The billionaires buying New Zealand bunkers to live luxuriously in the aftermath of global nuclear war probably should have read Mark Lynas's new book, Six Minutes to Winter: Nuclear War and How to Avoid It, before they bought their Kiwi citizenship, writes Oliver Bullough in Coda.
If they had, they would have learned that "68% of New Zealanders would be dead after two years of nuclear winter." While that's better than Russia, the United States, China, United Kingdom, Canada and France, Germany, Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates —all of which would see 98 to 100% of their population die — there are better countries than New Zealand for billionaires to build their underground pleasure palaces:
Iceland, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, Costa Rica, Haiti and – painfully no doubt for Kiwis – Australia all have a 0 percent death rate. At present, Iceland does not sell visas, and Australia closed its investor visa programme last year, so it's no good to you even if you have the cash to flash. But there are plenty of options among the others: Uruguay's is a bit pricey, but Costa Rica will sell you residency for just $150,000, and Argentina is practically giving it away.:
Elon Musk, presumably without the assistance of cognition-altering drugs, thinks Mars is the best place to chill when 99 percent of the human race perishes. Bulloughs writes that it's "possible that Musk might want to claim Mars for himself. That would be in violation of Earth's treaties, and therefore bad. It would also – considering the havoc wreaked by Musk in his brief stint in government – be a pretty grim prospect on its own terms."
Previously:
• New Zealand bans most offshore residential real-estate ownership
• For the first time in 22 years, New Zealand has banned a book
