No, I didn’t fully get it at the time, but I kind of get it now (since, like the rest of us, I’ve lived through it all, including his close loss in 2020). Still, twice? Him? A convicted felon, no less! And yes, I do think italics are all too appropriate under the circumstances.

Two times as the president of these increasingly disunited states of America? Holy cowpie!

Perspecting (No, That’s Not a Typo) Donald Trump

This country actually did it — elected him (again!) — and so we deserve whatever we get, at least a little less than 50% of us do: Fox News… oops, sorry, Pete Hegseth to run the largest, best-funded, and least adept military on planet Earth? Robert Kennedy, Jr., to keep our health in check(mate?) or do I mean checkerboard red shape? Tulsi Gabbard overseeing what still passes for American “intelligence,” though in some sense it couldn’t have been dumber for endless years? Or Chris Wright, who denies that there’s any kind of a climate crisis on Planet Earth, to lead — yes, of course! — the Department of Energy. And that’s just to start down an endlessly expanding, mind-blowingly unnerving list.

Yikes! You really couldn’t make this stuff up, could you? And I haven’t even mentioned Kristi Noem as secretary of Homeland Security. Nor did I have time to put in Matt Gaetz at the Department of (In)Justice before he went down in an instant cloud of smoke and scandal. (The question is: Before we’re done with the madness of it all, will everything be, in some fashion, enveloped in that same cloudy firmament?)

I suppose there’s no reason to be shocked, not really. After all, it’s a matter of history. Sooner or later, all great imperial powers go down the tubes — or do I mean the drain? — in some fashion, even if Donald Trump, the second time around, gives tubes and drains a new meaning. Just ask any of the emperors of imperial China or Winston Churchill or, for that matter, Mikhail Gorbachev about imperial decline. But to have almost 50% of the population vote to send this country directly (no stops along the way) whooshing down those tubes into the basement of history, well, that’s no small thing, is it? Or maybe, on a planet already going to hell in a climate-changed handbasket, it actually is a small thing. (And, yes, I just can’t seem to help myself when it comes to italics and him, though he’s all too literally not a small thing, not The Donald!)

Who knows anymore? Who can make any real sense out of it when you’re not comfortably outside looking in, or in the present peering into the long-gone past, but right here, right now (and nowhere else), distinctly experiencing everything from the inside out — or do I mean, the outside in or even the inside in? That, in truth, may be the lesson Donald Trump(ed us all) has to offer when it comes to our ever stranger world. And perspective isn’t exactly available to us, is it? After all, when The Donald fills the screen 24/7, how can anyone perspect — if you don’t mind my making up a word to fit our ever-stranger world — anything?

And yet, let’s face it, if you try to take a step or two back, even if it’s into the deep doo-doo of the rest of this planet of ours — check out Benjamin Netanyahu’s nightmarish version of Israel, for instance — Donald Trump isn’t just a strange (all-)American happenstance. Under the circumstances, however happenstantial, of a country in which there was already an increasingly greater (and still growing) space between the wildly wealthy (especially the rising number of all-American billionaires who have more money than half of the rest of the population combined) and the ever more pressed working and middle classes, what populace, already distinctly in trouble (or he never would have made a political appearance in the first place), wouldn’t have elected a “businessman” (and I’m only being socially truthful by putting that word in quotes) who claimed to be all in for them on his third presidential run (though, of course, you won’t actually see 78-year-old Donald Trump, the man who reputedly once urged soldiers on our southern border to shoot migrants in the legs, running anywhere). Whew, that was one long sentence! And no wonder, since he’s distinctly wound us up in an endlessly convoluted world.

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And this time around, the richest man on Planet Earth, Elon Musk, was ready to pay out millions of promotional dollars to potential voters to increase Trump’s vote totals in swing states — and don’t for a second think that was bribery! After all, in a country where keeping yourself afloat amid still rising prices is no small trick, why wouldn’t you find appealing a man who swore he spoke for you and whose claim to fame, in a sense, was his remarkable ability to keep himself (and no one else) on the (more or less) flat and level, or even the uphill incline, as he sent his own businesses distinctly downstream into failed or bankrupt states? Whew, again!

And don’t be surprised, given his record, if, in his second term in office, he sends this country into his own version of, if not bankruptcy, at least ruptcy. After all, Donald Trump is — if you don’t mind my inventing another word — a distinctly remarkable (or do I mean smashing?) rupturist. His story (or do I mean history?) — since Kamala Harris lost, it certainly isn’t herstory — suggests that he’s likely to repeat his business “success” with this whole country the second time around, keeping himself on the flat and level or even the uphill incline as so much around him goes down, down, down. And don’t be surprised if he somehow manages to outlast that disaster, too. (Or do I mean two?) Oh, and since he’s already quipping about a third term in office, however jokingly — no joke there for the rest of us, of course — you should feel distinctly nervous (if, that is, the fate of this country means anything to you).

You can undoubtedly understand his position when it comes to a third possible round in the Oval Office, right? I mean, to hell with that old amendment! (“No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.”) If it were of any importance, it would obviously be the first, second, or third amendment, not the 22nd one, right?

The Dis-United States of Trumperica

Of course, none of this should truly surprise us. After all, historically speaking — and no, I don’t mean his story here, I mean the long, long story of humanity on this planet — great powers never seem to end up in particularly great shape toward the end of their ride. (And what a ride it’s been lately! Just ask… well, yes, Donald J. Trump!) As I like to remind TomDispatch readers, the country whose officials, after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, touted it as the last superpower (or perhaps that should be in caps, The Last Superpower, or maybe even THE LAST SUPERPOWER) on Planet Earth, now seems to be in the process of transforming itself into the last super-basket-case on a planet that itself is becoming a basket case and heading downhill all too rapidly.

And I write that as someone living in a city — New York — that until recently was in the midst of a historic drought, the worst since records began to be kept here in 1869, in a state in drought in a region in drought. My city, in other words, was anything but alone in a country 40% of which recently was considered to be experiencing drought conditions. Even New York City’s parks were burning — more than 230 brushfires in just two recent weeks — and smoke was regularly been in the air here. All of this on a planet where weather extremes — from devastating heat waves to devastating floods to devastating storms — are distinctly on the rise. It’s in that context, of course, that Donald Trump, the proud “drill, baby, drill” guy, who has long insisted that climate change is a “hoax,” plans to do anything he can to promote fossil fuels in the coming years. He’s also intent on reversing the Inflation Reduction Act of the Biden years, which has been “providing hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies and tax breaks for clean energy” in a country that, in 2023, set a global record for the production of oil.

In short, Donald Trump’s second (and third?) term(s) is (are) guaranteed to turn much in this country (though not its wealth disparities) upside down. In fact, as a preview of what’s coming, perhaps it’s time to think of this land as the Dis-United States of Trumperica.

Imagine that, in the years to come, he will once again be inhabiting the place built during George Washington’s presidency and occupied by Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy, among so many others. Need I say more when it comes to matters of decline and fall?

In truth, it’s a rather straightforward fact that this country is now visibly going down in a potentially big-time fashion and that, domestically speaking, there’s far worse to come. Of course, sooner or later, great powers do go down in various ways and Donald Trump’s version of that (just like his version of going up) could mean a distinctly failed state for the rest of us, no matter what happens to him.

Gaining Perspective on Donald Trump?

Imagine this: I was born when FDR was still president. (I was eight months old when he died.) And 80 years later, “my” president is Donald Trump (again!). If that doesn’t count as a political lifetime, what does? Whether the 78-year-old Donald or the 80-year-old me will live to see the end of “his” presidency is, of course, beyond my knowing.

But count on one thing: whatever we do see, it’s not likely to be pretty. In some sense, whatever chaotic version of guardrails were imposed on him in his first term will be largely removed this time around. From Pete Hegseth to Robert Kennedy, Jr., he’s already trying to appoint a crew of men (and yes, they are largely men) who would once have seemed inconceivable in this country — and not just because so many of them are rumored to have mistreated women.

Imagine that, starting in January, Trump and Elon Musk, the richest man on Earth, will be occupying the White House with “cat ladies” Vice-President J.D. Vance waiting in the wings. Fox News will be in the saddle (all too literally, given Trump’s appointments) and, this time around, President Tariff could essentially take the planet down with him. Yes, Matt Gaetz recently came up short (the earliest failed cabinet pick in modern history), but so many other nightmarish Trumpian figures won’t. They’ll be there doing their damnedest as “agents of his contempt, rage, and vengeance.”

Gaining perspective on Donald Trump? In some ways, his greatest skill in life has been in making such perspective inconceivable. No matter what you think, you can never quite fully take him in or know what he’s likely to do.

So, here we are, about to be Trumped once again. In fact, in the years to come, if things go as they now look like they might, with Elon Musk, Fox News, and him inhabiting the White House, it might be possible to think of this country (and even this planet) as Donald Trump’s last bankruptcy.

Copyright 2024 Tom Engelhardt

Via Tomdispatch.com

And yes, in case you think that, as in his novel 1984, published in 1949, a year before his death and just as the Cold War (a term he was the first to use in an essay in October 1945) was getting underway, our world, too, seems to be heading for a nightmarish future, I suspect that — were he capable of returning to this planet of ours — he wouldn’t disagree with you for a moment. Phew! Sorry for such a long, complicated sentence, but little wonder given the way our world is now tying itself in knots. Yes, just last week, with the election of climate-change denier and (to steal from Orwell) our very own Big Brother Donald Trump as president of the United States (again!), we just paved the way for an instant all-American nightmare. Still, even without him, the world was anything but peachy keen.

As a matter of fact, we live in a country on the brink of who knows what, on a planet on the brink of… well, yes, who has any idea anymore? One thing, however, is obvious (even if not to The Donald, who plans to “drill, baby, drill” on day one back in the White House): it’s getting hotter by the year (after year after year) in every sense imaginable, as heat records are broken, week by week, month by month around the world. After all, 2024 is expected to be the hottest year in human history, beating out 2023 for that record, and yet, all too sadly, it’s not likely to hold that record for more than a year. As Kristina Dahl, a climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, pointed out recently: “The latest scientific data shows a devastating scientific duality: not only is 2024 slated to be the hottest year on record to date, but it could also be one of the coolest years we’ll see in the decades ahead.”

