Three of Trump’s core policies are the genesis for this question. The desire to annex Canada, the desire to annex Greenland, and the push for autarky.

Now, I realize this isn’t an explicit policy, and it couldn’t be considering how they message politically on climate change. And even if Trump isn’t thinking that far ahead, I wouldn’t be so sure about the Silicon Valley billionaires like Musk that are running most of his cabinet and feeding him ideas. Sure, Trump doesn’t have long to live based on his age. But someone like Zuckerberg? Catastrophic climate collapse is a scenario that you may face in your lifetime.

In a catastrophic climate change scenario, the appeal of having more northern territory is obvious. In some of the more severe scenarios, this century the US is looking at the collapse of its agricultural heartland as corn, soy, and wheat belts march north. And of course there are newly opening Northernly trade routes as the polar ice thaws.

Trump has long had a belief that the US should be more self-sufficient. He seems to genuinely believe in the concept of autarky. And if some of the worse projections of climate change come to pass, we are looking at what may be known to history as the Great Famine. We’re facing potential vast decreases in agricultural productivity and multiple simultaneous breadbasket failures. And whenever a country experiences a food shortage, the very first thing its government does is to prohibit the export of food staples.

I again don’t think Trump himself is playing this level of chess, strategizing for decades in the future. But some of the tech billionaires, the ones that follow Yarvin and dream of reorganizing society from top to bottom? There’s zero chance those guys aren’t also factoring in climate change into their machinations. There’s a reason so many of them are building bunkers in New Zealand and other remote locations likely to fair relatively well in the event of catastrophic climate change.

I would never expect them to admit this is their strategy. The fossil fuel wing of the Republican Party has been pushing the “climate change is a hoax” line for so long that the party can’t just abandon that messaging without being eaten alive by their base. But looking at their actions, it sure looks like the actions of an amoral sociopath that was concerned about catastrophic climate change.

I ask myself, “if I had no conscience, didn’t care about hurting innocent people, and was running the US, what would I do to best position the US for catastrophic climate change?” And it looks an awful lot like what the Trump administration is doing right now.