Remember the movie “Elysium”? Though the dystopian, science-fiction vision of a future Earth didn’t cause much of a stir when it was released in 2013, its premise deserves another look in 2024, when climate and environmental crises are disrupting countries across the globe. Even the average person can’t help but notice unseasonable fall weather, with T-shirts replacing puffy jackets, and deduce something is a little off.

The film’s “Elysium” was a space station floating outside the Earth’s atmosphere, a privileged habitat for the rich and powerful escaping a polluted and overpopulated world, where the poor toiled throughout shortened and diseased lifetimes unless they devised a way out and into that promised land in the sky.

Not exactly upbeat, but too close to reality in an America where residents in the majority-Black city of Flint, Mich., remain devastated from the effects of a water supply poisoned a decade ago by leaders who were supposed to be looking out for them. While officials assure them the water now meets federal standards, lead pipes still need to be replaced, and children who consumed and bathed in that water continue to suffer seizures and developmental setbacks.

Storms, droughts and wildfires are striking in the last places you’d expect, from western North Carolina to New Jersey, and occurring with alarming frequency.

The situation has many asking questions about what the future holds, with an incoming Republican administration that last time around dismissed climate questions as alarmist and favored weakening environmental regulations that it said crippled business.

This is as world leaders gathered in Baku, Azerbaijan, this week at the United Nations annual climate conference, known as COP29. With some of the top representatives from the largest carbon dioxide-polluting countries missing, there were understandable concerns about commitment to the cause and uncertainty about how poorer countries would raise the funds to meet their climate goals. Taking on loans and increasing debt would just add additional burdens to countries that are a day, week or month away from the next weather disaster.

It’s an issue that intersects with others, including immigration.

“For the world’s most vulnerable people, climate change is a harsh reality that profoundly affects their lives,” said Filippo Grandi, U.N. high commissioner for refugees, as the agency released a report with its findings during COP29. “The climate crisis is driving displacement in regions already hosting large numbers of people uprooted by conflict and insecurity, compounding their plight and leaving them with nowhere safe to go.”

Just as in the film, escape is their next best option.

Climate adviser John Podesta, though optimistic, didn’t sound that convincing when he vowed at the conference not to revert to energy systems of the 1950s — while also predicting Donald Trump would pull out of international climate agreements and short-circuit Biden administration climate policies included in the Inflation Reduction Act.

With the next Trump administration already making plans, some hope the president-elect has softened his previous positions. To do that, they are looking past recent history, when Trump in his first term removed the U.S. from the Paris climate accord, a move reversed by President Joe Biden but expected again in Trump 2.0.

Trump and many of his supporters have called climate change a “hoax.” In Florida — a state whose weather events have made residents and insurers wary — Gov. Ron DeSantis has described himself as “not a global warming person.” It barely registers in state law, after a push to remove references to climate change. 

The previous Trump administration also rolled back more than 100 environmental rules, including many that regulated air and water pollution, wildlife habitat and toxic chemicals, reported The New York Times, which compiled a list. The U.S. oil executives whom Trump reportedly lobbied before the 2024 election, in a bid to raise more campaign cash, at the very least have his ear when it comes to what comes next and which Americans would benefit.

Those who can’t afford a seat at that exclusive table include the citizens who live in “Cancer Alley” in Louisiana, a strip hugging the Mississippi River, so named because its predominantly poor and Black residents have a greater-than-average risk of developing cancer.

The industrial facilities located there include petrochemical manufacturing plants, according to the Louisiana Illuminator, many of which “emit ethylene oxide, an extremely potent toxin that is considered a carcinogen by the Environmental Protection Agency and has been linked to breast and lung cancers.” That’s Speaker Mike Johnson’s home state, though I’ve heard the conservative Christian talk a lot more about consolidating power.

This week, Trump, who is gathering the loyalists who will populate his Cabinet and staff, named former Republican Rep. Lee Zeldin of New York to be the next administrator of the EPA. In his unsuccessful 2022 run for New York governor, Zeldin promised, in part, to expand fossil fuel energy.

And though he gets some credit for actions to protect the Long Island shore in his home district, Zeldin, after being named to head the EPA, told Fox News, “There are regulations the left wing of this country have been advocating through regulatory power that ends up causing businesses to go in the wrong direction.”

Billionaire Elon Musk also got a new job this week, when he was announced as co-leader with Vivek Ramaswamy of something called the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Trump described the billionaire entrepreneurs as “two wonderful Americans [who] will pave the way for my Administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.”

Two people to lead one agency. What an efficient start.

What could go wrong when Musk, toting hefty government contracts, gets to oversee the agencies that are overseeing his companies?

Americans suffering the effects of too little government protecting them and enhancing their quality of life don’t have a chance with these two changing the rules of the game, and perhaps the Constitution.

Maybe Musk does something remotely positive and unselfish — a long shot considering the South African immigrant’s self-centered, self-dealing track record. Maybe he burns it all down.

Either way, there will be no personal consequences. Musk can afford his own Elysium. He’s even got the spaceship to fly him and his elite buddies there.

Mary C. Curtis has worked at The New York Times, The Baltimore Sun, The Charlotte Observer, as national correspondent for Politics Daily, and is a senior facilitator with The OpEd Project. She is host of the CQ Roll Call “Equal Time with Mary C. Curtis” podcast. Follow her on X @mcurtisnc3.