Yikes!

War, War, and More War

Just consider that, so many thousands of years after we humans first began making war on each other, we’re on a planet that seems to be going down big-time in ways Orwell couldn’t have imagined. And no matter its state, we just can’t seem to stop ourselves from, or even evidently stop wanting to make war again… and again… and again.

At this point, in fact, at least three thoroughly nightmarish, seemingly never-ending conflicts are being fought (and fought and fought) on this planet of ours. There is, of course, the war in Ukraine that began with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s painful decision in February 2022 to invade that country. More than two and a half years later, with perhaps 200,000 or more deaths and the destruction of significant parts of Ukraine, it seems as if that particular war is in a nightmarish slog of endless devastation leading who knows where or to who knows what end (including, possibly, the first use of nuclear weapons since August 1945, something Orwell was already thinking about in that Cold War essay of his only months after the U.S. nuked the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II).

And oh yes, only recently, a third country, also nuclear-armed like the Russians, and its leader, like Vladimir Putin, also willing to threaten the use of such weaponry, decided to directly enter the fray. I’m thinking, of course, about the neighboring state of North Korea. And don’t be confused by that “neighboring.” After all, that country’s only about 4,500 miles away from Ukraine, but it’s certainly a neighbor of Russia’s, right?

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Whoops, sorry about that! After a glance at a map, I realize that I must have meant a neighbor of China, which is indeed a neighbor of Russia, which is more or less the same thing. Under the circumstances, why shouldn’t North Korean leader Kim Jong-un have sent 8,000 to10,000 of his crack troops to more or less the other side of the planet (or do I mean the universe?) to help an atomic near-neighbor? And I certainly have no right to be critical of such a decision, since in this century my own country has dispatched its military endless thousands of miles away to fight (losing) wars in places like Afghanistan and Iraq.

Of course, whatever my country did, what’s now going on in Ukraine should still be the definition of a nightmare first class, a war without end that only seems to be growing more severe. But perhaps when compared to what’s now taking place in the Middle East, it might have to be seen as a nightmare second class. After all, another nuclear-armed country, Israel, in response to a horrifying terror attack on its citizens by the Palestinian group Hamas on October 7, 2023, has spent more than a year (14 months!) devastating and decimating just about anything left standing, including human beings, in the tiny Gaza Strip. It has by now killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, including staggering numbers of children, destroyed most of the infrastructure there, promoted famine, and well… honestly, that’s just a start, since Vladimir Putin…oh, sorry, my mistake, I meant Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been spreading the war on Gaza in a thoroughly — yes! — devastating way to Lebanon (where, forget the growing numbers of dead, more than 1.2 million Lebanese have been displaced from their homes and turned into refugees in next to no time at all). Meanwhile, he’s been going face to face, or perhaps I mean bomb to bomb and missile to missile — and keep in mind that most of those bombs and missiles come from my own remarkably generous country, since Israel is “the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. military aid since World War II” — with Iran. And who knows where that set of wars may, in fact, go from here (though undoubtedly, nowhere good), or where else in the Middle East the Israelis might still want to expand their military campaigns.

And if all of that isn’t enough for you, or this deeply battered planet of ours, then don’t forget Sudan, where a devastating civil war has been raging for a year and a half, killing untold tens of thousands of Sudanese, displacing eight and a half million more of them from their homes, and causing a brutal famine affecting millions that could destroy an inconceivable number of lives. And like the horrifying conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, that war between two local military factions shows not the slightest sign of ending any time soon.

So, three devastating regional wars on one small planet. If that isn’t distinctly an achievement of sorts for a humanity that continues to arm itself to the teeth, then I’m not sure what is.

Planetary War

And sadly, all three of those wars, which have essentially nothing to do with each other — you seldom see even two of them, no less all three, in the same news coverage — are distracting us remarkably well from what might be considered the real, or at least the most devastating war on Planet Earth. I’m thinking, of course, of the war that, thanks to us, this planet is now waging on — yes! — us.

After all, even where there hasn’t been horrific war-making, all too often there have been other kinds of devastation. Take Spain recently, where in the neighborhood of the city of Valencia, a year’s worth of rain fell in eight hours in a stunning weather event leading to floods that killed hundreds and destroyed much property. Consider that a reminder, amid humanity’s seemingly unending wars (and our unending ability to keep on waging them), that thanks to the greenhouse gases we humans, especially the two great global powers, the United States and China, are still pouring into the atmosphere at — all too sadly — a record pace, this planet is essentially responding by making war on us. (And don’t forget that our wars and the militaries that fight them are another devastating way we humans have discovered to pour yet more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, heating this planet further, and the U.S. military, even when not at war, remains a gigantic emitter of such gases.)

While my country is historically the greatest producer of greenhouse gases ever, in our own moment it’s fallen into second place to China, which (despite its impressive investment in the production of green energy) continues to increase its use of coal, in particular, pouring yet more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in a fashion never before seen on Planet Earth.

It’s not that we haven’t been warned, not just by scientists, but by the weather itself. And you don’t have to be in Spain to notice it. After all, if you live in the southeastern United States, you’re not likely to soon forget the devastation caused by hurricanes Helene and Milton, after they revved up while passing over the record-hot waters of the Gulf of Mexico, before clobbering Florida and the Southeast. And that’s just one example among so many, including for instance the stunning fires that swept across Canada in the summer of 2023 (and again in 2024), sending devastating clouds of smoke south into the United States.

Let’s face it, whether we’re talking about fire, drought, floods, unprecedented storms, or so much else, we increasingly live on a different planet. After all, in 2023, the average global rise in temperature hit 1.48 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times. Worse yet, by July of this year, it had hit the ultimate 1.5 degree mark that the 2015 Paris climate accord set as the level not to be reached by the end of this century 12 (yes, 12!) months in a row. Worse yet, scientists are now talking about a possible devastating rise of 3 degrees or more by century’s end. With that in mind, just imagine what future hurricanes are going to feel like when they sweep across parts of this country.

In short, while we humans have anything but given up our old ways of making war on ourselves, it seems that we’ve found a new way of doing so as well, and if that isn’t dystopian, what is? I suspect that George Orwell would be stunned by the planet we now seem to be on and the climate-denying president Americans just sent back into the White House to create an all-too-literal hell on Earth.

And given all of that, I wonder what this planet could prove to be like in 2084, if we don’t change our habits, whether it comes to making war or burning fossil fuels? Will we still be slaughtering each other on a planet that could be truly experiencing truly devastating weather in ways we may not yet be able to imagine? It’s hard even to dream (as in having a nightmare, of course) of a future in which neither those recent hurricanes, nor the flooding in Spain will seem all that disastrously out of the ordinary, anything but — and that’s assuming none of the nine countries on this planet that have already gone nuclear (or others which may be heading in that direction) decide to atomize the planet instead.

Now, mind you, it’s also possible that (thanks to some miracle) by 2084, we humans will have figured out how to truly green ourselves and this planet, leaving all those greenhouse gases to the history books, along with our endless centuries of increasingly devastating war-making.

But given our past and the recent American election, I wouldn’t count on it.

Honestly, who would have guessed that we humans might prove capable of making Orwell’s 1984 seem like an upbeat fantasy a century later when, whatever wars might then be underway, the planet itself could prove to be a genuine hell on earth?

And here’s the truth of it all: it shouldn’t have to be this way.

Copyright 2024 Tom Engelhardt

[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Yep, it’s me again with the same old, same old. Sigh. And instantly in a far worse world with Donald Trump on his way back to the White House. And there’s no question that I need your help to keep TomDispatch going under increasingly grim global circumstances. Anything you can offer will mean so much to me (and to the writers who continue to produce pieces for this site that you’re unlikely to find elsewhere). Anyway, if the mood strikes you, do visit our donation page and think about what you could do. Tom]

Via Tomdispatch.com

Indeed, it’s as yet unclear whether American voters will decline The Donald, but what is increasingly clear — there can’t be a doubt on the subject — is that he himself is on the decline in a typically wild and mad sort of way. And yet he might indeed still be elected to lead (even if that hardly seems the right word anymore) this country. And what exactly does that tell us about this all-American world of ours?

All too much, I fear. Above all, that it’s increasingly anything but all-American.

Can you believe that only 30-plus years ago, after the Soviet Union collapsed, this country, the very one Donald Trump might once again preside over, was considered (at least in Washington) the “lone superpower” on planet Earth? And in some sense, it actually was. After all, the great European imperial powers were ancient history by then, the Russians in a state of post-Cold War devastation, and Communist China had yet to truly begin its rise. But like all great imperial powers, it should now be far clearer that, in the wake of a seemingly endless series of lost wars abroad, its global “moment” has long been ending. Its ability to command or direct the world now seems largely a thing of the past. There can be little question any more that the (increasingly dis-)United States is an imperial power on the decline.

Make America Grotesque Again?

Don’t misunderstand me. This country remains all too powerful when it comes to its military and nuclear forces. Just check out the latest Pentagon budget or the more than 40,000 American military personnel, battleships, aircraft carriers, jet fighter planes, and who knows what else deployed to a Middle East that Israel is now blowing sky-high. But if you want a measurement of just how far the Lone Superpower has fallen, keep in mind that, once upon a time not so terribly long ago, an Israeli leader like Benjamin Netanyahu would never have dared to pay so little attention to the desires of Washington when it came to his actions in the Middle East. Once upon a time, a figure like Netanyahu couldn’t have ignored the wishes of the top officials of the very country still arming his own in a staggering fashion, while doing whatever he damn well pleased to tear his region to shreds.

Consider him visible evidence that this country is indeed no longer the world’s lone superpower (and not just because of the rise of China either). Yes, the Pentagon budget remains a staggering (and still increasing) affair, but something has certainly changed. Consider it anything but symbolic (though it is that, too) that 81-year-old Joe Biden is by far the oldest president in American history. (Ronald Reagan left office at age 77.) Worse yet, should Donald Trump win re-election this November and last until the end of his term, he would set a new record and leave Biden in the aging dust of history.

