collapse of the old society

While I share your knee-jerk reaction, still seems like a more protracted and calculated approach would be a Manhattan-project style response at reversing desertification, improving soil and forest coverage and diversification of ecologies by moving dead wood and biomass into increasingly arid landscapes and burying it to aid soil moisture retention and biology accompanied by repopulation of beavers and reestablishing wetlands that preserved and accumulated carbon in the soil. Things like that could, possibly, reverse trends and drive improved, sustainable weather patterns. But, that would require the rich to feed the ecologies that sustain us all and provide our sustenance without being torn limb from limb and forced to do so, which seemed unlikely from the start and never more so than now.

And, honestly, all this should have been undertaken fifteen or twenty years ago, at minimum. The outlook at this point is grim.