Do people in capitals not understand or believe this? What do rich people (some of whom control large parts of the media) plan to do exactly? Die? Bunker? I mean seriously.
Understanding a problem, and being able to hold on to power while making the hard decisions is a classic unsolved problem in politics.
But it's infinitely harder with very few (two!?!) high centralized litmus-tested groupthink political parties, incentivized to lock up power unilaterally, and marginalize the power of other parties, not skills conducive to governing.
And also infinitely harder with unlimited spending by corporations (who are not citizens, and don't share the interests of citizens), where tiny groups of executives get to leverage all their companies resources toward tilting the political field in their favor, in order to get massive bonuses for feeding insatiable shareholder demand. But without reflecting any of the decency that shareholders might actually have.
It's the moloch beast. The whole system is the problem, but it's near impossible to improve the system's design because it will fight that at every step.
It mindlessly cares about its own survival. Which is how it came to be.
Even if every single person in the system actually wants to do the hard things that will keep the planet in good shape.
Option A implies at some point in the future, massive social unrest due to mass migration.
Option B implies massive social unrest today due to a large decline in standard of living. And no, it won’t be the “people in capitals” suffering here.
Option C is option A plus some geoengineering that will likely be undertaken when the situation is desperate enough.
As for geoengineering, good luck. While I also think this may be necessary, a precondition for spraying stuff into the sky is convincing people that this kind of intervention is necessary. Good luck doing that while enormous financial interests are trying to convince the world that it’s safe to keep digging up and burning fossil fuel deposits. They may not object to geoengineering itself, but they can’t afford to permit the kind of consensus it would require to get geonengineering done, so they will throw resources at fighting that consensus until it’s too late.