As we are all too well aware, in January, 2017, the Doomsday Clock was advanced to two-and-a-half minutes before midnight, a threat level that had not been reached for 30 years. The accompanying statement invoked the two major threats to survival: nuclear weapons and “unchecked climate change.” The call condemned world leaders, who are endangering “every person on Earth [by] failing to perform their most important duty—ensuring and preserving the health and vitality of human civilization.”

This grim declaration naturally brought to mind another one issued just fifty years earlier: the appeal to the people of the world by Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein, calling on them to face a choice that is “stark and dreadful and inescapable: Shall we put an end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war?”—recognizing that war can quickly turn into terminal nuclear war.

The Russell-Einstein appeal differs from the current declaration in two crucial respects. It did not include the threat of environmental catastrophe, then not sufficiently understood. And it directly addresses the people of the world, not the political leadership. The latter difference is of some importance. There is substantial evidence that on climate change, nuclear weapons planning, and international policies generally, the population seems in general more concerned than the political leadership.

It is hardly a secret that even the most free and democratic governments respond only in limited ways to popular will. For the United States, it is well established that a considerable majority of the population, at the lower end of the income/wealth scale, are effectively disenfranchised. Influence increases slowly as one moves up the scale, and at the very top—a fraction of 1 percent—policy is pretty much determined. That being the case, the attitudes at the very top of the ladder are of great import. These are revealed dramatically in the poll of CEOs released in January 2015 at the Davos conference of “masters of the universe,” as the business press describes them.

The poll revealed that climate change did not merit inclusion among the top 19 risks that concern CEOs. Worse still, at the top of their perceived risks was “overregulation”—that is, the prime method for addressing environmental catastrophe. Their overriding concern was growth prospects for their companies.