Some years ago, I found myself making my way up the narrow stairs of a Learjet on a sultry runway in a deserted airport near the South Africa-Mozambique border. The humidity was there to taste – the air thick with it.

The weather radar was showing a fast-developing thundercloud. Our mission was to fly through the most active part of the storm, measure it, fly through again while dumping a bin load of dry ice, turn hard and fly through for a final measurement.

The inside of the Learjet resembled a food blender, so severe was the turbulence. Thousands of meters below, a smaller plane would be threading through the storm downdrafts measuring the rain. It isn’t something you do every day although the saucer-sized hail dents on the wings of the Learjet told of its many prior engagements.

Apart from the fun of flying through the core of a thunderstorm in a Learjet, I didn’t think much about the time I was lucky enough to be part of that project. Until I heard about the recent freak storm in Dubai.

The project I was part of, neatly named Rain (Rain Augmentation in Nelspruit), was a cloud seeding experiment several years in the making. Cloud seeding involves adding tiny particles into a cloud in order to give moisture something to attach to and form droplets. Gradually those droplets merge and become heavy enough to fall as rain. In theory, the “seeeded” clouds will grow more droplets suitable for rain.

No one flight is proof of seeding having been effective. It can’t be. There is no identical cloud with which to compare the outcome of having seeded a particular cloud. It is therefore necessary to fly a lot of missions and to measure, but not seed, half of them thereby creating a data set for the experiment itself (seeded clouds) and the control (unseeded clouds).

Statistical analysis of the results from Rain was rigorous to say the least. After several years of trying, modification of rain rates from some storms was successful, although it would never be possible to prove that any one storm had been changed.

A perfect storm

Early on Tuesday morning, April 16, the chat network of my school class which is replete with global insights after 40 years of dispersion, lit up with reports of unprecedented rain from Brendan in Bahrain and Ant in Dubai. Ant is a pilot and was flying out of Dubai that morning. He duly relayed photographs of his flight over the saturated desert.

Parts of the Arabian Peninsula received 18 months of rainfall in 24 hours that Tuesday. The airport looked more like a harbour. Being the weather-man in the chat group, I looked at the satellite and the forecast model data. What I saw were the ingredients of a perfect storm.

What normally keeps the old deserts, such as those of the Arabian Peninsula, so very dry is persistent and intense sinking of air – the very opposite of what is required for rain. The sinking air is bone dry, having come from the cold, top of the atmosphere, and is compressed and warmed as it descends. It arrives near the surface like a hairdryer.

Below this layer, especially in deserts close to warm oceans, evaporation is plentiful. But that humidity is kept captive by the sinking air above. It is a cauldron with the lid firmly on.

What took that lid off the cauldron on 16 April was a high-altitude jet stream unusually far south. In fact two jet streams, the subtropical jet and the polar jet that had joined forces and left behind a cut-off circulation of imported, cooler air. The sinking air, along with the cauldron lid, was gone.

“Dubai Inundated,” Digital, Dall-E, 2024.

Meanwhile a feed of moisture laden air was accelerating in from the northern tropical Indian Ocean and converging over the desert. Dew point temperatures over the UAE were similar to those normally found in the rainforests of the Congo basin.

Under these conditions, thunderstorms develop very readily and in this case a special kind of storm, a mesoscale convective system, built and sustained itself for many hours. Infrared satellite data showed it to be about the size of France.

Cloud seeding not to blame

The power, intensity and organisation of a storm like this is hard to fathom. What surprised me, though, was not the majesty of nature, but an emerging set of reports blaming the ensuing rains on cloud seeding. One broadsheet even insinuated the University of Reading, a powerhouse of meteorological expertise, was responsible.

It turns out the UAE has been running a cloud seeding project, UAE Research Program for Rain Enhancement Science, for several years. Their approach is to fire hygroscopic (water-attracting) salt flares from aircraft into warm cumuliform clouds. The idea, similar to the Rain project I once worked on, is to promote the growth of cloud droplets and thereby rainfall. Bigger droplets fall out more easily.

So could seeding have built a huge storm system the size of France? Let’s be clear, that would be like a breeze stopping an intercity train going at full tilt. And the seeding flights had not happened that day either. The kind of deep, large-scale clouds formed on April 16 are not the target of the experiment.

The interesting thing is that humans have a hard time coming to terms with the fact that 2,400 gigatonnes of carbon (our total emissions since pre-industrial times) might make a difference to climate, but very readily get behind the idea of a few hygroscopic flares making 18 months worth of rain fall in a day.

Richard Washington, Professor of Climate Science, University of Oxford

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Clean Energy Wire ) – The damaging effects of climate change are set to hit economic growth severely across most countries, said researchers from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK).

With the climate change that is already locked-in through past and “plausible” future emissions, income will be 19 percent lower on average globally over the next 26 years than in a scenario without climate change, they said in an article in Nature.

This corresponds to global annual damages in 2049 of 38 trillion dollars (in 2005 dollars), said the researchers. They also compared these damages to the mitigation costs required to achieve the Paris Climate Agreement goals and said that climate damages are larger than the mitigation costs in 2050 by a factor of approximately six.

Maximilian Kotz et al. wrote,

“Using an empirical approach that provides a robust lower bound on the persistence of impacts on economic growth, we find that the world economy is committed to an income reduction of 19% within the next 26 years independent of future emission choices (relative to a baseline without climate impacts, likely range of 11–29% accounting for physical climate and empirical uncertainty). These damages already outweigh the mitigation costs required to limit global warming to 2 °C by sixfold over this near-term time frame and thereafter diverge strongly dependent on emission choices. Committed damages arise predominantly through changes in average temperature, but accounting for further climatic components raises estimates by approximately 50% and leads to stronger regional heterogeneity.”

The red shows decreases in income, the blue increases, caused by climate change. H/t Nature

Climate advocates and policymakers often emphasise that the cost of inaction on climate change is set to be much larger than the cost of efforts to mitigate the worst effects by introducing ambitious climate policy.

German government representatives have also said that climate mitigation is of the highest priority, because the less intense the impacts of climate change are, the less money needs to be spent adapting to them.

Published under a “ Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY 4.0)”. The text has been augmented by quotes from the original Nature article.

( Tomdispatch.com ) – Last September witnessed what used to be a truly rare weather phenomenon: a Mediterranean hurricane, or “medicane.” Once upon a time, the Mediterranean Sea simply didn’t get hot enough to produce hurricanes more than every few hundred (yes, few hundred!) years. In this case, however, Storm Daniel assaulted Libya with a biblical-style deluge for four straight days. It was enough to overwhelm the al-Bilad and Abu Mansour dams near the city of Derna, built in the 1970s to old cool-earth specifications. The resulting flood destroyed nearly 1,000 buildings, washing thousands of people out to sea, and displaced tens of thousands more.

