Imagine yourself in space, looking down on our world and yet unable to return any time soon.
Consider it our bad luck, in fact, that Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita Williams were the two Americans sent to the International Space Station, 250 miles above this planet, for a few days in June and now find themselves stuck there until perhaps next February. If only it had been Donald Trump and J.D. Vance.
If only indeed.
Of course, in some sense, both of them are already in deep space, far beyond where Wilmore and Williams find themselves. And if you don’t believe me, just ask any dog or cat from Springfield, Ohio.
Here’s the truly sad thing, though: if Donald Trump were once again to become president (and Vance his veep), the rest of us would undoubtedly find ourselves spinning somewhere in space with nowhere to go, nowhere to land, and only piles of AR-15s in sight (and all too sadly in use).
In fact, let’s not mince words. Were Donald Trump reelected this November, he would not only be the oldest president ever to take office, but he might represent nothing less than the all-too-literal end of the world, at least as we’ve known it all these centuries, even if in distinctly slow motion. And typically of The Donald, it would happen slowly enough that, at age 78, he wouldn’t be around to pay the full price or even take the full blame for the nightmare to follow.
Think of it this way, if you want: His election would give the phrase “hot-button issue” a genuinely new meaning. (And believe me, I’m already sweating!)
After all, right now, in September 2024, we’re living on a planet that has never, not at any time in human history, been hotter. Our world has, in fact, been setting remarkable heat records, one after another, month after month — August was the 15th straight month to be the hottest of its kind ever — year after year. In fact, 2023 seta global heat record and 2024 has a 95% probability of smashing that record. And the weather of such an overheating planet should already be taking your breath away, even if we’re still early (more or less) in a process that could indeed create nothing less than a genuine hell on Earth.
All the greenhouse gases that have been and are being sent into the planet’s atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels are creating ever more heat, about 90% of which is at present being absorbed by global waters and is already altering our world in stunning ways. Recently, for instance, there has been devastating climate-change-related flooding globally, whether you’re talking about parts of China, Nigeria, or most recently central Europe that suddenly found themselves underwater (while, by the way, Portugal was burning with more than 100 fires). The droughts have similarly been horrific, while the fires — oh, yes, those fires! — have been beyond fierce, including the recent blazes in Southern California and the 1.9 million (yes, 1.9 million!) acres scorched in Oregon’s record summer fire season. And don’t forget those Canadian fires of 2023 and 2024 that set such grim records in a world where “nearly 12 million hectares [of forests] — an area roughly the size of Nicaragua — burned in 2023, topping the previous record by about 24%.”
And the heat? Well, don’t get me started on that. This year, records have been smashed again (and again) across the American West — and significant other parts of the planet.
And let’s face it, even without Donald Trump, the United States, a country that likes to think of itself as the good guy in so many situations, has historically been the worst of bad guys when it comes to what’s now known as climate change (a term, by the way, that’s far too mild and unassuming for the set of distinctly [un]natural phenomena it represents). It’s true that China, while installing significantly more solar and wind power than the rest of the planet combined (no, that is not a typo!), still beats the U.S. right now when it comes to pouring greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, though its emissions may peak soon.
Thank you, coal, of which China also now uses more than the rest of the planet combined and is still building coal-fired power plants in a striking fashion! Nonetheless, when it comes to filling the atmosphere with greenhouse gasses, this country might be considered top dog (sorry, Springfield!) if you take into account China’s population size and ours. Not exactly something to be proud of even without Donald Trump.
In fact, to be fair to The Donald, while Joe Biden and Kamala Harris did indeed take some significant steps toward greening this country, mainly through the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), during their time in office, the U.S. has remained the leader globally in producing oil and natural gas. In 2023, for the sixth year in a row, it set an all-time global record for oil production and another for natural gas exports. And don’t forget about methane, a truly potent greenhouse gas, where the American record is equally grim.
Still, the man who demanded a billion dollars in campaign contributions from a group of leading oil executives and lobbyists at a dinner at Mar-a-Lago last spring, while promising to reverse Biden administration environmental rules and regulations, has, as Kamala Harris reminded us in their debate, repeatedly dismissed the phenomenon as a “hoax.” Worse yet, it’s obvious that, should he enter the White House again, Trump and his compatriots are planning to let the fossil-fuel companies run wild and wreak havoc. He also plans to do his damnedest to limit the production of electric cars (despite the backing of Elon Musk) — “I will end the electric vehicle mandate on day 1” — and so much else to ensure that we live on what, barring some remarkable surprise in the decades to come, will be a planet from… yes, hell.
