We know I'm not going to go out and literally murder rich people. Not right away. I'd rather get together with a bunch of like-minded people and tax their excessive consumption. If they resist, we'd almost certainly try taking away all their favorite stuff and locking them in a people-cage before resorting to killing them.

Votes for higher tax rates on wealthier tax brackets, and for stricter environmental laws, and more enforceable penalties for breaking them, are all more effective than me, individually, setting my thermostat just one more degree towards discomfort, separating my recycling into just one more category, shortening my showers by just one more minute, and doing all that stuff we were told would make a difference.

But then one (allegedly) rich jackass screws it up for everybody, unilaterally withdrawing from international environmental agreements, and putting a fox in charge of the EPA's henhouse. It can make someone question their commitment. Why should I voluntarily endure all this eco-sterity, when I can reduce my environmental footprint to zero and still live to see the melting methane clathrates roiling arctic seas, because we were all apparently targeting the wrong people?

The people who collectively claim to own most of the planet are the ones who are destroying it. They can do as they please with their other possessions, can't they? I lost whatever direct stake I had in this planet in the wake of the 2007 mortgage crisis. I used to own land. Or I thought I did. Now I have to rent the ground on which I sleep. So if the planet is dying, I don't really have to worry about my piece of it dying. If my home is demolished by floods and tornadoes, that's more the landlord's problem: I move on to the next place. I'm just in a race with all the other doomed souls, to work hard enough to make enough money to win the bidding war to rent the last habitable place on Earth. In doing that, I may have to discard any pretense of environmental responsibility, and think solely of my own small tribe, because clearly, the cartel in place to ensure cooperation for the greater good of all civilization is not effectively checking the renegades who are choosing personal benefit over collective benefit, at a world-altering scale.

So instead of tsking at the person who threw brown glass into the clear glass bin, get violently pissed at the person who is secretively trucking those bins to the landfill, because glass recycling isn't profitable this month. Instead of frowning at the person eating a real meat hamburger, go ape on the person whose animal waste lagoon breached a levee and washed into the local watershed. I'm not going to do one more damned thing to my own lifestyle for the sake of environmentalism, as long as I think that nothing that I have already done, and nothing I am currently doing, really matters.

If becoming an eco-terrorist is the only plausible way to avoid Venus 2: Methane Boogaloo, then yeah, I think I could maybe make a difference that way. There are definitely better paths to pursue, collectively, but I think maybe the folks telling me, "Hey, you! Stop eating meat. Thanks!" while trading Bitcoin and designing the next Juicero-like company (but better this time), are not fully understanding the problems at hand, and will not be effective allies.