Saliha Abu Bakr, an attorney, told a harrowing tale of how the waters kept rising in her apartment building before almost reaching the roof and quite literally washing many of its residents away. She clung to a piece of wooden furniture for three hours in the water. “I can swim,” she told a reporter afterward, “but when I tried to save my family, I couldn’t do a thing.” Human-caused climate change, provoked by the way we spew 37 billion metric tons of dangerous carbon dioxide gas into our atmosphere every year, made the Libyan disaster 50 times more likely than it once might have been. And worse yet, for the Middle East, as well as the rest of the world, that nightmare is undoubtedly only the beginning of serial disasters to come (and come and come and come) that will undoubtedly render millions of people homeless or worse.

“Libya Flood,” Digital, Dream / Abstract v. 2, 2024.

Failing Grades

In the race to keep this planet from heating up more than 2.7° Fahrenheit (1.5° Centigrade) above the preindustrial average, the whole world is already getting abominable grades. Beyond that benchmark, scientists fear, the planet’s whole climate system could fall into chaos, severely challenging civilization itself. The Climate Change Performance Index (CCPI), which monitors the implementation of the Paris climate accords, presented its alarming conclusions in a late March report. The CCPI crew was so disheartened by its findings — no country is even close to meeting the goals set in that treaty – that it left the top three slots in its ranking system completely empty.

For the most part, the countries of the Middle East made a distinctly poor showing when it came to the greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels that are already heating the planet so radically. Admittedly, Morocco, with longstanding and ambitious green energy goals, came in ninth, and Egypt, which depends heavily on hydroelectric power and has some solar projects, ranked a modest 22nd. However, some Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates hit rock bottom in the CCPI’s chart. That matters since you undoubtedly won’t be surprised to learn that the region produces perhaps 27% of the world’s petroleum annually and includes five of the 10 largest oil producers on the planet.

Ironically enough, the Middle East is at special risk from climate change. Scientists have found that it’s experiencing twice the rate of heating as the global average and, in the near future, they warn that it will suffer, as a recent study from the Carnegie Institute for International Peace put it, from “soaring heat waves, declining precipitation, extended droughts, more intense sandstorms and floods, and rising sea levels.” And yet some of the countries facing the biggest threat from the climate crisis seem all too intent on making it far worse.

Little Sparta

The CCPI index, issued by Germanwatch, the NewClimate Institute, and the Climate Action Network (CAN), ranks countries in their efforts to meet the goals set by the Paris Agreement according to four criteria: their emissions of greenhouse gases, their implementation of renewable energy, their consumption of fossil-fuel energy, and their government’s climate policies. The authors listed the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in 65th place, calling it “one of the lowest-performing countries.” The report then slammed the government of President Mohammed Bin Zayed, saying: “The UAE‘s per capita greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are among the highest in the world, as is its per capita wealth, while its national climate targets are inadequate. The UAE continues to develop and finance new oil and gas fields domestically and abroad.” On the southeast coast of the Arabian Peninsula, the UAE has a population of only about a million citizens (and about eight million guest workers). It is nonetheless a geopolitical energy and greenhouse gas giant of the first order.

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The Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, or ADNOC, headquartered in that country’s capital and helmed by businessman Sultan Ahmed al-Jaber (who is also the country’s minister of industry and advanced technology), has some of the more ambitious plans for expanding petroleum production in the world. ADNOC is, in fact, seeking to increase its oil production from four million to five million barrels a day by 2027, while further developing its crucial al-Nouf oil field, next to which the UAE is building an artificial island to help with its expected future expansion. To be fair, the UAE is behaving little differently from the United States, which ranked only a few spots better at 57. Last October, in fact, American oil production, which continues to be heavily government-subsidized (as does that industry in Europe), actually hit an all-time high.

The UAE is a major proponent of the dubious technique of carbon capture and storage, which has not yet been found to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions significantly or to do so safely and affordably. The magazine Oil Change International points out that the country’s carbon capture efforts at the Emirates Steel Plant probably sequester no more than 17% of the CO2 produced there and that the stored carbon dioxide is then injected into older, non-producing oil fields to help retrieve the last drops of petroleum they hold.

The UAE, which the Pentagon adoringly refers to as “little Sparta” for its aggressive military interventions in places like Yemen and Sudan, brazenly flouts the international scientific consensus on climate action. As ADNOC’s al-Jaber had the cheek to claim last fall: “There is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phase-out of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5C.”

Such outrageous denialism scales almost Trumpian heights in the faux grandeur of its mendacity. At the time, al-Jaber was also, ironically enough, the chairman of the yearly U.N. Conference of Parties (COP) climate summit. Last November 21st, he boldly posed this challenge: “Please help me, show me the roadmap for a phase-out of fossil fuel that will allow for sustainable socioeconomic development, unless you want to take the world back into caves.” (In the world he’s helping to create, of course, even the caves would sooner or later prove too hot to handle.) This year the International Energy Agency decisively answered his epic piece of trolling by reporting that the wealthier nations, particularly the European ones, actually grew their gross national products in 2023 even as they cut CO2 emissions by a stunning 4.5%. In other words, moving away from fossil fuels can make humanity more prosperous and safer from planetary catastrophe rather than turning us into so many beggars.

“Absolutely Not!”

What could be worse than the UAE’s unabashedly pro-fossil fuel energy policy? Well, Iran, heavily wedded to oil and gas, is, at 66, ranked one place lower than that country. Ironically, however, extensive American sanctions on Iran’s petroleum exports may, at long last, be turning that country’s ruling ayatollahs toward creating substantial wind and solar power projects.

But I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that dead last — with an emphasis on “dead” — comes that favorite of Donald (“drill, drill, drill“) Trump, Saudi Arabia, which, at 67, “scores very low in all four CCPI index categories: Energy Use, Climate Policy, Renewable Energy, and GHG Emissions.” Other observers have noted that, since 1990, the kingdom’s carbon dioxide emissions have increased by a compound yearly rate of roughly 4% and, in 2019, that relatively small country was the world’s 10th largest emitter of CO2.

Worse yet, though you wouldn’t know it from the way the leaders of both the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia are acting, the Arabian Peninsula (already both arid and torrid) is anything but immune to the potential disasters produced by climate change. The year 2023 was, in fact, the third hottest on record in Saudi Arabia. (2021 took the all-time hottest mark so far.) The weather is already unbearable there in the summer. On July 18, 2023, the temperature in the kingdom’s Eastern Province, al-Ahsa, reached an almost inconceivable 122.9° F (50.5° C). If, in the future, such temperatures were to be accompanied by a humidity of 50%, some researchers are suggesting that they could prove fatal to humans. According to Professor Lewis Halsey of the University of Roehampton in England and his colleagues, that kind of heat can actually raise the temperature of an individual by 1.8° F. In other words, it would be as if they were running a fever and, worse yet, “people’s metabolic rates also rose by 56%, and their heart rates went up by 64%.”

While the Arabian Peninsula is relatively dry, cities on the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden can at times be humid and muggy, which means that significant increases in temperature could sooner or later render them uninhabitable. Such rising heat even threatens one of Islam’s “five pillars.” This past year the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, known as the Hajj, took place in June, when temperatures sometimes reached 118° F (48° C) in western Saudi Arabia. More than 2,000 pilgrims fell victim to heat stress, a problem guaranteed to worsen radically as the planet heats further.