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While it no longer even occurs to observers to use a phrase like “lone superpower” when it comes to the United States, it still seems that, in a deeper sense, the reality of this country’s imperial decline has yet to be fully taken in here, even by those who no longer see it as the operative great power on Planet Earth. In truth, it’s not just that it has lost much of its grandeur and influence abroad but that, though this is seldom mentioned in such a context, it’s visibly coming apart at the seams right here at home and that should, of course, be a significant part of any definition of imperial decline. As it happens, such a decline of a major global power will always prove anything but a distant foreign affair.

Even if it’s not normally thought about or written about that way, it is, in fact, happening right here, right now, in these increasingly dis-United States of America in a distinctly up close and personal fashion. At this point, you can, in fact, see evidence of it almost any time you turn on the news. In some sense, it couldn’t be more graphic or literal. After all, former president Donald Trump, once again running for president, is, symbolically speaking, declining before our very eyes as he rants and verbally stumbles in a distinctly declinist fashion, even if to the cheers of striking numbers of his MAGA fans and followers. (By the way, in light of recent history, isn’t it perhaps time to redefine MAGA as Make America Grotesque Again?)

And yes, in these years of imperial decline, Donald Trump has gotten (whether positively or negatively) almost unprecedented attention here at home. Sometimes, in fact, it seems as if he (and he alone) is the news. But here’s the truly strange thing: he, the MAGA movement, and Election 2024 are seldom seen for what (at least in part) they really are. He, that MAGA phenomenon, and the 20 million — yes, 20 million! — military-style AR-15 automatic rifles (the best-selling rifle in America) now in private hands — mainly the mitts of those who are White, male, between the ages of 40 and 65, and have accompanied him into this version of America — actually represent the truest sign of imperial decline imaginable in the place its leaders still like to think of as the greatest on Planet Earth.

Yes, Donald Trump is living, breathing evidence that this country is none too slowly coming apart at the seams. I mean, when in our history could you count on the fact that, if one candidate for president loses the upcoming election, he (and yes, it distinctly is a he) will undoubtedly claim that it’s been stolen from him and that he actually won? And his followers, significant numbers of them armed to the teeth, will agree with him and do who knows what (but nothing good). And of course, were he instead to win, four years later you can count on one thing: in some sense, this country is likely to be politically unrecognizable. If you don’t believe me, just check out the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 to get a sense of the direction that a whole crew of his former officials and other Trumpian types think it should head. In other words, the United States is not just going down as a global power but potentially, in some fashion, beginning to disintegrate domestically as well, even possibly as a democracy. And if that isn’t both the functional and the literal definition of “decline,” what is?

Let me just say that, if I could bring my parents back from the (long) dead and tell them the fantastic story of Donald Trump and how he became president or, for that matter, how the Supreme Court, led by six right-wing (including three Trump-appointed) justices, essentially immunized a significant range of his illegal acts in office by granting him “presumptive immunity” for them, I guarantee you they wouldn’t have believed such a thing possible. Nor would they have believed that a “businessman,” without the slightest political background, who survived multiple (and I do mean multiple) bankruptcies and was best known for hosting a reality (or perhaps irreality) TV show, The Apprentice, for 14 seasons that tested the supposed business skills of its contestants, could become president of the United States.

Trump’s very victory in 2016 should, in other words, have instantly been seen as the functional definition of American imperial decline — a crucial sign of the weakening and potential collapse of this country’s position in the world translated into domestic politics. And an election victory this November could, in the end, mean both the figurative and literal bankruptcy of the American system, while his defeat, in a nation now armed to the teeth, could give chaos a new name in the imperial homeland.

In other words, whether Donald Trump wins or loses Election 2024, this country is in trouble deep and, four years from now, its situation could be almost unimaginable. It could be run by a degenerating 82-year-old madman or, even with Kamala Harris in the White House, a country in an ever more deeply divided and increasingly violent state of mind. It will not be, as it proudly proclaimed itself once upon a distant time, “the leader of the free world,” nor is it likely to be a fully functional global superpower (though what chaos or devastating violence its “fall” could bring the world, including future conflicts with China, remains hard to imagine).

Chill, Baby, Chill?

And let’s not forget that, in some sense, that may be the least of our problems. After all, as we’ve experienced all too recently with hurricanes Helene and Milton, whatever devastation may lie ahead socially and politically for this country, another kind of devastation is fast becoming a distinct (and distinctive) part of everyday life, here and in the world at large. Whether we’re talking about increasingly powerful storms or ever more devastating fires and floods, we’re on a planet that’s heading for trouble in a big-time fashion.

The fact is that we all now live on a different Earth, one that’s clearly going to experience devastating weather of every imaginable sort. Climate change, in other words, is truly our new reality and it’s clear that the devastation has only begun.

As ever more homelands on this planet become ever less livable and ever greater numbers of us begin wandering in search of places to inhabit — yes, Donald, climate change is indeed creating a previously inconceivable world of “illegal immigrants”! — imagine the once greatest power on planet Earth with a president who still insists that global warming is a “hoax.” Imagine a president on this very planet right now who plans, above all else, to “drill, baby, drill” from his first day back in the White House — and that’s in the nation that’s already the world’s record producer of oil and natural gas.

That should, of course, be the definition of creating a dysfunctional country on an increasingly dysfunctional planet, one where the old imperial dreams of so many “great powers” will have ever less meaning.

Yes, the Middle East is now in ever greater chaos as the Biden administration’s support for Netanyahu only continues, even as he draws even more of the region into disastrous conflict, while hardly bothering to consult with Washington’s top officials. Still, count on one thing: the chaos you see out there now is, in its own eerie fashion, already coming home to roost and if Donald Trump ends up back in the White House, believe me, we’ll need another term entirely than “lone superpower” to describe this country.

Might the planet’s “great stupid power” work?

And mind you, despite the rise of China, it still remains an open question, whether there can be another lone superpower of any sort or even a truly great power on a planet all too literally going to hell in a (flaming) handbasket, one whose land surface and ocean temperatures have already hit record levels with far worse to come.

You might almost imagine that climate change had grasped the withering global power of the United States and decided to act accordingly. In some fashion, we now seem to be on a post-imperial planet in which — if only — the best approach would be: chill, baby, chill.

Copyright 2024 Tom Engelhardt

Via Tomdispatch.com

Consider it our bad luck, in fact, that Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita Williams were the two Americans sent to the International Space Station, 250 miles above this planet, for a few days in June and now find themselves stuck there until perhaps next February. If only it had been Donald Trump and J.D. Vance.

If only indeed.

Of course, in some sense, both of them are already in deep space, far beyond where Wilmore and Williams find themselves. And if you don’t believe me, just ask any dog or cat from Springfield, Ohio.

Here’s the truly sad thing, though: if Donald Trump were once again to become president (and Vance his veep), the rest of us would undoubtedly find ourselves spinning somewhere in space with nowhere to go, nowhere to land, and only piles of AR-15s in sight (and all too sadly in use).

In fact, let’s not mince words. Were Donald Trump reelected this November, he would not only be the oldest president ever to take office, but he might represent nothing less than the all-too-literal end of the world, at least as we’ve known it all these centuries, even if in distinctly slow motion. And typically of The Donald, it would happen slowly enough that, at age 78, he wouldn’t be around to pay the full price or even take the full blame for the nightmare to follow.

Think of it this way, if you want: his election would give the phrase “hot-button issue” a genuinely new meaning. (And believe me, I’m already sweating!)

After all, right now, in September 2024, we’re living on a planet that has never, not at any time in human history, been hotter. Our world has, in fact, been setting remarkable heat records, one after another, month after month — August was the 15th straight month to be the hottest of its kind ever — year after year. In fact, 2023 set a global heat record and 2024 has a 95% probability of smashing that record. And the weather of such an overheating planet should already be taking your breath away, even if we’re still early (more or less) in a process that could indeed create nothing less than a genuine hell on Earth.

All the greenhouse gases that have been and are being sent into the planet’s atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels are creating ever more heat, about 90% of which is at present being absorbed by global waters and is already altering our world in stunning ways. Recently, for instance, there has been devastating climate-change-related flooding globally, whether you’re talking about parts of China, Nigeria, or most recently central Europe that suddenly found themselves underwater (while, by the way, Portugal was burning with more than 100 fires). The droughts have similarly been horrific, while the fires — oh, yes, those fires! — have been beyond fierce, including the recent blazes in Southern California and the 1.9 million (yes, 1.9 million!) acres scorched in Oregon’s record summer fire season. And don’t forget those Canadian fires of 2023 and 2024 that set such grim records in a world where “nearly 12 million hectares [of forests] — an area roughly the size of Nicaragua — burned in 2023, topping the previous record by about 24%.”

And the heat? Well, don’t get me started on that. This year, records have been smashed again (and again) across the American West — and significant other parts of the planet.

And let’s face it, even without Donald Trump, the United States, a country that likes to think of itself as the good guy in so many situations, has historically been the worst of bad guys when it comes to what’s now known as climate change (a term, by the way, that’s far too mild and unassuming for the set of distinctly [un]natural phenomena it represents). It’s true that China, while installing significantly more solar and wind power than the rest of the planet combined (no, that is not a typo!), still beats the U.S. right now when it comes to pouring greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, though its emissions may peak soon.

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Thank you, coal, of which China also now uses more than the rest of the planet combined and is still building coal-fired power plants in a striking fashion! Nonetheless, when it comes to filling the atmosphere with greenhouse gasses, this country might be considered top dog (sorry, Springfield!) if you take into account China’s population size and ours. Not exactly something to be proud of even without Donald Trump.

In fact, to be fair to The Donald, while Joe Biden and Kamala Harris did indeed take some significant steps toward greening this country, mainly through the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), during their time in office, the U.S. has remained the leader globally in producing oil and natural gas. In 2023, for the sixth year in a row, it set an all-time global record for oil production and another for natural gas exports. And don’t forget about methane, a truly potent greenhouse gas, where the American record is equally grim.

