Figures and previews from the forthcoming IPCC AR6 (due out in July) are starting to come out. They're not looking great. Limiting warming to 2 degrees C or less is now virtually impossible, as even the most optimistic net carbon zero projections put us at 2.1 degrees of warming by 2100. More realistic target is now in the 2.5-3.5 degrees of warming range, which is likely to be extremely bad for a lot of people.
The authors of the IPCC report suggest that only an "immediate and radical transformation" of the global economy and governance would allow us to avoid the worst of the oncoming climate catastrophe. This kind of language is a marked difference from earlier IPCC reports, and reflects a growing sense of urgency and impending doom within the climatology community broadly.
Which is actually extremely puzzling, really. There's a huge amount of both modeling and empirical evidence showing that unchecked climate change is going to be far, far worse economically than aggressive decarbonization and mitigation. The gold standard metareview on this, the Stern Report from the London School of Economics, puts the difference as high as an order of magnitude: 2% global GDP expenditure to mitigate, and up to 20% global GDP loss annually in the worst case, long-tail scenarios. Even from a strictly economic standpoint, the damage that would be done by 10+% GDP loss annually is mind-blowing, especially given that those impacts will disproportionately hit the Global South.
Basically every economist on any side of the political spectrum agrees that it makes far more economic sense to act now and mitigate the damage. Economic arguments against climate mitigation are always smokescreens for other ideological commitments.
Maybe the powerful know that there is going to be world shattering change within the next half century or so and they are in full plunder mode just trying to eat every morsel they can before father time takes away their plate. It just seems like any dip in profit or growth is just completely out of the question for them, which is not the way that someone who feels stable in their political position/situation acts. If they all knew that they would be in similar positions of power for the next ~50 or so years then having the economy pause for 2 months while COVID gets dealt with wouldn't have mattered at all. Maybe that's why the CCP dealt with COVID so much better? They're kinda the only game in town so they know they have to sleep in the bed they make.
Yeah. I'm not a psychologist, but I think the inferences you're making about their collective psychological state are at least plausible. I suspect that the number of people in power who genuinely believe that climate science is bunk or unproven is, at this point, vanishingly small. The "we still don't know and the science isn't settled" narrative, as well as the "it would just cost too much to fix" narrative are just stop-gaps to gum up the machinery of change for as long as possible. They know change is coming one way or another, so they're trying to extract every last drop of profit from this system while they still can. Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway did an excellent job tracing the history of this strategy in other areas (e.g. tobacco industry regulation) in their book Merchants of Doubt , which I can't recommend highly enough.