Despite the threat that climate change poses to the welfare of that country’s inhabitants, the government of King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman is doing less than nothing to address the growing problems. As the CCPI’s authors put it, “Saudi Arabia’s per capita greenhouse gas emissions are rising steadily. Its share of renewable energy in total primary energy supply (TPES) is close to zero.” Meanwhile, at the 2022 U.N. climate summit conference held in Egypt, “Saudi Arabia played a notably unconstructive role in the negotiations. Its delegation included many fossil fuel lobbyists. It also tried to water down the language used in the COP’s umbrella decision.”

At the next meeting in Dubai last fall, COP28, the final document called only for “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner, accelerating action in this critical decade, so as to achieve net zero by 2050 in keeping with the science.” Avoided was the far more relevant phrase “phase down” or “phase out” when it came to fossil fuels and even the far milder “transitioning away” was only included over the strenuous objections of Riyadh, whose energy minister, Prince Abdulaziz Bin Salman, said “absolutely not” to any such language. He added, “And I assure you not a single person — I’m talking about governments — believes in that.” His assertion was, of course, nonsense. In fact, some leaders, like those of Pacific Island nations, consider an immediate abolition of fossil fuels essential to the very survival of their countries.

Abandoning the Logic of Small Steps

Although Saudi Arabia’s leaders sometimes engage in greenwashing, including making periodic announcements about future plans to develop green energy, they have done virtually nothing in that regard, despite the Kingdom’s enormous potential for solar and wind power. Ironically, the biggest Saudi green energy achievement has been abroad, thanks to the ACWA Power firm, a public-private joint venture in the Kingdom. The Moroccan government, the only one in the Middle East to make significant strides in combatting climate change, brought in ACWA as part of a consortium to build its epochal Noor concentrated solar energy complex near the ancient city of Ouarzazate at the edge of the Sahara desert. It has set a goal of getting 52% of its electricity from renewables by 2030. Though critics pointed out that it missed its goal of 42% by 2020, government boosters responded that, by the end of 2022, 37% of Morocco’s electricity already came from renewables and, just in the past year, it jumped to 40%, with a total renewables production of 4.6 gigawatts of energy.

Moreover, Morocco has a plethora of green energy projects in the pipeline, including 20 more hydroelectric installations, 19 wind farms, and 16 solar farms. The solar plants alone are expected to generate 13.5 gigawatts within a few years, tripling the country’s current total green energy output. Two huge wind farms, one retooled with a new generation of large turbines, have already come online in the first quarter of this year. The country’s expansion of green electricity production since it launched its visionary plans in 2009 has not only helped it make major strides toward decarbonization but contributed to the electrification of its countryside, where access to power is now universal. Just in the past two and a half decades, the government has provided 2.1 million households with electricity access. Morocco has few hydrocarbons of its own and local green energy helps the state avoid an enormous drain on its budget.

In contrast to the pernicious nonsense often spewed by Saudi and Emirati officials, the Moroccan king, Mohammed VI, is in no doubt about the severe challenges his poverty-ridden country faces. He told the U.N. COP28 climate conference in early December, “Just as climate change is inexorably increasing, the COPs must, from here on, emerge from the logic of ‘small steps,’ which has characterized them for too long.”

Large steps toward a Middle East (and a world) of low-carbon energy would, of course, be a big improvement. Unfortunately, on a planet they are helping to overheat in a remarkable fashion, the United Arab Emirates, Iran, and Saudi Arabia have largely taken steps — huge ones, in fact — toward ever more carbon dioxide emissions. Worse yet, they’re located in a part of the world where such retrograde policies are tantamount to playing Russian roulette with a fully loaded gun.

Copyright Juan Cole 2024

Via Tomdispatch.com

Song lyrics tell me to be proud to be an American, yet war and profligate preparations for more of the same are omnipresent here. My government spends more on its military than the next 10 countries combined (and most of them are allies). In this century, our leaders have twice warned of an “axis of evil” intent on harming us, whether the fantasy troika of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea cited by President George W. Bush early in 2002 or a new one — China, Russia, and North Korea — in the Indo-Pacific today. Predictably given that sort of threat inflation, this country is now closing in on a trillion dollars a year in “defense spending,” or close to two-thirds of federal discretionary spending, in the name of having a military machine capable of defeating “evil” troikas (as well as combatting global terrorism). A significant part of that huge sum is reserved for producing a new generation of nuclear weapons that will be quite capable of destroying this planet with missiles and warheads to spare.

My country, to be blunt, has long been addicted to war, killing, violence, and massive preparations for more of the same. We need an intervention. We need to confront our addiction. Yet when it comes to war and preparations for future conflicts, our leaders aren’t even close to hitting rock bottom. They remain in remarkable denial and see no reason to change their ways.

To cite two recent examples: Just before Easter weekend this year, President Biden swore he was personally devastated by Palestinian suffering in Gaza. At the same time, his administration insisted that a United Nations Security Council resolution for a ceasefire in Gaza that it allowed to pass was “non-binding” and, perhaps to make that very point, reportedly shipped 1,800 MK84 2,000-pound bombs and 500 MK82 500-pound bombs off to Israel, assumedly to be used in — yes! — Gaza.

The Biden administration refuses to see the slightest contradiction in such a stance. Men like Joe Biden and his chief diplomat Antony Blinken confess to being disturbed, even shocked, by the devastation our bombs deliver. Who knew Israel would use them to kill or wound more than 100,000 Palestinians? Who knew that they’d reduce significant parts of Gaza to rubble? Who knew that a blank check of support for Israel would enable that country to — it’s hard not to use the phrase — offer a final solution to the Gaza question?

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Not to be outdone by the Democrats, Republican Congressman Tim Walberg of Michigan recently cited the examples of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in seeking a “quick” end to the conflict in Gaza (before walking his comments back somewhat). For him, Israel remains America’s greatest ally, whatever its actions, even as he argues that Palestinians in Gaza merit no humanitarian aid from the United States whatsoever.

With that horrifying spectacle — and given the TV news and social media, it truly has been a spectacle! — of genocide in Gaza, America’s leaders have embraced the very worst of Machiavelli, preferring to be feared rather than loved, while putting power first and principle last. Former National Security Adviser and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, recently deceased, rightly vilified for pursuing a Bismarckian Realpolitik, and deeply involved in the devastation of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, might even have blanched at the full-throttled support for war (and weapons sales) now being pursued by this country’s leaders. Dividing the world into armed camps based on fear seems basic to our foreign policy, a reality now echoed in domestic politics as well, as the Democratic blue team and the MAGA Republican red team attack each other as “fascistic” or worse. In this all-American world of ours, all is conflict, all is war.

When asked about such an addiction to war, your average government official will likely claim it’s not our fault. “Freedom isn’t free,” so the bumper sticker says, meaning in practice that this country stands prepared to kill others without mercy to ensure its “way of life,” which also in practice means unbridled consumption by an ever-shrinking portion of Americans and unapologetic profiteering by the richest and greediest of us. Call it the “moderate” bipartisan consensus within the Washington Beltway. Only an “extremist” would dare call for restraint, tolerance, diplomacy, and peace.