Still, the man who demanded a billion dollars in campaign contributions from a group of leading oil executives and lobbyists at a dinner at Mar-a-Lago last spring, while promising to reverse Biden administration environmental rules and regulations, has, as Kamala Harris reminded us in their debate, repeatedly dismissed the phenomenon as a “hoax.” Worse yet, it’s obvious that, should he enter the White House again, Trump and his compatriots are planning to let the fossil-fuel companies run wild and wreak havoc. He also plans to do his damnedest to limit the production of electric cars (despite the backing of Elon Musk) — “I will end the electric vehicle mandate on day 1” — and so much else to ensure that we live on what, barring some remarkable surprise in the decades to come, will be a planet from… yes, hell.

Not that Donald Trump has to be worried about that. By the time global warming truly becomes global frying, he (like the author of this piece) will be long gone. If, however, you want an appropriate nickname for him under the circumstances, here’s a possibility to consider: “Satan.” After all, as far as we can tell, he has no hesitation about the idea of taking humanity to hell and back, while he has the time of his life.

And oh yes, that Heritage Foundation plan, Project 2025, that he claims he hasn’t read (and it’s true that, as far as we know, he doesn’t read much, other perhaps than Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf or the collection of that monster’s speeches, which he once reportedly kept near his bed). Still, Project 2025, created by so many people connected to his first term in office, already promises, according to the Guardian‘s Oliver Milman, “a widespread evisceration of environmental protections, allowing for a glut of new oil and gas drilling, the repeal of the IRA and even the elimination of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service so they can be replaced by private companies. The conservative Heritage Foundation, which leads Project 2025, has said a new Trump administration should ‘eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere.’”

The estimate is that if Project 2025’s authors have their way, the result will be an added 2.7 billion tons of carbon emissions by 2030 and 26 billion tons (no, that is not a misprint!) by 2050. A cheery prospect for sure on a planet already heating in a historic (or do I mean post-historic?) fashion.

Here’s a simple fact, though not one you would know if you were only listening to Donald Trump and crew: we’re already living on a wounded planet and, were he reelected, he could help make that wound so much deeper. (By the way, in case you were wondering why there are no section breaks in this piece, as there normally are in all TomDispatch pieces, it’s because the Trumpified version of climate change that we might indeed face, beginning in January 2025, will be a genuinely unbroken horror.)

Yes, it’s true that climate change isn’t the easiest way to destroy this planet in an ultimate fashion. After all, the very country Donald Trump might once again preside over invented atomic weapons, using two of them in August 1945 in a devastating fashion to end World War II. Now, of the nine countries that possess such world-ending weaponry, the U.S. and Russia have the largest nuclear arsenals, with China coming in third. And mind you, that all-American arsenal is already in the process of being “modernized” to the tune of perhaps $1.5 to $2 trillion over the coming decades. And don’t forget that, according to former White House chief of staff John Kelly, The Donald, while president, actually discussed using such weaponry against North Korea (and blaming it on another country). More recently, in relation to the war in Ukraine, he suggested that President Biden could threaten Russia with a nuclear attack and dispatch some of our nuclear submarines to cruise off the Russian coast.

And all of this from a man who, soon after becoming president, pulled this country out of the Paris climate agreement and, when he isn’t simply calling climate change a “hoax,” explains what’s happening and what’s going to happen on this planet in this fashion:

“You know, when I hear these poor fools talking about global warming. They don’t call it that anymore, they call it climate change because you know, some parts of the planet are cooling and warming, and it didn’t work. So they finally got it right, they just call it climate change. They used to call it global warming. You know, years ago they used to call it global cooling. In the 1920s they thought the planet was going to freeze. Now they think the planet’s going to burn up. And we’re still waiting for the 12 years. You know we’re down almost to the end of the 12-year period, you understand that, where these lunatics that know nothing, they weren’t even good students at school, they didn’t even study it, they predict, they said we have 12 years to live. And people didn’t have babies because they said — it’s so crazy. But the problem isn’t the fact that the oceans in 500 years will raise a quarter of an inch, the problem is nuclear weapons. It’s nuclear warming… These poor fools talk about global warming all the time, you know the planet’s going to global warm to a point where the oceans will rise an eighth of an inch in 355 years, you know, they have no idea what’s going to happen. It’s weather.”

As climate-change expert Bill McKibben points out, such classic Trumpian language is “gibberish in the service of something very important and very dangerous: doing all that he can to block the energy transition.”

We’re talking, of course, about the man who generally summarizes his stance on energy and this planet in a simple phrase: “Drill, baby, drill” — sometimes adding “and drill now!” Honestly, you couldn’t be blunter than that, could you, when it comes to the fate of our world?

If Satan were indeed to become president again, you can at least rest assured of one thing. Unlike his first administration, thanks to Project 2025’s planning, this one could be far more effectively organized in a whole range of areas that matter to the rest of us and, all too sadly, climate change would distinctly be one of them.

In fact, consider it beyond strange that, knowing what we do now (or at least what we should know now), anyone would want to vote for a candidate guaranteed to do his and his associates’ damnedest (and that’s distinctly the word to use) to finish Earth off as a reasonable place to exist.

Yes, the wars on this planet — the three of them in Ukraine, Gaza, and Sudan — are an ongoing nightmare of the first order, themselves pouring greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in an unnerving fashion. In fact, from the devastated Ukrainian borderlands to the utterly destroyed 25-mile-long Gaza Strip, we humans regularly seem to have the urge to create a set of hells on Earth. But none of that, short of actual nuclear war, would do what electing a “hot-button” president would.

A Trump victory could, in every sense, put us in a lost universe, floating not just in space but in a space growing hotter by the year.

It would represent a defeat of an almost unbearable sort for humanity on a planet growing ever less comfortable.

Copyright 2024 Tom Engelhardt

These days, however, when I consider that possibility, I find myself smiling, however grimly. After all, how could you truly write fiction in a world — and I’m not just thinking of Donald Trump (though I most distinctly am thinking of him) — that seems ever more fictionalized? How could you write fiction in a country whose former president and presidential candidate used the word “I” 317 times in a single speech or, in another, spun a tale of near death in an almost-helicopter crash in which nothing he mentioned actually happened? He even — all too conveniently — put the wrong “Brown” (Kamala Harris’s pal Willie Brown instead of California governor Jerry Brown) in the copter that didn’t come close to going down with him on board. Oh, wait, maybe there actually was a helicopter with him and another cast of characters entirely that did at least come closer to going down! And just in case you hadn’t noticed, he’s already claiming, in a strikingly repetitive fashion, that Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential campaign and Kamala Harris’s nomination together represent nothing short of a “coup” in the Democratic Party: “This was an overthrow of a president. This was an overthrow… They deposed a president. It was a coup of a president. This was a coup.”

And if that doesn’t tell you something about the state of the country whose leaders, when the Soviet Union disappeared in 1992, hailed the U.S. as the world’s “lone superpower” and acted accordingly, what does? Honestly (speaking of fiction), if I were now able to time-travel back to that moment and tell those leaders that, less than a quarter-century later, this country would elect a president whose only public accomplishment before entering the Oval Office was to host and be the leading character (and I do mean character!) on a TV show called The Apprentice, who would have believed me? If I could now tell them that, having been in the Oval Office once, and making so many of the rest of us his apprentices for four years, he couldn’t stop trying to return, neither they, nor anyone else then alive (including, I suspect, Donald Trump), would have thought it possible. In fact, such a description of American politics would have been off the charts, even for, say, dystopian fiction.

A Distinctly -Topian World

And speaking of -topias, my more-or-less namesake (since my first name is Thomas and my middle name Moore), Sir Thomas More, produced the first Utopia, inventing that very word as the title for his 1516 novel about a fictional island in the then-barely-known or even imagined New World. And almost half a millennium later, while an editor at Pantheon Books I would put out — or more accurately, stumble upon and reintroduce to our strange world — Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1915 utopian masterpiece Herland. Still, if either More or Gilman were alive today, I doubt they would be writing utopian anythings. Even the word “dystopian” might no longer seem strong enough for this grim world of ours. Perhaps what we need for 2024 and beyond, on a planet going down big time (even if in slow motion), is an altogether new word — something like “catastropian”? — that would be H.G. Wells or George Orwell multiplied by 10 (or maybe I mean 100) and not faintly in the same universe with More or Gilman.

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Our world is now, in fact, mega-dystopian in so many ways it’s almost hard to fathom and I’m not just thinking of the nearly 50,000 people believed to have died in Europe alone last year from the megafires, droughts, and devastating heat waves of climate change. Nor am I thinking of the more than 40,000 Palestinians (and still counting) slaughtered in Gaza over the last 10 (yes, 10!) months in a war that never seems to end on — again, if this were fiction you wouldn’t believe it — a strip of land only 25 miles long and 4 to 7 miles wide. And worse yet, it’s painfully clear that, instead of facing our catastrophian future of ever more disastrous planetary overheating, humanity continues to find itself distracted in a distinctly metatopian fashion by all too many other nightmares that show not the slightest sign of ending. (And if, in this paragraph, I made up a word or two to fit this new world of ours, I hope you’ll forgive me.)

Admittedly, the one thing we’re missing to fully transform an already thoroughly dystopian planet (other than the arrival of devastatingly hostile extraterrestrials in UFOs) is an actual world war. Still, three major conflicts continue to roll (rattle or roil?) on this planet of ours, one in Ukraine (and now Russia, too), one in Gaza (that’s increasingly threatening to spread across the Middle East), and one in Sudan, all of them murderous and none of them showing the slightest sign of going away — more or less ever. Each of them accounts for staggering numbers of humans being slaughtered or disappearing in who knows what horrific ways, even as such wars pour yet more devastating greenhouse gases into our atmosphere, helping ensure that this planet continues to become too hot to handle. (And mind you, the U.S. military alone emits more hydrocarbons than whole countries like Portugal or Denmark!)

I mean, tell me all of that doesn’t add up to a truly big-time, if slow-rolling, version of dystopia or possibly worse. In fact, if, once upon a time, you had been able to put all of this into a dystopian novel, I guarantee you that no one would have found it faintly credible (even as an imagined future). Consider, for instance, a significant power in the Middle East (backed financially and militarily, weapon by endless weapon, by the once mightiest nation on Planet Earth) fighting an unending war with almost any imaginable kind of weaponry short of an atomic bomb against a modest-sized guerrilla force on a tiny strip of land holding a population of about 2.1 million people, essentially destroying more or less everything in sight and still not winning. (Put that in a novel and you’d be laughed out of the dystopian living room!)

