( Tomdispatch.com ) – Yes, he’s done quite a job so far and, in a way, it couldn’t be simpler to describe. Somehow he’s managed to take the greatest looming threat to humanity and put it (excuse the all-too-appropriate image) on the back burner. I’m thinking, of course, about climate change.
My guess is that you haven’t read much about it recently, despite the fact that a significant part of this country, including the city I live in, set new heat records for June. And Europe followed suit soon after with a heat hell all its own in which, at one point, the temperature in part of Spain hit an all-time record 114.8 degrees Fahrenheit. And oh yes, part of Portugal hit 115.9 degrees as both countries recorded their hottest June ever. Facing that reality, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said (again all too appropriately): “Extreme heat is no longer a rare event — it has become the new normal.” The new normal, indeed! He couldn’t have been more on target!
And why am I not surprised by all this? Well, because whether you’re in the United States or Europe (or so many other places on this planet) these days, if you’ve been paying any attention at all, you’ve noticed that June is indeed the new July, and that, thanks to the ever increasing amounts of greenhouse gases that continue to flow into the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels, heat waves have grown more frequent and more intense. After all, we’re now on a planet where, without a doubt, heat is at an all-time-record high. After all, 2024, was the hottest year in history and the last 10 years, the hottest decade ever known. Worse yet, in the age of Donald Trump, this is clearly just the beginning, not the end (though somewhere down the line, of course, it could indeed prove to be exactly that).
An Ongoing Act of Global Terrorism
While this old man is online constantly reading publications ranging from the Washington Post to the British Guardian, he still reads the paper New York Times. And if that isn’t old-fashioned of me, what is? Can you even believe it? And its first section of news, normally 20-odd pages long, does regularly tell me something about how climate change is (and isn’t) covered in the age of Donald Trump. Let me give you one example: on June 21st, that paper’s superb environmental reporter Somini Sengupta had a piece covering the droughts that, amid the rising heat, are now circling this planet in a major fashion from Brazil to China, the U.S. to Russia. And yes, she indicated clearly in her piece that such droughts, bad as they may always have been from time to time, are becoming significantly worse thanks to the overheating of this planet from fossil fuel use. (As she put it: “Droughts are part of the natural weather cycle but are exacerbated in many parts of the world by the burning of fossil fuels, which is warming the world and exacerbating extreme weather.”)
The next day that piece appeared in the paper newspaper I read — a day when, as always, the front page was filled with Donald Trump — and where was it placed? Yep, on page 24.
And on the very day I happened to be writing this sentence, Trump was the headline figure in, or key to three of the six front-page Times stories, including ones headlined “The Supreme Court’s Term Yields Triumphs for Trump” and “Trump’s Deal with El Salvador Guts MS-13 Fight.” On the other hand, you had to turn to page eight to read “Heat Overcoming Europe Turns Dangerous, and There’s More to Come” in which the eighth and 24th paragraphs quote experts mentioning climate change. I don’t mean to indicate that the Times never puts a climate piece on the front page. It does, but not daily like Donald Trump. Not faintly. He is invariably the page-one story of our present American world, day after day after day. Whatever he may do (or not do), he remains the story of the moment (any moment). And for the man who eternally wants to be the center of attention, consider that, after a fashion, his greatest achievement. Yet, at 79 years old, he, like this almost 81-year-old, will, in due course, leave this country and this planet behind forever. But the climate mess he’s now helping intensify in such a significant way won’t leave with him. Not for a second. Not in any foreseeable future.
In short, despite everything else he’s doing in and to this world of ours, there’s nothing more devastating (not even his bombing of Iran) than his urge to ignore anything associated with climate change, while putting fossil fuels back at the very center of our all-American world. Yes, he can no longer simply stop solar and wind power from growing rapidly on this planet of ours, but he can certainly try. And simply refusing to do anything to help is — or at least should be — considered an ongoing act of global terrorism.
And don’t think it’s just that either. For example, Trump administration cuts to the National Weather Service have already ensured that, when truly bad weather hits (and hits and hits), as it’s been doing this year, whether you’re talking about stunning flash-flooding or tornadoes, there will be, as the Guardian‘s Eric Holthaus reports, ever fewer staff members committed to informing and warning Americans about what’s coming or helping them once it’s hit. Meanwhile, cuts to the government’s greenhouse gas monitoring network will ensure that we’ll know less about the effects of climate change in this country.