A Common Cause to Unify Humanity

Short of an attack on Earth by aliens, it’s hard to imagine the U.S. today making common cause with “enemies” like China, Iran, North Korea, or Russia. What gives? Isn’t there a better way and, if so, how would we get there?

In fact, there is a common foe — or perhaps a common cause — that should unite us all as humans. That cause is Earth, the health of our planet and all the life forms on it. And that foe, to state the obvious (even if it regularly goes unsaid), is war, which is unhealthy in the extreme not just for us but for our planet, too.

War turns people into killers — of our fellow humans, of course, but also of all forms of life within our (often very large) blast radii. In addition, war is a mass distraction from what should truly matter to us: the sacredness of life and the continued viability of our planet and its ecology. Call it a cliché but there’s no way to deny it: there is indeed only one Spaceship Earth. As far as we know now, our planet is the sole body in the universe teeming with life. Of course, the universe is incomprehensibly vast and there could well be other forms of life out there, but we don’t know that, not with certainty anyway.

Imagine, in a dystopic future, America’s “best and brightest” (or the “best and brightest” of another country) acting in a nuclear fury, employing the very weaponry that continues to proliferate but hasn’t been used since the destruction of two Japanese cities on August 6 and 9, 1945, and so crippling Spaceship Earth. Imagine also that our planet is truly the universe’s one magnificent and magical spot of life. Wouldn’t it be hard then to imagine a worse crime, not just against humanity, but life itself cosmically? There would be no recompense, no forgiveness, no redemption — and possibly no recovery either.

Of course, I don’t know if God (or gods) exists. Though I was raised a Catholic, I find myself essentially an agnostic today. Yet I do believe in the sacredness of life in all its diversity. And as tenacious as life may be, given our constant pursuit of war, I fear the worst.

If you’re of a certain age, you may recall when the astronauts on Apollo 8 witnessed earthrise as their spaceship orbited the moon in 1968. The crew read from Genesis, though in truth it could have been from any creation story we humans have ever imagined to account for how we and our world came to be. Specific religions or creeds didn’t truly matter at that moment, nor should they now. What mattered was the sense of awe we felt as we first viewed the Earth from space in its full glory but also all its fragility.

For make no mistake, this planet is fragile. Its ecosystems can be destroyed. Not for nothing did the inventor of the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer, turn to the Hindu scriptures to intone, “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,” when he saw the first atomic device explode and expand into a mushroom cloud during the Trinity test in New Mexico in July 1945.

In the febrile postwar climate of anti-communism that would all too soon follow, America’s leaders would decide that atomic bombs weren’t faintly destructive enough. What they needed were thermonuclear bombs, 1,000 times more destructive, to fight World War III against the “big fat commie rat.” Now nine (9!) nations have nuclear weapons, with more undoubtedly hankering to join the club. So how long before mushroom clouds soar toward the stratosphere again? How long before we experience some version of planetary ecocide via a nuclear exchange and the nuclear winter that could follow it?

Genocide and Ecocide on a Planetary Scale

The genocide happening in Gaza today may foreshadow one possible future for this planet. The world’s lone superpower, its self-styled beacon of freedom, now dismisses U.N. Security Council resolutions to stop the killing as “non-binding.” Meanwhile, Israel, whose founding was a response to a Holocaust inflicted during World War II and whose people collectively said Never Again, is now killing, starving, and displacing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the name of righteous vengeance for Hamas’s October 7th attack.

If the U.S. and Israel can spin mass murder in Palestine as not just defensible, but even positive (“defeating Hamas terrorists”), what hope do we have as a species? Is this the future we have to look forward to, an endless echoing of our murderous past?

I refuse to believe it. It truly should be possible to imagine and work toward something better. Yet, in all honesty, it’s hard to imagine new paths being blazed by such fossilized thinkers as Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

“Don’t trust anyone over thirty” was a telling catchphrase of the 1960s. Now, we’re being told as Americans that we’ll have to place our trust in one of two men almost at or exceeding 80 years of age. Entrusting and empowering political dinosaurs, however, represents an almost surefire path toward future extinction-level events.

Let me turn instead to a 25-year-old who did imagine a better future, even as he protested in the most extreme way imaginable the genocide in Gaza. This February, fellow airman Aaron Bushnell lit himself on fire outside the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. He sacrificed his life in a most public way to challenge us to do something, anything, to stop genocide. America’s “leaders” answered him by ignoring his sacrifice and sending more bombs, thousands of them, to Israel.

Aaron Bushnell did, however, imagine a better world. As he explained last year in a private post:

“I’ve realized that a lot of the difference between me and my less radical friends is that they are less capable of imagining a better world than I am. I follow YouTubers like Andrewism that fill my head with concrete images of free, post-scarcity communities and it makes me so much more prepared to reject things about the current world, because I’ve imagined how things could be and that helps me see how extremely bullshit things are right now.

“What I’m trying to say is, it’s so important to imagine a better world. Let your thoughts run wild with idealistic dreams of what the world should look like and let the pain and anger at how it’s not that way flow through you. Let it free your mind and fuel your rage against the machine.

“It’s not too late for you or anyone. We can have the world of our dreams tomorrow, but we have to be willing to fight today.”

His all-too-public suicide was a fiery cry of despair, but also a plea for a better future, one free of mass murder.

Earlier this week, millions of people across America witnessed a total eclipse of the sun. It’s awe-inspiring, even a bit alarming, to see the sun disappear in the middle of the day. Those watching took comfort in knowing that it would reappear from behind the moon in a matter of seconds or minutes and so gloried in that fleeting moment of preternatural darkness.

But imagine if the moon and sun were somehow to become permanently stuck in place. Imagine that darkness was our future — our only future. Sadly enough, however, it’s not the moon but we humans who can potentially cast the Earth into lasting darkness. Via the nuclear winter that could result from a nuclear conflict on this planet, we could indeed cast a shadow between the sun and life itself, a power of destruction that, tragically, may far exceed our current level of wisdom.

We know from history that it’s far easier to destroy than to create, far easier to kill than to preserve. Yet when countries make genocide or ecocide (from nuclear winter) possible and defensible (as a sign of uncompromising “toughness” and perhaps the defense of “freedom”), you know that their leaders are, in some sense, morally obtuse monsters. And who or what are we if we choose to follow such monsters?

As human populations rise, as vital resources like water, food, and fuel shrink, as this planet grows ever hotter thanks to our intervention and our excesses, we’ll need to cooperate more than ever to ensure our mutual survival. Far too often, however, America’s strategic thinkers dismiss cooperation through diplomacy or otherwise as naïve, unreliable, and impractical. “Competition” through zero-sum games, war, or other hyperviolent urges seems so much more “reasonable,” so much more “human.”

