The paradox of intolerance: tolerating intolerance immediately results in an intolerant society.
There are various paradoxes and limitations inherent to a socially liberal society (not including the obvious issues of capitalism) that have been exploited by billionaires, fascists, strongmen, religious nuts and many others.
Why stop at the highlands? There are parts of various places including most of the home counties and London that would be much improved by the reintroduction of hundreds of wolves.
The US has always got the dollar-as-global-reserve-currency out of its military spending, which is a large part of how post second world war America accrued a huge portion of unearned global wealth. Trump, those that voted for him, and those that spent decades creating this situation for personal enrichment are rapidly hastening the end of this situation.
I’m not holding my breath either.
Maybe the way various entities have encouraged the US to embrace its worse impulses might offer a clue as to how global climate activists might be able to try and deal with the seemingly invincible fossil fuel empire.
To elaborate: the second election of Trump, and his and Musk’s actions only a month in have already severely harmed if not destroyed the trust the US needs for the world to continue to use the dollar as global reserve currency.
I don’t think Musk or Trump have the capacity for strategic thinking, or enough of an understanding of geopolitics or economics to understand what harm they have and are causing the US’s prospects over the mid to long term.
There are always best and worst case scenarios.
We are currently comprehensively losing the battle for 3C@2100 (which comes with increasingly harmful-to-devastating impacts in the intervening years and decades: future climate refugees will make the current not-far-off-a-London a decade seem like a picnic. A situation fascists will no doubt exploit).
It looks like the only way to prevent 4C plus and, a future Earth only described in science fiction, is mass civil disobedience.
But the UK government appears to be the worst in any civilised country in terms of squashing dissent, and most of the public appears to be more concerned with not being delayed on their commutes.
The biosphere is a metastable system. We are in the process of knocking it out of the state in which we have thrived, to something far less hospitable to human life. In the process so many of these fossil fuel reserves will burn. Various previous carbon sinks are already sources.
There is always a best and worse case scenario, so always a reason to take action, but a great deal of harm is already locked in.
Human ingenuity is a hell of a thing, but forget Musk’s always-an-obvious-con of colonising Mars, there is a much better chance (imho) that humans don’t survive re-colonising this new planet Earth over the coming centuries to millennia than travelling across the galaxy in what is, let’s face it, a Star Trek inspired fantasy.