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The Man of the Moment (And What a Moment It Is!)
Donald Trump is all too literally the candidate from hell and, yes, he’s threatening to take the United States and the world to — no place else! — hell and back. He’s the greatest danger to this planet imaginable. And I’m not even thinking about what else he’d do, were he to win election 2024 and return to the Oval Office, having reassured his religious voters that, should they opt for him this November, they’ll never have to do so again. (“Get out and vote, just this time… You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what? It’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.”)
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.”
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