To the victor goes the spoils, so it’s said. But a planet despoiled by thermonuclear war, cast into darkness, ravaged by radiation, disease, and death, would, of course, offer no victory to anyone. Unless we put our efforts into ending war, rather than continuing to war on one another, such conflicts will, sooner or later, undoubtedly put an end to us.

In reality, our worst enemy isn’t some “axis” or other combination of imagined foes from without, it’s within. We remain the world’s most dangerous species, the one capable of wiping out most or all of the rest, not to speak of ourselves, with our folly. So, as Aaron Bushnell wrote, free your mind. Collectively, there must be a better way for all creatures, great and small, on this fragile spaceship of ours.

Copyright 2024 William J. Astore

Via Tomdispatch.com

Soon after the elected, unindicted felons passed their dirty bill, Texas was hit with an unprecedented string of 100° F. days amid one of the state’s worst and longest heat waves, accompanied by severe drought. The state also faces sea level rise along the coasts, storm surges, more powerful hurricanes, flooding, and severe winters caused by the polar vortex exacerbated by climate change. Not to mention that it experienced just last month among the worst and largest wildfires in U.S. history.

While government is powerful and economic incentives can affect economic activities, this pitiful effort to prop up the dying fossil fuel industries appears to resemble most the frenetic to and fro of a chicken that has been beheaded. A lot of energy expended just before a certain demise.

Exhibit A is a new report by the Energy Information Agency that shows how rapidly solar power is overtaking fossil gas in the state.

Wind farms produce the most renewable energy in Texas, but solar is making rapid strides, alongside vastly increased battery storage. Solar power generation in the Lone Star state has already overtaken that in California, which is saying something.

From the winter of ’22-’23 to the past winter, ’23-’24, solar power generation in Texas increased by a whopping 35%. This increased solar power generation allowed the state to use less fossil gas in the middle of the day. Yes, solar is coming on so strong in Texas that it is already displacing fossil gas.

“Solar Hero v. Gas Monster,” by Juan Cole, Digital, Dream/ Dark Fantasy/ IbisPaint, 2024.

Utility-scale solar now generates about a third as much power (32k GWh) as wind (108k GWh) in Texas. For the moment, wind is holding steady and only growing slowly as a power source.

Solar, in contrast, is set to grow by leaps and bounds over the next two years. Texas now has 16 gigawatts of solar power, but in ’24 and ’25 there are plans to add 24 gigawatts of solar net summer capacity to the grid.

Texas ended 2023 with 5.6 gigawatts of battery storage, but there are plans to add 13 gigwatts of battery storage to the electricity grid in the next couple of years.

Julian Spector at Canary Media explains that Texas’ ERCOT incentivizes entrepreneurial renewables:

“Unlike California, Texas does not award specific contracts to ensure sufficient grid capacity; instead, the price spikes from moments of scarce supply are meant to incentivize private developers to build power plants and make money. Developers have found that acquiring land, obtaining permits and connecting to the grid is easier in Texas than in California’s regulatory regime. The payoffs can be huge, both for developers and residents. For developers, rapidly responding batteries are well suited to making money off the sudden swings in ERCOT’s increasingly renewables-inflected markets.”

How delicious that the market and technological innovation are allowing renewables companies to outflank the corporate welfare socialism of Texas’ conservative legislators. Watch the top of the below graph moving left to right. It is showing the future:

Source: US Energy Information Administration

The combination of solar and batteries is important because after midday, solar generation begins declining. Consumers get home from work and put a big strain on the grid from 6 pm to 8 pm, when solar goes offline. Some of this shortfall is taken up by wind farms, since the winds pick up in the evening. But much of it is covered by fossil gas peaker plants, which come online to substitute for the fading solar generation.

But if excess solar power has been stored in batteries, then you can release it back into the grid as the sun sets, instead of turning to the fossil gas peaker plants. Since the latter emit a great deal of carbon dioxide as they come online, the batteries save a lot of CO2.

There are also plans for a further 3 gigawatts of wind generation by the end of 2025.

The long and the short of it is that solar growth is already so great that it is cutting down on the need for fossil gas in the Texas grid during some hours of the day and during the summer. Doubling solar capacity and combining it with a tripling of battery storage will make even greater inroads into fossil gas.

There is no point in getting a 3% loan or a bonus from the state government to build a fossil gas plant if you will nevertheless go bankrupt. Hence there are only plans to add 3 gigawatts of fossil gas capacity to the Texas grid over the next two years, only a fifth of what is planned for solar and only a fourth of what is planned for battery storage. Somebody is being left in the dust.

Just 57 companies and nation states were responsible for generating 80% of the world’s CO₂ emissions from fossil fuels and cement over the last seven years, according to a new report released by the thinktank InfluenceMap. This finding suggests that net zero targets set by the Paris climate change agreement in 2015 are yet to make a significant impact on fossil fuel production.

The report uses the Carbon Majors database, established in 2013 by Richard Heede of the Climate Accountability Institute, to provide fossil fuel production data from 122 of the world’s largest oil, gas, coal and cement producers.

The InfluenceMap report tells a sobering but informative story of the state of production in these high-emitting industries. Cement and fossil fuel production has reached unprecedented levels, with most of the emission growth traceable to a relatively small number of large companies.

The troubling reality is that the lack of progress of these large fossil fuel companies means the world will need to undertake ever more stringent and steep decarbonisation trajectories if countries are to meet the Paris agreement goal of keeping warming well below 2°C.

The Carbon Majors database highlights how critical it is for companies and countries to be held accountable for their lack of progress on emission reductions. Companies need to define exactly how best to align with the Paris goals, and then monitor and track their progress.

To address this need, our team of researchers from the Universities of Queensland, Oxford and Princeton developed a framework that outlines strict science-based requirements for tracking the progress of companies against Paris-aligned pathways.

By applying this framework to the Carbon Majors database in a follow-up study, our team mapped production budgets for 142 fossil fuel companies against several Paris-aligned global scenarios of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

“Surreal Oil Rigs,” Digital, Dall-E, 2024.

We considered the “middle-of-the-road” future scenario whereby business carries on as usual – this is commonly used by investors to evaluate a company’s climate risks. With this scenario, we found that between 2014 and 2020, the coal, oil and gas companies produced 64%, 63% and 70% respectively more than their budgets allow. Further details can be found on the Are You Paris Compliant? website.

Transparency is crucial

Over the seven-year period covered by the InfluenceMap report, nation states and state-owned companies are responsible for most of this growth. It is not yet clear whether such government-run companies will move towards improved reporting against climate standards, but further interventions by governments will clearly be required to meet stated national emission-reduction goals.

Fortunately, more transparency will be available for investor-owned companies. In 2023, a non-profit that aims to standardise global accounting, the International Financial Reporting Standards Foundation, released new climate-related disclosure standards. These should provide investors, politicians and the public with access to more transparent and consistent data, making it much easier for them to accurately judge companies’ climate performance – or lack thereof.

It will be interesting to read the climate reporting of the 57 companies identified by InfluenceMap in coming years. The release of the Carbon Majors data, along with the new climate-related disclosure standards, will hopefully make a huge difference. Companies being more accountable for their emissions should help reduce greenwashing in corporate sustainability reports.