And that’s just to start describing the grim fantasy world of present-day reality where, more than 500 years later, even the faintest sense of utopia is all too literally missing in action.

Hey, and while you’re at it, imagine Russia’s leader on a planet where the Cold War is ancient history, deciding to invade Ukraine and fight a never-ending, wildly destructive conflict there, year after endless year, while my country (as if it were indeed still in a Cold War world) backed the Ukrainians to the tune of something like $117 billion (yes, billion!), much of it in the form of advanced weaponry, while no one seems even faintly interested in launching negotiations for peace of any sort. (Whew! That was a long sentence!)

A Mad, Mad Planet

In the context of all this, consider Donald Trump’s latest run for the presidency a sign sent from… well, I won’t even try to guess where… that this country, which its leaders not so long ago considered the only power of significance (and then at least the greatest power) on Planet Earth, is going down, down, down all too fast, fast, fast. Now, don’t misconstrue me on this. The U.S. still “invests” more in its military than the next nine countries combined and well over a trillion dollars annually in what it calls “national defense.” And given that, isn’t it strange how few Americans consider it, yes, strange that this country hasn’t won a war of significance since World War II? And that may, in fact, be one reason it’s visibly heading for hell in a handbasket, even if Kamala Harris and Tim Walz do pull out this election.

Of course, if they do, given Donald Trump and the increasingly mega-dystopian nature of the United States, don’t be surprised to see it begin, in its own fashion, to come apart at the [you fill this one in] ___-topian seams. After all, an estimated one of every 20 Americans now owns at least a single AR-15 rifle (which is about as close as you can get to a machine gun without actually having one) and, no surprise here, mass shootings in this country in recent years averaged more than 600 annually.

Now, assuming Donald Trump doesn’t, in fact, win election 2024, just for a moment try to imagine this country next November. It’s a given, of course, that, should he lose, Trump and his crew will denounce that loss as fraudulent and dispute it big time. (He’s already saying the 2024 election will be “rigged” against him.) With that in mind, imagine the “lone superpower” of Planet Earth a mere three decades ago as it now begins to come apart at the seams. And mind you, were he to win the election, assume that he would be almost guaranteed to use the Insurrection Act to dispatch the American military to the streets of Washington, D.C., and other “Democratic” cities to suppress anyone demonstrating against his victory and the Trumptopia to come.

Were Kamala Harris and Tim Walz to win and not be instantly challenged by a country coming apart at the seams, their administration would undoubtedly continue supporting the wars in Gaza and Ukraine (and largely ignoring the one in Sudan). In her convention acceptance speech, in fact, Harris plugged the sort of militarized foreign policy that’s been ours forever and a day. (“I will never hesitate to take whatever action is necessary to defend our forces and our interests against Iran and Iran-backed terrorists.”) Still, she and Walz wouldn’t be set on quite literally heating the planet to the boiling point in the fashion of Donald Trump and his Big Oil buddies. (Though mind you, even without Trump, my country has set absolute global records in recent years for producing oil and exporting natural gas.)

And I haven’t even mentioned that only recently California, ablaze, had its hottest month in recorded history or that the good news on Planet Earth was that, unlike the previous 13 months, July may not — no, not! — have set a new monthly global record for heat, but merely come in a remarkably close second to the worst July (of 2023) in human history. Mind you, the last 10 Julys have been the 10 hottest ever and climate change was barely mentioned at the Democratic convention, while the Trumpublicans continued to attack Harris and other Democrats for their “war on American energy.”

How You-Topian Can We Get?

Fiction? You must be kidding. Don’t even think about creating imaginary worlds on a planet where reality is becoming the biggest fiction of all and our mega-, catastrophic-, dys-, miss-, piss-topian moment could leave anything the human mind might conjure up all too literally in the dust of history.

So, yes, put that novel you’re writing in a drawer. Ours is now a world that indeed does increasingly threaten to leave fiction in the dust and give dystopian a whole new meaning. In short, you and I are living in a reality that looks ever more sadly fictional.

And it’s up to each of us to — think of this, five centuries later, as Thomas More updated, perhaps even as you-topian — do what we can to bring this planet of ours under some kind of control for, if not us, then our poor children and grandchildren.

Copyright 2024 Tom Engelhardt

Tomdispatch.com

Forget all of that, including the racism, the madness, the urge to transform this country into the all-American equivalent of an autocracy. Forget every last bit of it — even if, yes, that’s one hell of a lot to forget! Instead, focus on just one thing: Donald Trump and his crew, including that gem J.D. Vance, who attacked what he called “the Green New Scam” at the Republican convention, are determined to fossil-fuelize our future in a fashion never before seen, not at least under these circumstances.

And unfortunately, Donald Trump is anything but alone. (Do you hear me, Vladimir Putin?) In fact, according to a recent Guardian report, almost one-quarter of this country’s congressional representatives (100 members of the House and 23 senators) deny the very existence of climate change — and be shocked, very shocked, but every last one of them is a Republican! In what now passes for the mainstream, The Donald and his vice-presidential buddy, the very opposite of “cat ladies,” are extreme but all too common examples of the urge to heat this planet to the boiling point or beyond. Admittedly, the competition is fierce. After all, whatever steps President Joe Biden took in relation to climate change — and he did take them and they will make a difference — American oil production and oil and natural gas exports all set staggering new global records during his term in office.

Still, there’s no question about one thing: Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, and crew are determined to fully reject that Green New Scam (as Republicans now love to call it), which means the two of them are intent on making you, me, and everyone else on this planet sweat, sweat, sweat. I say that given the fact that, only recently, humanity experienced the hottest day ever recorded and the very next day set an even more feverish daily global record. And that, mind you, was after 13 straight months each of which (including two Junes) set new heat records for human history (and probably far beyond it), and all of that, in turn (if you don’t mind the longest, hottest sentence imaginable), came after 2023 set a global record as the hottest year ever — and count on this: I’m undoubtedly leaving all sorts of things out.

Yikes, I’m already sweating!

A Green New Scam President?

Given the recent withdrawal of 81-year-old Joe Biden from the presidential race, 78-year-old Donald Trump is now the oldest American presidential candidate ever (yes, ever!), so why should he give a damn about how hot our future could become? Admittedly, there are his kids and grandkids to consider, but it’s not clear that, even when it comes to them (and despite his recent family-ization of the Republican convention), he gives a damn about anyone other than… yes, Donald Trump. Based on the last few years of him, I doubt it. In the most literal sense possible, as far as he’s concerned, he’s always the man of the moment. Any moment. And if the moment isn’t his, then to hell with it and everything else!

And believe me, under the circumstances, I’m not just using “hell” figuratively.

After all, this planet and this country are both growing hotter all too quickly. This was already one hell of a summer in the United States. State after state, city after city simply broiled, while records were regularly set across the globe. (Hey, Las Vegas hit a new city high of 120 degrees Fahrenheit in July and, in breaking local heat records, it was anything but atypical.) After all, June, as I mentioned, was the 13th straight hottest month of its kind ever. And while later in the summer, we might get a slight break from such record-setting temperatures, the future looks all too grim. While you’re at it, consider yourself lucky that you don’t live in someplace like Dubai, where on one recent anything-but-atypical July day the temperature hit 113 and the heat index 144. In fact, the Washington Post now suggests that the Persian Gulf region may be the “most likely to regularly exceed life-threatening heat thresholds during the next 30 to 50 years.”

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Of course, only this summer, Donald Trump held a rally in Phoenix, Arizona, where the temperature hit… go ahead, just for hell of it, take a guess!

Yes, 113 degrees! Eleven of his listeners were treated right there for heat exhaustion on “stretchers hooked to IV bags,” while The Donald continued to “rail against wind turbines and electric vehicles.” And mind you, unlike the acts of the assassin whose bullet hit Trump’s ear at that rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, the former president’s statements in Arizona blasting any efforts to deal with this overheating globe of ours weren’t considered acts of violence.

And I’m not even including Project 2025, a Heritage Foundation greenhouse-gas nightmare of a document prepared for the possible second term of the president who called climate change “a great hoax” and once said sarcastically, “The oceans are going to rise 1/100th of an inch in the next 300 years and it’s going to kill everybody,” while insisting “that windmills cause cancer and that electric cars are ‘bad’ for the environment.” After all, despite the fact that so many of Project 2025’s creators at that “notorious rightwing climate-denying think tank” were former Trumpian officials and J.D. Vance is closely tied to it, the former president has claimed it has absolutely nothing to do with him. Still, here’s the Trumpian essence of it all: he’s always been a fossil-fuelizer of the first order; the oil and gas industry has backed his presidential runs big-time; and he seems desperately eager to do it all (and more) again. As he so classically put the matter during this election campaign: on day one back in the Oval Office, he’s going to act like a “dictator“ and, above all, institute a “drill, baby, drill” regime for the next four years (and undoubtedly beyond). He and his key officials the second time around are going to do their damnedest, in other words, to encourage the long-term, full-scale overheating of this planet.

The plans that he and J.D. Vance have when it comes to fossil fuels should make anyone’s hair stand on end (even someone as bald as me). After all, he’s already promised that, above all else, when he next enters the Oval Office, his main goal will be to “drill, baby, drill.” You can’t be more blunt than that when it comes to encouraging the fossil-fuel companies from whom you recently demanded a fortune in election funding.

And that’s obviously just the beginning. He and his crew have promised to wipe out anything the Biden administration did aimed at dealing with climate change and fossil fuels while nixing any steps taken to support the creation of clean energy. Instead, he would “develop the liquid gold that is right under our feet” and “unleash domestic energy production like never before.” From obliterating wind power projects (“I hate wind“) to promoting oil and natural gas drilling from the Gulf of Mexico to the Alaskan Arctic, there’s no end to what he and his cronies have in mind. He and his “team” may even be ready to systematically dismantle, if not obliterate the Environmental Protection Agency (which, in case you’ve forgotten, was created in 1970 by a Republican president, Richard Nixon, who did little else right). Donald Trump’s next presidency, in other words, will clearly force the U.S. government to literally worship at the foot (or the oil rig) of the fossil-fuel companies.

