rover's RAD," Science 343 (2014), 1244797. ↩
6. M. H. Hecht et al., "Detection of Perchlorate and the Soluble Chemistry of Martian Soil at the Phoenix Lander Site," Science 325 (2009), pp. 64–67; Jennifer Wadsworth and Charles S. Cockell, "Perchlorates on Mars enhance the bacteriocidal effects of UV light," Scientific Reports 7 (2017), 4662. ↩
7. Bruce M. Jakosky and Christopher S. Edwards, "Inventory of CO₂ available for terraforming Mars," Nature Astronomy 2 (2018), pp. 634–639. ↩
8. On bone and muscle loss, Jean D. Sibonga et al., in the NASA Human Research Program evidence reports; on the neuro-ocular syndrome, T. H. Mader et al., Ophthalmology 118:10 (2011), pp. 2058–2069. On the absence of partial-gravity reproductive data, see the National Academies' Decadal Survey on Biological and Physical Sciences Research in Space 2023–2032, which identifies it as an open and unaddressed question. ↩
9. Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future (New York: Ecco, 2015), on the Hyperloop's origins and motivation. ↩
10. On Haldeman, Jill Lepore's reporting and lectures on the Musk family and the Technocracy movement, and Chris McGreal, "Elon Musk's grandfather," The Guardian, 2 March 2023. On the November 2023 post, contemporaneous reporting in the Washington Post, the Financial Times and the advertiser withdrawals that followed. ↩