Quantifying fossil fuel and cement production, and associated emissions, is a crucial step. But companies also need to act. Achieving net zero by reducing the emissions of a relatively small number of companies will be much easier than persuading 8 billion people to take collective action on climate.

Such drastic reductions in fossil fuel production must also be matched by investment in abundant and increasingly cheap sources of clean renewable energy. Without these steps, the Paris goals will be unachievable – and that’s very risky for all of us.

Matthew Carl Ives, Senior Researcher in Economics, University of Oxford; Belinda Wade, Industry Professor, School of Business, The University of Queensland, and Saphira Rekker, Senior Lecturer in Sustainable Finance, The University of Queensland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

( Clean Energy Wire ) The year 2023 was the windiest in Germany in more than 15 years, providing excellent conditions for wind electricity generation, said Germany’s National Meteorological Service (DWD).

In 2023, the average wind speed across Germany at a height of 100 metres [yards] – a typical hub height for wind turbines in this country – was just under 6 metres [yards] per second (m/s), DWD said. Wind speeds were significantly higher than the long-term average, particularly in the winter months of January, November and December and reached the highest level since 2007.

Will renewables stop the climate crisis? | DW Documentary Video

Last year was also a good one for solar PV, but not a record year like 2022, DWD added. “From a meteorological perspective, 2023 was a successful year for the use of renewable energies in Germany,” DWD vice president Renate Hagedorn commented.

The expansion of onshore wind power in Germany is picking up again and it appears that a “politically caused” dent in newly installed capacity between 2019 and 2021 has been overcome, industry lobby group BWE said earlier this month.

Preliminary data by energy market research group AG Energiebilanzen (AGEB) showed that onshore wind turbines produced a record 114.2 terawatt hours (TWh) in Germany in 2023, while solar PV produced a record 61.1 TWh.

In January, the DWD had said that 2023 also marked Germany’s hottest year since records began in 1881, warning that the country had to “take intensive action to protect the climate and adapt to the damage caused by extreme weather events.”

Via Clean Energy Wire

Published under a “Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY 4.0)” .

As Newsom said shortly before signing his order on the hood of a bright red electric Ford Mustang Mach-E:

“Our cars shouldn’t make wildfires worse and create more days filled with smoky air. Cars shouldn’t melt glaciers or raise sea levels threatening our cherished beaches and coastlines… This is the next big global industry, and California wants to dominate it. And that’s in detoxifying and decarbonizing our transportation fleets… And so today, California is making a big, bold move in that direction.”

One stereotype about Californians is true: we do drive a lot, which also means we buy a lot of new cars. California is, in fact, the top seller of new vehicles in the U.S., with more than 1.78 million cars and trucks rolling off its lots in 2023. In total, significantly more than 14 million vehicles are registered in the state, nearly the same number as in Florida and Texas combined. So Newsom is undoubtedly right that ridding our roads of combustion engines will significantly reduce the state’s climate toll. After all, California’s transportation sector alone is responsible for more than 40% of its greenhouse gas emissions.

On the surface, Newsom’s executive order appears all too necessary, indeed vital, if the use of fossil fuels is to one day be eliminated and climate change mitigated. California is also home to more than 50 electric vehicle manufacturers, and car companies that don’t get on board will soon find themselves “on the wrong side of history,” as Newsom warned. “And they’ll have to recover economically, not just recover in terms of being able to look their kids and grandkids in the eyes.”

Underpinning the governor’s ambitious goal of an all-electric future is another reality. While we may change the kinds of cars we drive, we won’t change our lifestyles to fit a climate-challenged future. Millions upon millions of new zero-emission vehicles will be required and to create them, we’ll need staggering amounts of resources that are still lodged below the earth’s crust. On average, a single battery in a small electric car today contains eight kilograms (17.5 pounds) of lithium, or “white gold.” To put that in perspective, if Californians continue to purchase vehicles at the same pace as in 2023, the amount of lithium required will exceed 113 million kilograms (249 million pounds) annually going forward.

That’s a mountain of lithium and an awful lot of mining will need to be done to make the governor’s plan a reality. And mind you, those figures are lowball estimates — a Tesla Model S battery needs 62.6 kilograms of lithium, for instance — and they don’t address the additional mining electric vehicles will demand to produce considerable amounts of cobalt (14 kilograms), manganese (20 kilograms), and copper (upwards of 80 kilograms) per car. Newsom is correct: ridding California’s sprawling freeways of gas-guzzlers is a necessity and will also be highly profitable, especially for the extraction industry. Nevertheless, it will come with significant cultural and environmental costs that must be accounted for.

A Lithium Bonanza

It’s a scorching hot afternoon in the middle of August and I’m heading west on State Route 293 through Humboldt County in northern Nevada. I’m just a few miles south of where the Thacker Pass lithium mine operation has broken ground. The terrain, managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), part of the Department of the Interior, is sparse and vast. The sky is cloudless, the soil bone-dry. I pass a coyote scampering through the sagebrush. In the distance, the Montana Mountains rise above the flats, casting a long shadow. While dramatically serene, this landscape, located in the middle of the McDermitt Caldera, along with its almost boundless lithium deposits, holds a hauntingly shameful history.

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On September 12, 1865, American soldiers carried out a massacre of the Numu (Northern Paiute) near Thacker Pass. Natives call the area “Peehee mu’huh,” or “rotten moon,” to honor the victims. As the story goes, Indigenous Numu were being hunted by the 1st Nevada Cavalry and decided to hide out near Thacker Pass. Dozens of them, including women and children, were eventually found and slaughtered.

An article in the September 30, 1865 edition of The Owyhee Avalanche detailed the carnage. “A charge was ordered and each officer and man went for scalps, and fought the scattering devils over several miles of ground for three hours, in which time all were killed that could be found.” In all, 31 bodies were located, but “more must have been kill[ed] and died from their wounds, as a strict search was not made and the extent of the battlefield so great.”

Today, descendants of the massacre victims are still fighting to designate Thacker Pass and the surrounding area as a memorial site in the National Register of Historic Places. By doing so, they hope the bulldozers will be forced to shut off their engines and lithium mining will cease. In 2021, federal judge Miranda Du rejected their plea, noting that the evidence they presented was “too speculative” to stop the company, Lithium Americas, from prospecting there. In the years since then, the protesters have encountered significant setbacks but have refused to quit.

“All the people here on the reservation were not consulted when this mine was approved,” says Dorece Sam, a descendant of Ox Sam, one of only three survivors of the bloody 1865 massacre at Thacker Pass. Along with six others, he’s currently being sued by Lithium Nevada Corp. (a subsidiary of Lithium Americas) for protesting the mine. “Myself as an Ox Sam descendant, it means a lot to me to know and watch… as the grounds become more and more desecrated. It’s hard to see and hard to watch.”

Lithium Americas pitched its plan to the BLM in 2019 and broke ground at Thacker Pass in March 2023. Native tribes and environmental groups have argued in various court proceedings that the BLM rushed its environmental review without properly consulting the tribes in the approval process. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals shot down their best-chance lawsuit in July.