The Slow-Motion Equivalent of a Nuclear War

To put all of this in some grim perspective, the British outfit Carbon Brief estimated that, by 2030, a Trump presidency would add approximately four billion more tons of greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere than another Biden administration (or, assumedly, one run by Kamala Harris). And all of that means that a country and a world already overheating at a record pace would do so in an even more dramatically grim fashion.

The startling thing is that, on this distinctly overheating planet of ours, a person whose platform is essentially an oil or natural gas-drilling rig should have the faintest chance of being elected president. It’s not all that complicated really. Leaving aside any other issue, voting for Donald Trump in our already rapidly warming world would be — all too literally — a suicidal act.

And keep in mind that, even before Donald Trump returns to the Oval Office a second time (should he win in November), the news daily has gotten ever worse. As a start, we’re talking about a country that, in the Biden years and despite the money that he and his crew began investing in climate-change-mitigating activities, set its sixth consecutive yearly record in 2023 for producing oil (more than any other country on the planet) and another for exporting oil and natural gas, while the giant U.S. oil companies continued to garner record profits.

Of course, climate change is hardly the only danger on planet Earth right now. There’s the potentially explosive set of horrors underway in Gaza and elsewhere in the Middle East that could erupt into something far worse at any moment. (Ominously enough, the U.S. only recently dispatched yet more warships and planes to the region.) And there are other dangers, including the possibility of a future war with China, a potential nuclear face-off with Russia, or even (should Donald Trump lose the election this year), a rise in violence in this country, if not some possible version of a civil war here at home.

But put in proper perspective, climate change should be seen as the slow-motion equivalent of a nuclear war on this planet, one that — not in a day, a week, a month, or a year — but over the decades to come, could make our world ever less livable, ever less ours. While a full-scale nuclear exchange could almost instantly create a “nuclear winter” that might result in up to five billion of us dying of hunger, climate change could devastate this planet in a similarly horrific fashion, just over the (very) long term.

So, consider a vote for Donald Trump a vote for nothing less than destroying the Earth as a livable environment for… well, all of those to come. And given the apocalyptic nature of that, don’t you find it strange that Trump’s climate-change views and his ultimate support for the fossil fuel industry above all else (except himself) haven’t gotten more attention in this election season?

Anyone who lived through the last blistering year should realize that global heat of an unprecedented sort isn’t anywhere near a high point but, given the fossil fuels still pouring into the atmosphere (including staggering amounts of methane, a gas that heats the planet faster than any other), at something closer to a low point. And under the circumstances, Donald (“drill, baby, drill”) Trump should be considered, not figuratively but all too literally, the presidential candidate from… yes, hell. Voting for him would be voting for, in historical (and Christian) terms, the devil and that’s not just an image but potentially an all-too-literal reality.

As president, Donald Trump would undoubtedly prove to be a first-class global heat machine and voting for him would be the slow-motion equivalent of putting an atomic weapon in the Oval Office. Quite a prospect, don’t you think?

Copyright 2024 Tom Engelhardt

Of course, that was another America in another age — and my apologies for using that word in a piece about Donald Trump and Joe Biden! It was one in which it seemed all too natural to have the youngest president ever, John F. Kennedy, who was only 46 years old when he was assassinated. 

That happened in 1963, or relatively early in what was already known as “the American Century.” In fact, that phrase was first used in February 1941, before Joe Biden, Donald Trump, or the author of this piece even landed on Planet Earth. It was the title of an editorial in Life magazine by its owner Henry Luce. “The 20th century is the American Century,” he wrote. With a distinctly imperial image of an all-American future in mind, Luce was urging the country’s dramatic entry onto “the world scene” and, in defense of Great Britain, into what became World War II. He was also convinced that the twentieth century would indeed be “America’s first century as a dominant power in the world.”

In fact, he predicted that, if his country ditched its isolationist stance and made itself a true force by taking control of world affairs, the twentieth century would prove a distinctly all-American one. And as it happened, he wasn’t wrong. After the Nazis were defeated and the U.S. dropped those two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ending World War II, the post-war years, the ones in which Joe, Donald, and I grew up, would become the earliest in… no doubt about it!… the American Century. 

Alone and All-Powerful on Planet Earth

It’s true, of course, that when it came to major powers, despite its dominant position, the United States wasn’t then alone on planet Earth. Hence, the global struggle that came to be known as the Cold War, which all too often edged in a far hotter direction with the Soviet Union (and its ally Communist China, whose troops the U.S. actively fought in the Korean War in the early 1950s). It was also true that, by the late 1950s, when Joe, Donald, and I were “ducking and covering” under our desks in school, either this country or the Soviet Union could have ended everything with their ever-expanding nuclear arsenals.

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Still, in so many ways, the years from 1945 to the moment the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 were indeed all-American ones and generally felt that way in this country.  Yes, Washington ruled the roost from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO). Admittedly, it also had its problems. Despite (as is still true today) pouring far more money into its military than any other country on the planet, from Korea to Vietnam, it proved incapable of winning a major war in Asia. Still, in so many ways, it was indeed a, if not the, globally dominant power. Kids like me or Joe or Donald growing up in such a world did sense that, to use a phrase I once made part of the title of a book of mine, we were distinctly living in a “victory culture.” And you can still sense some version of American triumphalism embedded in both of those now ancient creatures, Joe and The Donald.

After the Soviet Union disintegrated, of course, all of that seemed beyond self-evident and Henry Luce a prophet of the first order.  At that moment, in terms of great powers, this country was alone and evidently all-powerful on Planet Earth. It was, in fact, a time when American officials liked to refer to the United States as the “last,” “lone,” or even “ultimate superpower.” By then, Joe Biden, almost 49 years old, had already been a senator in Washington, D.C., for 18 years and Donald Trump, 45, was the “successful” president of Trump Management (the business his father had started for which he became “the apprentice”) and, while often losing millions of dollars, he was also the owner of the Plaza Hotel in New York City, the Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, and various troubled casinos in Atlantic City.

In 1991, it certainly seemed as if everyone on the planet (Joe and Donald included), whether they cared to or not, had entered nothing less than — yes! — the American Century in a staggeringly impressive fashion. And given the lack of other great powers — China had yet to begin its “rise” — the phrase “the last superpower” hardly seemed an exaggeration or even braggadocio in an American Century that was then a mere 50 years old and (so to speak) in the prime of life.  It was certainly a moment when power brokers in Washington believed that the world had been left lock, stock, and barrel to us, a mood that naturally infected both the still relatively youthful Joe Biden and Donald Trump. 

Misspeaking the American Century

Today, 83 years after that century began, I hardly need suggest that, whatever this planet may be, it’s anything but an all-American one. You might even think that, in old age, the American Century has become the perfect symbolic place for those two ancient men to face off one last time. In fact, it would be hard to get a more striking sense of just how deeply the American Century has aged than by watching those elderly men, born with that century, once again running for president in an American world that distinctly seems on the downhill slope.

That’s why, in some sense, I would consider neither of them a mistake. In their own unnerving and strangely spoken fashion, they both capture an image of an America heading for some national version of senility and, possibly, if Donald Trump wins election 2024, the all-too-literal end of this country’s democracy. If Joe Biden does capture the presidency once again, we’re still likely to find ourselves in a distinctly bump-stocked world in which all too many Americans might disagree in a devastating fashion about who should be considered president.   

I mean, when you think about the American Century now, just imagine two candidates, one of whom can stumble on a radio show (where his backers provided the interviewer with all the questions) and briefly claim that he was “the first Black woman to serve with a Black president,” while the other can insist that Joe Biden’s reelection could lead us into… yes!… “World War II,” while repeatedly calling him “Obama”!

A Deeply Bump-Stocked Defeat Culture

No, I didn’t watch a single show from the 14 seasons of The Apprentice, though I did wander past Trump Tower from time to time. But believe me, in all those years before 2015, I never imagined that someday I might face a world in which Donald Trump (so unlike any politician who’s occupied a position of ultimate authority in this country) could ever hold power beyond compare, the power, in fact, to potentially make 2024 the last real American election. He could indeed provide the final exclamation point on the all-American world I’ve known all these years, whether he wins the presidency or not.  Of course, you can’t just blame The Donald for that.  He was only there (and remains here) because this country was sinking fast.

Today, there can be little question that, whichever old man takes election 2024, we’re watching a great imperial power going down, down, down on a planet that itself may be going down, down, down. And at my age, which falls just between Trump’s and Biden’s, it seems as if I’ve watched it all from the moment of my birth in July 1944.

After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, my father, at age 35, volunteered for the U.S. Air Force and experienced that birthing American Century in person in Burma (where he fought the Japanese), while my mother, a theatrical and political caricaturist, spent many of her wartime nights at New York City’s Stage Door Canteen drawing servicemen like her husband heading off to a war that would indeed lay the groundwork for the American Century. And I’ve continued to watch that century develop all these years, often writing about it as well. And yet, somehow, nothing truly prepared me for this moment of ours. 

Of course, growing up in the 1950s, I didn’t think of the United States as an imperial power.  It was my country, a democracy that (or so I thought once upon a time) generally did good in this difficult world of ours.  And now, whatever you may think of it, it seems to be preparing to go down big time in an ever less all-American world — and even faster if Donald Trump takes the reins of a presidency only recently made potentially far more autocratic by his very own Supreme Court.  (Talk about taking down the American Century!)

Today, it’s hard to imagine that a world ever existed in which this country was the unquestioned “lone superpower.” That now seems like such ancient history, as does the all-American world in which Joe Biden, Donald Trump, and I grew up — a world that, for young people today, would be hard even to imagine.

Imagine this, though: in a mere 30-plus years, we’ve moved from a planet with that triumphant “lone superpower” to one in which it’s becoming ever harder to conceive of a super anything. Instead, this country seems in the process of transforming itself into a heavily over-armed, deeply bump-stocked, wildly divisive culture on a planet that’s threatening to go down in a welter of wars, as well as unprecedented droughts, fires, floods, storms, and heat.

