Among the many ironies that characterize our chaotic era is the likelihood that the green dreams of environmental reformers will be realized in the nightmarish context of a class war that separates mankind into two groups: the rich and politically powerful, who will preserve high standards of living; and the poor and politically weak, who will sink into polluted misery as resource depletion, climate change, and social unrest ruin their lives.
Nobody is more eager to go “off the grid” than the predatory elites. Once they have isolated their lily pads of comfort from the decaying infrastructure of the mass societies that they exploit, they will have a far more efficient and profitable model for aggrandizing their wealth. The wealthy fully anticipate a die-off of the world’s excess population, and they have zero interest in any kind of shared sacrifice that might save a few billion people at the expense of cuts in their living standards.
Thus, creating enclaves that are ecologically self-sufficient is a high priority for those who intend to be among the survivors of the coming ecological catastrophes. Where possible, the wealthy will provide their own power, water, food, and security directly, but where they must depend on outside entities, they will work relentlessly to secure preferential access, mainly by insisting that the resources be provided by private corporations. The reason the rich love free markets is that they can always be the high bidders. Markets allow the rich to legally secure scarce resources. This is why there has been a steady drive to privatize the control of vital services worldwide. For example, water supply, which was once almost entirely in the hands of governments, has been steadily privatized all over the world. When clean water is provided by a corporation, all it takes is a single price adjustment to turn it into a luxury available only to the wealthy.
There is no realistic possibility of an ordinary middle-class household going “off the grid” without enduring a sharp drop in living standards. But the wealthy can afford the scale of investment required to replace costly shared infrastructure, or to buy dwindling shared resources at top-bidder prices. Thus the green future envisioned by environmental reformers is likely to be realized by the wealthy and powerful, and not by the mass of humanity, who, having exceeded the carrying capacity of the planet, will die in misery outside the islands of comfort the rich have established in the green strongholds of their neo-medieval society.