In a previous 2023 ruling, a lower court stated that the BLM had indeed violated federal law by approving the mine since Lithium Americas hadn’t demonstrated its rights to the 1,300 acres it would, in the future, bury in waste rock from its mining. Despite that acknowledgment, presiding Judge Du failed to revoke the company’s permits.

“Our hearts are heavy hearing the decision that Judge Du did not revoke the permits for the Thacker Pass Lithium Mine. Indigenous people’s sacred sites should not be at the expense of the climate crisis the U.S. faces. Destroying Peehee Mu’huh is like cultural genocide,” said the People of Red Mountain, Indigenous Land and Culture protectors, following Du’s decision.

The “Right” to Mine

While the courts ruled in favor of the Bureau of Land Management’s audit, few are disputing that the Thacker project will have a deleterious impact on the region. For one thing, when the mine is up and running, it will need an exorbitant amount of groundwater for its operations. An estimated 1.7 billion gallons sucked from the Quinn River Valley, an already overburdened aquifer, will have to be pumped into the mine annually. Opponents of the project also note that chemicals used in the lithium extraction process could leach into groundwater supplies, polluting nearby creeks, home to the already threatened Lahontan cutthroat trout. The Thacker basin is also a vibrant wildlife corridor for pronghorn antelope, mule deer, and home to the single largest sage-grouse population in Nevada.

In total, the Thacker Pass mine, the largest known lithium deposit in this country, could one day eat up more than 17,000 acres of public lands, more than half the size of San Francisco. It’s set to be the largest lithium mine in the country, churning out as many as 40,000 metric tons annually, enough to power 800,000 electric vehicles. Inevitably, Thacker will make Lithium Americas’ shareholders very rich, bringing them an estimated nearly $4 billion once all the recoverable lithium is extracted. However, that projection, from 2021, was based on the price of lithium when it sold for an average of $12,600 per ton. By 2023, a ton of lithium was selling for around $46,000.

Promising that the mine will power its all-electric-vehicle future, General Motors now holds exclusive rights to the lithium the mine will extract and has invested $650 million in it. President Biden’s Department of Energy is also all in, loaning $2.26 billion to Lithium Americas to jump-start the project.

The Thacker Pass lithium mine is but one of many examples of the way once venerable Native lands have been and continue to be exploited. The 1872 Mining Act and the Dawes Act of 1887 have long permitted the federal government to stake claims to tribal lands without their consent.

“The Mining Law allows United States citizens and firms to explore for minerals and establish rights to federal lands without authorization from any government agency. This provision, known as self-initiation or free access, is the cornerstone of the Mining Law,” reads a report on that law by Lawrence University economics professor David Gerard. “If a site contains a deposit that can be profitably marketed, claimants enjoy the ‘right to mine,’ regardless of any alternative use, potential use, or non-use value of the land.”

The Dawes Act went even further, allowing the federal government to divide tribal lands into smaller parcels that could be sold off to individual buyers, part of a sinister scheme to delegitimize Native sovereignty on lands that had been stolen from them in the first place.

“It served the larger purpose because the larger purpose was twofold: to make us more like white people or destroy us and get large amounts of land out of Native control and into the hands of individual, non-Native citizens,” says Kelli Mosteller, director of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation Cultural Heritage Center. “The Dawes Act solidified once again the distrust that has settled in about dealing with the government. Every time the government comes in and asks for something, there is always that ulterior motive.”

The mine at Thacker Pass, which will end up slicing a gash in the earth a mile wide and 2.3 miles long, is just the latest example of an ugly legacy of ravaging former Native lands for profit.

“Are we still in a situation where the rich get rich and the tribes get poorer because they don’t get a dime off of the mining that happens within their original lands? That’s hard to swallow,” says Arlan Melendez, chair of the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony.

Going Back to California

A significant underground lithium deposit has also been discovered near the south end of  California’s dilapidated and toxic Salton Sea, once a playground for Hollywood’s elite. While it’s not nearly as large as the one at Thacker Pass, estimates put the extractable deposits of lithium at upwards of 18 million metric tons, enough to eventually fill 380 million electric vehicle batteries.

Of course, digging out all that smoldering “white gold” will come at a cost there, too, not just economically but environmentally. What those effects will be, exactly, has yet to be revealed. Even so, Governor Newsom made his way to the Imperial Valley and the Salton Sea, a region he hopes might be transformed into a hub for electric battery production and that he’s smugly branded “Lithium Valley.”

“California is poised to become the world’s largest source of batteries, and it couldn’t come at a more crucial moment in our efforts to move away from fossil fuels,” said Newsom. “The future happens here first — and Lithium Valley is fast-tracking the world’s clean energy future.”

How clean that future will be remains to be seen. Here’s one thing to consider, though: no matter how this all turns out, Newsom’s electrified vision of the future doesn’t mean fewer vehicles on the road or a reduction in America’s energy consumption. The California governor isn’t about to challenge the tenets of global capitalism that, with a significant helping hand from global warming, are already driving us toward the brink of ecological collapse. In all too many ways, at least as now planned, more mining, even of lithium, will mean not a new world but an all-too-grim continuation of the status quo. The key difference is that this time around, it will come with a “green” stamp of approval.

In other words, despite the horrors of climate change, the present approach to fixing it, whether by mining for lithium in the Salton Sea or dredging up the spirits of Thacker Pass, is deeply problematic. As long as every single thing on this planet remains a commodity to be exploited for profit, whether labor or natural resources, humanity will remain in crisis. If we proceed as planned down this violent and bumpy road ahead, we may (or may not) save our imperiled climate, but one thing is certain: our little planet will be left in ruins while the wealthy speed off in their Teslas.

Copyright 2024 Joshua Frank

Via Tomdispatch.com

I’ve lived my whole life in an imperial power. Once, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, it was even “the lone superpower,” the last great power on planet Earth, or so its leaders believed. I then watched how, in a world without great-power dangers, it continued to invest ever more of our tax dollars in our military. A “peace dividend“? Who needed that? And yet, in the decades that followed, by far the most expensive military on planet Earth couldn’t manage to win a single war, no less its Global War on Terror. In fact, in this century, while fighting vain or losing conflicts across significant parts of the planet, it slowly but all too obviously began to go down the tubes, or perhaps I mean (if you don’t mind a few mixed metaphors) come apart at the seams?

And it never seems to end, does it? Imagine that 32 years after the U.S. became the last superpower on Planet Earth, in a devastating kind of political chaos, this country might indeed reelect a man who imagines himself running a future American “dictatorship” — his very word for it! — even if, publicly at least, just for a single day.

And yes, in 2024, as chaos blooms on the American political scene, the world itself continues to be remarkably at war — think of “war,” in fact, as humanity’s middle name — in both Ukraine and Gaza (with offshoots in Lebanon and Yemen). Meanwhile, this country’s now 22-year-old war on terror straggles on in its own devastating fashion, with threats of worse to come in plain sight.