And if the ancient Donald Trump, who was recently almost knocked off by a man on a rooftop in Butler, Pennsylvania, with an AR-15 rifle, is indeed reelected in November 2024, we would undoubtedly also find ourselves in an almost unimaginable version of — yes! — defeat culture. (Maybe that will have to be the title of the book I’ll undoubtedly never write in the wake of turning 80 and heading distinctly downhill myself.)

So, here we are in 2024 with two seemingly confused old men contesting to “lead” the United States into what still passes for the future.  Nothing strange, right?  Not anymore. But all too sad, that’s for sure, given a future in which so many of us are likely to have to “duck and cover” in relation to so much. 

The American Century has been declared over and done with more than once. Still, what might that imperial powerhouse Henry Luce — I grew up with his magazine, LIFE, offering me its vision of an all-American century from the baseball diamond to Hollywood to Washington, D.C., to a planet in this country’s sight lines — have thought about election 2024? What would he have made of those two bumbling old men “running” (a word that, under the circumstances, needs to be put in quotation marks) for president? I suspect his dream of the United States bringing “the triumphal purpose of freedom” to this planet — “It is in this spirit that all of us are called, each to his own measure of capacity, and each in the widest horizon of his vision, to create the first great American Century” — would now seem to him dated beyond words (as dated as those two old men, in fact). 

Welcome, then, to the ancient American Century hobbling along at age 83. 

Copyright 2024 Tom Engelhardt

Via Tomdispatch.com

However, that’s begun to change. As it happens, like so many other New Yorkers, I only recently experienced a June heat dome over my city. Here in Manhattan, where I walk many miles daily for exercise, it was simply brutal. The sort of thing you might expect in a truly bad week in August.

This June, though, it was hot nationally almost beyond imagining. As I began this piece, it was estimated that more than 270 million Americans, 80% of us, were experiencing a heatwave of a potentially unprecedented sort extending over significant parts of the country. There were devastating early wildfires in the Southwest and West (not to speak of the ones burning long-term in Canada). Ruidoso, a small mountain town in New Mexico that my wife, who grew up in El Paso, Texas, once loved, had at least 1,400 of its structures damaged or destroyed by fire and two people killed.

Meanwhile, as I began writing this, the first tropical storm of this overheated season was already forming in the Gulf of Mexico and heading for Texas, not to speak of those record rainstorms that only recently flooded the Ft. Lauderdale and Miami areas in a distinctly unsettling fashion. And then, of course, there was the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s prediction that, given how hot the tropical waters of the Atlantic Ocean had become, this year’s hurricane season could prove to be an all-too-literal hell on Earth. There might possibly be 25 named storms (itself a record prediction). And I was thinking about all of this as I sat at my desk in New York City, stripped to my undershirt in the rising heat of a June day from hell. 

Honestly, it’s not that complicated. In fact, we should give ourselves credit. We humans have certainly proved to be remarkable — or at least remarkably destructive. Yes, we’ve long been that way, but the levels of that destructiveness have, in recent history, grown in a striking fashion. If you feel in a negative enough mood, humanity’s time on this planet can be seen as a history of ever more horrific wars that, in the last century, became global. And, of course, the second of those world wars ended in an historically unprecedented fashion with the destruction of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by a new weapon, the atom bomb, that all too soon proved capable not just of devastating urban areas but of possibly wiping out civilization itself. And that, in a sense, couldn’t be more deeply us. (There are, of course, other histories that could also be written that would be far more encouraging, including a history of literature and of healing, but at least for now let’s leave them aside.)

I mean, give us full credit. In these decades, we’ve discovered — once by the deepest sort of planning and experimentation (think “Trinity,” the code name for the first nuclear test in the desert of Los Alamos, New Mexico, that Robert J. Oppenheimer became so famous for) and then by the inadvertent, if deeply profitable use of fossil fuels — two ways of potentially destroying Earth, at least as a livable place for you-know-who. I’m talking, of course, about the very planet that nurtured humanity for endless millennia.

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Nuclear war between great (or even lesser) powers could, of course, quickly produce an apocalyptic scenario that might kill millions of human beings and create a nuclear winter on planet Earth capable of starving most of the rest of us. Climate change, while potentially no less destructive, offers us that apocalypse in slow motion. And that’s obviously why it’s taken me so long, despite all that I’ve written on the subject, to truly feel it myself in broiling Manhattan.

Death by Heat

Oh, and as I sat there sweating profusely in front of my computer on that overheated day, I was struck by a little cheery news when it comes to doing in the planet. As the Guardian recently reported, nuclear spending actually rose globally by 13% in 2023. How farsighted of us!

Congratulations are certainly in order, don’t you think? And to give credit where it’s due, among the nine nuclear powers on this planet, my own country leads the list in increased spending, pouring more billions of dollars into such weaponry than the next eight nuclear powers combined. And mind you, at this very second, two of the planet’s nine nuclear powers, Russia and Israel, are actually at war. While one, Israel, doesn’t mention its nuclear arsenal, the other has repeatedly threatened to use “tactical” nuclear weapons (some more powerful than the ones that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki) in Ukraine or even assumedly elsewhere in Europe.

A third nuclear power, North Korea, has been implicitly threatening to atomize its southern neighbor and foe. Oh, and just for a little even cheerier news, Russian President Vladimir Putin now needs North Korean weaponry so badly to fight his war in Ukraine that he may be willing to aid Kim Jong-un’s scientists in designing “a warhead that could survive re-entry into the atmosphere and threaten its many adversaries, starting with the United States.” So, at the moment, if anything, the possibilities of future nuclear war seem to be on the rise.

Meanwhile, in this planet’s slow-motion version of Armageddon, while we Americans have been experiencing our own extreme weather events from coast to coast, so have other countries, sometimes in an even more devastating fashion. Take Greece, part of a Europe that experienced extreme heat last summer. Only recently, it’s had an early heatwave that scientists say could “go down in history” (at least until next year!) in which at least five tourists have died. And that, in truth, was nothing, not if you shift your focus to Saudi Arabia. There, during this year’s Hajj religious pilgrimage in which 1.8 million well-robed visitors took part, more than 1,300 pilgrims died of heat exposure as the temperature hit 125 degrees Fahrenheit. Meanwhile, South Asia has been broiling, with temperatures there all too literally going sky high — up to 127 degrees Fahrenheit in India and Pakistan — and resulting in increasing numbers of deaths. In India, only perhaps 12% of the population even has air conditioning (which, in any case, simply puts more fossil fuels into the atmosphere). Scores of people have died there from extreme temperatures, including dozens of poll workers during India’s recent election.

Such extremes are becoming a global phenomenon, as is ever wilder weather. Take, for instance, recent record temperatures and a grim drought across significant parts of northern China along with record flooding in the southern part of that country. And mind you, China has done more than any other nation to switch to non-fossil-fuel-producing renewable forms of energy and yet, in 2023, it was also continuing to build new coal-powered plants at a rate of two per week.

Whether cheaper solar and wind energy, which are indeed growing faster than any energy source ever, will leave oil, coal, and natural gas in a historic ditch remains to be seen. In the meantime, our planet is a growing climate mess, with (let’s not forget) us humans continuing to make war on each other in Ukraine and Gaza, efforts that only pour yet more fossil fuels into the atmosphere.   

A Slow-Motion Conflagration

This is just the start of a process of climate devastation that, barring surprises, is scheduled to grow ever more severe in the years to come. And if you want to look for a moment at causation (as with nuclear spending), rather than the death-dealing results of it all, consider my country. It’s still setting startling records when it comes to the production of fossil fuels. In fact, in 2023, for the sixth year in a row, the United States set a global record for oil production (an average of 12.9 million barrels a day) and it’s also now the largest exporter of natural gas on the planet.

Meanwhile, the major fossil-fuel companies and their CEOs continue to make absolute fortunes. As the CEO of Chevron put it last year: “In 2023, we returned more cash to shareholders and produced more oil and natural gas than any year in the company’s history.” Hooray! And think of all of that as possibly the ultimate form of warfare on planet Earth. Consider it, in fact, a slo-mo version of atomic war, even if no one normally talks about fossil-fuelized war or anything of the sort.

Those mind-boggling American records took place under a president who has at least attempted to curb climate change. And yet, keep in mind that my fellow citizens, sweating across the country right now, could elect a man in 2024 who has sworn to wipe out our modest steps towards a greener future on the very first day he gets back into the Oval Office (and essentially ignored a question about climate change during the debate Thursday without being seriously challenged for doing so). He’s proudly met with just about every fossil fuel CEO in sight, promising to “end a freeze on permits for new liquefied natural gas,” reverse any steps President Biden took to limit fossil-fuel usage, and is even more proudly ready, as he’s bragged more than once, to “drill, baby, drill” from his first day in office. Meanwhile, of course, many of the countries of Europe, which until now have moved more decisively against the use of fossil fuels, just elected all too many far-right representatives to the European Parliament and may do the same thing in state-by-state elections, and so, as in this country, could reverse course on climate change.

Imagine this then: next June, if I’m still writing TomDispatch pieces, it may be without even that undershirt on. (Excuse me for a moment, while I wipe the sweat from my face.)

The future, as they say, is now and, believe me, I feel it. Right now! (And I don’t often use exclamation points.) And yet, in the slow-motion apocalypse that climate change represents, the one that’s already starting to slaughter human beings before it even truly hits its stride, this is clearly just the beginning, perhaps — though we don’t yet know — just the beginning of the beginning.

It saddens me beyond words to imagine the future world my grandchildren might find themselves in. It’s true that we should never underestimate ourselves — and not just when it comes to destruction. The switch to non-fossil-fuel forms of energy is distinctly on the rise and they are indeed becoming ever less expensive to install and use. And you never know — you truly don’t — what else the human brain can come up with. Nor, of course, do we know whether, in the grimmest fashion imaginable, we could end all this slow-motion suffering on planet Earth in a nuclear conflagration.

Given our history, who knows what we could do? And I haven’t even mentioned artificial intelligence, have I? I fear I may simply be too old to take all of this in or the ways in which we humans could still prove destructive beyond compare.