To put it bluntly, when it comes to climate change, the fact that Donald Trump is distinctly a terrorist first-class should be a daily part of the headlines in our world (though, if he has his way, it may not be “our” world for long). We’re talking about the president who is already doing everything he can to cut back on clean energy and ensure that this country produces more “clean, beautiful” coal, not to speak of oil and natural gas, and so send ever more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Meanwhile, Republicans in the House and Senate, bowing to Trump, have only recently passed a “big, beautiful bill” that would “quickly remove $7,500 consumer tax credits for buying electric cars,” among so many other things, while negating much of what the Biden administration did do in relation to climate change (even as it, too, let the American production of oil rise to record levels).
A Drill, Baby, Drill Presidency
Of course, given a president who once labeled climate change a “Chinese hoax” and “one of the greatest scams of all time,” who could be faintly surprised that his administration seems remarkably intent on sending ever more heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere? And sadly, if that reality, which was all too clear from his first term in office, had been the focus of the news last year, perhaps he wouldn’t have been voted back into the White House by 1.6% more Americans than opted for Kamala Harris who, to give her full (dis)credit, didn’t run a campaign taking out after him in any significant fashion on the issue of climate change and planetary suicide.
So here we are distinctly in Donald Trump’s world and what a world it’s already proving to be. We’re talking, of course, about the fellow who quite literally ran his 2024 presidential campaign on the phrase “drill, baby, drill.” In a sense, he couldn’t have been blunter or, in his own fashion, more honest than that. Still, it pains me even to imagine that, for the next three and a half years, he will indeed be in control of U.S. environmental policy. After all, we’re talking about the guy whose (now wildly ill-named) Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) “plans to repeal limits on greenhouse gas emissions and other airborne pollutants from the nation’s fossil fuel-fired power plants.” Brilliant, right? And the fellow now running the EPA, Lee Zeldin, couldn’t have been more blunt about it: “Rest assured President Trump is the biggest supporter of clean, beautiful coal. EPA is helping pave the way for American energy dominance because energy development underpins economic development, which in turn strengthens national security.”
Clean, beautiful coal. Doesn’t that take the air out of the room? Or perhaps I mean, shouldn’t it? Because, sadly enough, in this Trumpian world of ours, all too few people are paying all that much attention. And yet it’s the slow-motion way that we humans have discovered to destroy this planet and ourselves. Consider it an irony that the administration that wants to deny atomic weaponry to Iran on the grounds that a nuclear war would be a planetary disaster seems perfectly willing to encourage a slow-motion version of the same in the form of climate change. After all, to take but one example, only recently it opened up millions of acres of previously protected Alaskan wilderness to oil drilling.
It’s not that there are no strong articles in the mainstream world about what’s happening. Check out, for instance, this article by Simmone Shah of Time Magazine on the increasing number of heat domes on this planet of ours. Or if you look away from the mainstream and, for instance, check out the work of Mark Hertzgaard at the Nation magazine considering the climate-change costs of war or environmentalist Bill McKibben at his substack writing on how Trump and crew want to create an all too literal hell on Earth, you would certainly have a stronger sense of what’s truly happening on this planet right now.
For a moment, just imagine the reaction in this country and in the media if Donald Trump suddenly started openly talking about actually using atomic weaponry. And yet, in a slow-motion fashion, that’s exactly what his officials and the president himself are doing in relation to climate change and it all continues to be eerily normalized and largely ignored amid the continuing chaos of this Trumpian moment.
Who, for instance, could imagine this headline anywhere in the media: Trump Planning to Destroy Planet. Or perhaps: American President Attempting to Create a Literal Hell on Earth. Or even how about a milder: End of World as We’ve Known It Now Underway. Or… well, you’re undoubtedly just as capable as I am of imagining more such headlines.
Instead, we increasingly live in a world where, while President Trump and his officials essentially try to devastate this planet, a kind of self-censorship on the subject remains in operation and not just in the media, but among all the rest of us, too. We lead our lives largely not imagining that our world is slowly going down the drain — or do I mean up in flames?
And in some grim sense, that reality (or perhaps irreality would be the better term) may prove to be — I was about to write “in retrospect,” but perhaps there will be no “retrospect” — Donald Trump’s greatest “triumph.” He is indeed in the process of doing in, if not us, then our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, and clearly couldn’t give less of a damn about it. (If anything, it leaves him feeling distinctly on top of the world.)
Of all the wars we shouldn’t be fighting on this planet of ours from Ukraine to Gaza, Iran to Sudan, there is indeed one that we all should be fighting, including the president of the United States, and that’s the war against our destruction of this planet (as humanity has known it all these endless thousands of years) in a planetary heat hell.
If only.
Copyright 2025 Tom Engelhardt
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