After all, 88 years after two atomic bombs were dropped on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II, nukes seem to be making a comeback (not that they were ever truly gone, of course). Thank you, Kim and Vlad! I’m thinking of how North Korean leader Kim Jong-un implicitly threatened to nuke his nonnuclear southern neighbor recently. But also, far more significantly how, in his own version of a State of the Union address to his people, Russian President Vladimir Putin very publicly threatened to employ nukes from his country’s vast arsenal (assumedly “tactical” ones, some of which are more powerful than the atomic bombs that ended World War II), should any European countries — think France — send their troops into Ukraine.

And don’t forget that, amid all of this, my own country’s military, eternally hiking its “defense” budget, continues to prepare in a big-time fashion for a future war with — yes — China! Of course, that country is, in turn, rushing to upgrade its own nuclear arsenal and the rest of its military machine as well. Only recently, for instance, the U.S. and Japan held joint military maneuvers that, as they openly indicated for the first time, were aimed at preparing for just such a future conflict with China and you can’t get much more obvious than that.

Another World War?

Oh, and when it comes to war, I haven’t even mentioned, for instance, the devastating civil war in Sudan that has nothing to do with any of the major powers. Yes, we humans just can’t seem to stop making war while, to the tune of untold trillions of dollars globally, preparing for ever more of it. And the truly strange thing is this: it seems to matter not at all that the very world on which humanity has done so forever and a day is now itself being unsettled in a devastating way that no military of any sort, armed in any fashion, will ever be able to deal with.

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Let’s admit it: we humans have always had a deep urge to make war. Of course, logically speaking, we shouldn’t continue to do so, and not just for all the obvious reasons but because we’re on a planet that can’t take it anymore. (Yes, making war or simply preparing for it means putting staggering amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and so, quite literally, making war on the planet itself.) But — as both history and the present moment seem to indicate all too decisively — we just can’t stop ourselves.

In the process, while hardly noticing, it seems as if we’ve become ever more intent on conducting a global war on this planet itself. Our weapons in that war — and in their own long-term fashion, they’re likely to prove no less devastating than nuclear arms — have been fossil fuels. I’m thinking, of course, of coal, oil, and natural gas and the greenhouse gases that drilling for them and the use of them emit in staggering quantities even in what passes for peacetime.

In the previous century, of course, there were two devastating “world” wars, World War I and World War II. They were global events that, in total, killed more than a hundred million of us and devastated parts of the planet. But here’s the truly strange thing: while local and regional wars continue in this century in a striking fashion, few consider the way we’re loading the atmosphere with carbon dioxide and methane while, in the process, heating this planet disastrously as a new kind of world war. Think of climate change, in fact, as a kind of slow-motion World War III. After all, it couldn’t be more global or, in the end, more destructive than a world war of the worst sort.

And unlike the present wars in Gaza and Ukraine, which, even thousands of miles away, continue to be headline-making events, the war on this planet normally gets surprisingly little attention in much of the media. In fact, in 2023, a year that set striking global heat records month by month from June to December and was also the hottest year ever recorded, the major TV news programs of ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox actually cut their coverage of global warming significantly, according to Media Matters for America.

“If I Don’t Get Elected, It’s Going to Be a Blood Bath”

I live in New York City which, like much of the rest of the planet, set a heat record for 2023. In addition, the winter we just passed through was a record one for warmth. And I began writing this piece on a set of days in early March when the temperature in my city also hit records in the mid-60s, and when, on March 14th (not April 14th, May 14th, or even June 14th), it clocked 70-plus degrees. I was walking outside that afternoon with my shirtsleeves rolled up, my sweater in my backpack, and my spring jacket tied around my waist, feeling uncomfortably hot in my blue jeans even on the shadier side of the street.

And yes, if, as my wife and I did recently, you were to walk down to the park near where we live, you’d see that the daffodils are already blooming wildly as are other flowers, while the first trees are budding, including a fantastic all-purple one that’s burst out fully, all of this in a fashion that might once have seemed normal sometime in April. And yes, some of what I’m describing is certainly quite beautiful in the short run, but under it lies an increasingly grim reality when it comes to extreme (and extremely hot) weather.

While I was working on this piece, the largest Texas fires ever (yes, ever!), continued to burn, evidently barely contained, with far more than a million acres of that state’s panhandle already fried to a crisp. Oh, and those record-setting Canadian forest fires that scorched tens of millions of acres of that country, while turning distant U.S. cities like New York into smoke hells last June have, it turns out, festered underground all winter as “zombie fires.” And they may burst out again in an even more devastating fashion this spring or summer. In fact, in 2023, from Hawaii to Chile to Europe, there were record wildfires of all sorts on our increasingly over-heated planet. And far worse is yet to come, something you could undoubtedly say as well about more intense flooding, more violent storms, and so on.

We are, in other words, increasingly on a different planet, though you would hardly know it amid the madness of our moment. I mean, imagine this: Russia, whose leader, Vladimir Putin, clearly doesn’t consider climate change a significant issue, is on pace to achieve an oil-drilling record for the second year in a row. China, despite installing far more green power than any other country, has also been using more coal than all other nations combined, and set global records for building new coal-fired power plants.

Meanwhile, the third “great” power on this planet, despite having a president dedicated to doing something about climate change, is still the largest exporter of natural gas around and continues to produce oil at a distinctly record pace.

And don’t forget the five giant fossil-fuel companies, BP, Shell, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and TotalEnergies, which in 2023 produced oil, made profits, and rewarded shareholders at — yes, you guessed it! — a record pace, while the major petrostates of our world are still, according to the Guardian, “planning expansions that would blow the planet’s carbon budget twice over.”

In sum, then, this world of ours only grows more dangerous by the year. And I haven’t even mentioned artificial intelligence, have I? As Michael Klare has written in an analysis for the Arms Control Association, the dangers of AI and other emerging military technologies are likely to “expand into the nuclear realm by running up the escalation ladder or by blurring the distinction between a conventional and nuclear attack.”

In other words, human war-making could become both more inhuman and worse at the same time. Now, add just one more factor into the global equation. America’s European and Asian allies see U.S. leadership, dominant since 1945, experiencing a potentially epoch-ending, terminal failure, as the global Pax Americana (that had all too little to do with “peace”) is crumbling — or do I mean overheating?

What they see, in fact, is two elderly men locked in an ever more destructive, inward-looking electoral knife fight, with one of them warning ominously that “if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a blood bath… for the country.” And if he isn’t victorious, here’s his further prediction: “I don’t think you’re going to have another election, or certainly not an election that’s meaningful.” Of course, were he to be victorious the same could be true, especially since he’s promised from his first day in office to “drill, drill, drill,” which, at this point in our history, is, by definition, to declare war on this planet!

Unfortunately, Donald Trump isn’t alone. All too sadly, we humans clearly have trouble focusing on the world we actually inhabit. We’d prefer to fight wars instead. Consider that the definition not just of imperial decline, but of decline period in the age of climate change.

And yet, it’s barely news.

Copyright 2024 Tom Engelhardt

Via Tomdispatch.com