Copyright 2024 Tom Engelhardt

Via Tomdispatch.com

I mean, don’t you think we humans are kinda mad? And worse yet, at some deep level, we simply can’t seem to stop. All too often, we just can’t curb our urge to destroy.

Looking back, the desire to make war and obliterate our “enemies” is a deeply ingrained and repetitive pattern in our history. Each individual example can, of course, be explained (away) in its own fashion, but the overall pattern? Hmmm…

I mean, you can certainly “understand” the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Depending on your politics, you can explain it in terms of the threatening expansion of NATO or of a country run by an autocrat willing to see countless numbers of his people die (no, I’m not even thinking about the tens of thousands of dead Ukrainians) in order to take more territory — whether in parts of Georgia (no, not that Georgia!), Ukraine, or god knows where else — and make himself ever more impressively (or do I mean depressively?) imperial. Phew! That was a long one, but explanations about war-making tend to be that way.

And yes, if you want, you also can undoubtedly explain the ongoing nightmare in Gaza, beginning with Hamas’s horrific October 7th attack on Israel and followed by the outrageous urge of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his disturbingly right-wing compatriots to slaughter the population of that strip of land right down to the smallest child. In some grim fashion, given our history, such acts seem all too sadly human.

You could also undoubtedly offer explanations for the endless — yes, that’s a reasonable word to use here! — not to speak of disastrous wars my own country has stomped into since World War II ended, first as the leader of the “free world” and then as the leader of who knows what. Those conflicts ranged from Korea in the 1950s and Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia in the 1960s and 1970s to Afghanistan and Iraq, among other places, in this century. And undoubtedly it’s even possible to explain (away) the nightmarish civil war still devastating Sudan that’s already displaced more than eight million people without being noticed by much of the rest of the world.

Something New in the Planetary Bloodstream

In a sense, war is human history. It’s been the rare moment when we’ve proven capable of not making war on ourselves somewhere on this planet. It seems to be in the bloodstream, so to speak (as in the endless streams, even rivers, of blood eternally being spilled). And in a sense, war, the urge to take someone else’s territory or simply kill endless numbers of… well, us… has certainly been in that very same bloodstream at least since the first great literary work of the Western world, The Iliad, was written. In some sense, you could say that, 3,000 years later, we’re all still in Troy.

Oh, wait, that’s both true and not, because there is indeed something new in the planetary bloodstream. And I’m not even thinking about our endless ability to find ever “better” and more devastating ways to kill one another — from the spear to the AR-15 semi-automatic rifle (reputedly now owned by one of every 20 Americans), the bow and arrow to the AI-driven drone, the hand grenade to atomic weaponry. (And don’t forget that Vladimir Putin is already threatening to use “tactical” nuclear weapons in Ukraine — never mind that some of them are significantly more powerful than the bombs that, in August 1945, obliterated the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.)

No, what I have in mind is that other way we humans have found to potentially devastate our world: the burning of fossil fuels. Yes, it started with the massive consumption of coal during the early stages of the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and it’s simply never ended. (China, in fact, now uses more coal than the rest of the world combined and continues to build coal power plants.) By now, with oil and natural gas added to the mix in staggering quantities, records are being set monthly as ever greater heat waves, increasingly violent storms, startling flooding, and devastating fires are becoming part of our everyday lives. Typical was Miami’s May heat index that recently hit an unheard-of 112 degrees Fahrenheit, 11 degrees higher than at any past date in May ever. That should hardly shock us, however, since, as that superb environmentalist Bill McKibben reports, “A new study out today shows that heat waves have tripled since the 1960s in this country, and that deaths from those hot spells are up 800%.” And, of course, far worse is predicted for the decades to come, as those burning fossil fuels continue to pour greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at record rates.

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Forget what we officially call wars (anything but easy to do these days if you happen to be Gazan, Sudanese, or Ukrainian) and consider this the increasingly devastating new way we have of warring on ourselves and our planet. While there’s still a lot to learn about global warming, also known as climate change (terms far too mild for what’s actually happening), we already know far too much not to consider it the ultimate danger — other than nuclear war, of course. In fact, the difference between nuclear war and global warming could be that, since August 1945 (except for nuclear tests), such weaponry has never been used again, while the distinctly apocalyptic “weaponry” of climate change is still ratcheting up in a staggering fashion.

Image by Patou Ricard from Pixabay

A War Against the World as We’ve Known It

Climate change is certainly something Americans should know about. After all, only the other week, Donald (“drill, baby, drill“) Trump sat down with a group of fossil-fuel CEOs and reportedly suggested that, for a billion dollars in campaign financing, a bribe of the first order, he would toss out all of Joe Biden’s attempts to rein in the oil, natural gas, and coal industries and encourage them instead to make further fortunes by turning this planet into a cinder. (In truth, that wasn’t really much of an offer, since he had already made it clear that he was planning to do just that anyway, starting on “day one” of his next term in office.)

Of course, who needs Donald Trump when, as the New York Times reported recently, despite President Biden’s distinct attempts to limit the use of fossil fuels during his tenure in the White House, “oil and gas production have set records under the Biden administration and the United States is the world’s leading exporter of liquefied natural gas. Even with the [administration’s] pause on permits for new [natural gas] export terminals, the United States is still on track to nearly double its export capacity by 2027 because of projects already permitted and under construction.” And mind you, we’re talking about the country that, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, “produced more crude oil than any nation at any time… for the past six years in a row,” reaching — yes, indeed! — a new record in 2023.

And despite all of what I’ve just described, consider it an irony that the only true world war of the moment (think of it, in fact, as a slow-motion World War III) doesn’t normally get enough headlines (though there are, of course, exceptions) or the attention in the mainstream media that the wars in Gaza and Ukraine so regularly have. No matter that last year was the hottest in human history and that each of the last 11 months was the warmest of its kind on record. Still, if you want to follow what’s functionally our only true world war in the mainstream world, there’s one obvious place to go, the British Guardian, which regularly highlights reporting on the subject and even has an online “climate-crisis” section.

Here, for instance, are just a few of the things you could have learned from that paper’s reporting in the last month or so and tell me they shouldn’t have been headline news everywhere. Take the Guardian‘s Oliver Milman recently writing that “the largest ever recorded leap in the amount of carbon dioxide laden in the world’s atmosphere has just occurred… The global average concentration of carbon dioxide in March this year was 4.7 parts per million (or ppm) higher than it was in March last year, which is a record-breaking increase in CO₂ levels over a 12-month period.” Or the staggering heat waves that struck across Asia this spring “causing deaths, water shortages, crop losses and widespread school closures,” as Damian Carrington, that paper’s environment editor, reported. And mind you, such searing temperatures were “made 45 times more likely in India” by the climate crisis.

Do you even remember when not passing 1.5 degrees Centigrade was the goal of the countries that put together the 2015 Paris climate accord? Well, if you don’t, no problem, since, as Carrington also recently reported, thanks to an exclusive Guardian survey, “Hundreds of the world’s leading climate scientists expect global temperatures to rise to at least 2.5C (4.5F) above preindustrial levels this century, blasting past internationally agreed targets and causing catastrophic consequences for humanity and the planet.” And almost half of them expect it to hit 3C! Now, try to imagine that future planet of, well, I’m not sure you can say “ours” anymore, or better yet, check out another recent Carrington piece on the kinds of horrors — and they would be horrors of an unprecedented sort — such scientists now think a 3C world might hold for us.

Oh, and as Milman wrote recently, a new report suggests that “the economic damage wrought by climate change is six times worse than previously thought.” That’s already! And we’ve also already crept close to that 1.5C mark. But let me not go on. You get the idea. And each of those stories should have been a blazing headline across a planet that’s already feeling the heat in every sense imaginable, even if, in our normal reckoning, what’s happening doesn’t yet count as a world war (or at least a war on the world as we’ve known it).

Don’t you find all of that breathtaking (given the nature of heat)? And isn’t it amazing that, despite what it means for our future, it’s so often hardly considered headline-making news?

And mind you, there’s so much we don’t yet even know: Is the fierce tornado season that’s recently stretched from Texas through Iowa and beyond another climate-change-induced phenomenon? It’s certainly possible. Will the coming hurricane season set a series of records from hell, as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is now warning us, thanks in part to the fact that the tropical waters of the Atlantic Ocean have heated to all-time-record levels? Again, we’ll have to wait (but not for long) to see what happens. And is that record rise in U.S. billion-dollar — yes, billion-dollar! — weather disasters recorded by NOAA in 2023, another climate-change-induced horror? It certainly seems likely.

We are, in other words, already in a mad new world of “war” (as well as the mad old version of the same). And given how possible it is that Donald Trump will become President Fossil Fuel again, we may be left to face an all too literally mad future (along with staggering new profits for the big fossil-fuel companies) in what, until recently, still passed, despite endless disastrous wars, for the greatest power on the face of the Earth. And in retrospect, in climate terms, I suspect that even Joe Biden will seem distinctly lacking and congressional Republicans mad beyond words.

Take, for instance, President Biden’s actions in relation to this planet’s other greenhouse-gas burning monster, China. (While the U.S. has historically been the greatest greenhouse gas emitter, China now tops the list.) Unlike Donald Trump, Joe Biden does indeed take climate change seriously, but he’s also supported Israel in a war from hell that’s throwing vast amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and, when it comes to China, his urge hasn’t truly been to cooperate. Instead, his focus has been on expanding the U.S. military presence throughout Asia, including putting Green Berets on an island just 10 kilometers off China’s coast. (Imagine how this country would react if — and it would hardly be comparable — China were to assign its version of special forces troops to Cuba!)  In other words, he’s been at work creating the conditions for a new, if not hot, then certainly all-too-warm war between the two greatest greenhouse-gas polluters on this ever-warming planet. 

Brilliant! And the Chinese response? To pal it up with Vladimir Putin! (Equally brilliant!)

As mid-2024 approaches, the question remains: Can we humans stop making war on each other or preparing for yet more of the same and begin dealing with a planet heading to hell in a proverbial handbasket? Can we face the fact that the enemy is indeed us?

Copyright 2024 Tom Engelhardt

Via Tomdispatch.com