Not that Donald Trump has to be worried about that. By the time global warming truly becomes global frying, he (like the author of this piece) will be long gone. If, however, you want an appropriate nickname for him under the circumstances, here’s a possibility to consider: “Satan.” After all, as far as we can tell, he has no hesitation about the idea of taking humanity to hell and back, while he has the time of his life.
And oh yes, that Heritage Foundation plan, Project 2025, that he claims he hasn’t read (and it’s true that, as far as we know, he doesn’t read much, other perhaps than Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf or the collection of that monster’s speeches, which he once reportedly kept near his bed). Still, Project 2025, created by so many people connected to his first term in office, already promises, according to the Guardian‘s Oliver Milman, “a widespread evisceration of environmental protections, allowing for a glut of new oil and gas drilling, the repeal of the IRA and even the elimination of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service so they can be replaced by private companies. The conservative Heritage Foundation, which leads Project 2025, has said a new Trump administration should ‘eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere.’”
The estimate is that if Project 2025’s authors have their way, the result will be an added 2.7 billion tons of carbon emissions by 2030 and 26 billion tons (no, that is not a misprint!) by 2050. A cheery prospect for sure on a planet already heating in a historic (or do I mean post-historic?) fashion.
Here’s a simple fact, though not one you would know if you were only listening to Donald Trump and crew: we’re already living on a wounded planet and, were he reelected, he could help make that wound so much deeper. (By the way, in case you were wondering why there are no section breaks in this piece, as there normally are in all TomDispatch pieces, it’s because the Trumpified version of climate change that we might indeed face, beginning in January 2025, will be a genuinely unbroken horror.)
Yes, it’s true that climate change isn’t the easiest way to destroy this planet in an ultimate fashion. After all, the very country Donald Trump might once again preside over invented atomic weapons, using two of them in August 1945 in a devastating fashion to end World War II. Now, of the nine countries that possess such world-ending weaponry, the U.S. and Russia have the largest nuclear arsenals, with China coming in third. And mind you, that all-American arsenal is already in the process of being “modernized” to the tune of perhaps $1.5 to $2 trillion over the coming decades. And don’t forget that, according to former White House chief of staff John Kelly, The Donald, while president, actually discussed using such weaponry against North Korea (and blaming it on another country). More recently, in relation to the war in Ukraine, he suggested that President Biden could threaten Russia with a nuclear attack and dispatch some of our nuclear submarines to cruise off the Russian coast.
And all of this from a man who, soon after becoming president, pulled this country out of the Paris climate agreement and, when he isn’t simply calling climate change a “hoax,” explains what’s happening and what’s going to happen on this planet in this fashion:
“You know, when I hear these poor fools talking about global warming. They don’t call it that anymore, they call it climate change because you know, some parts of the planet are cooling and warming, and it didn’t work. So they finally got it right, they just call it climate change. They used to call it global warming. You know, years ago they used to call it global cooling. In the 1920s they thought the planet was going to freeze. Now they think the planet’s going to burn up. And we’re still waiting for the 12 years. You know we’re down almost to the end of the 12-year period, you understand that, where these lunatics that know nothing, they weren’t even good students at school, they didn’t even study it, they predict, they said we have 12 years to live. And people didn’t have babies because they said — it’s so crazy. But the problem isn’t the fact that the oceans in 500 years will raise a quarter of an inch, the problem is nuclear weapons. It’s nuclear warming… These poor fools talk about global warming all the time, you know the planet’s going to global warm to a point where the oceans will rise an eighth of an inch in 355 years, you know, they have no idea what’s going to happen. It’s weather.”
As climate-change expert Bill McKibben points out, such classic Trumpian language is “gibberish in the service of something very important and very dangerous: doing all that he can to block the energy transition.”
We’re talking, of course, about the man who generally summarizes his stance on energy and this planet in a simple phrase: “Drill, baby, drill” — sometimes adding “and drill now!” Honestly, you couldn’t be blunter than that, could you, when it comes to the fate of our world?
If Satan were indeed to become president again, you can at least rest assured of one thing. Unlike his first administration, thanks to Project 2025’s planning, this one could be far more effectively organized in a whole range of areas that matter to the rest of us and, all too sadly, climate change would distinctly be one of them.
In fact, consider it beyond strange that, knowing what we do now (or at least what we should know now), anyone would want to vote for a candidate guaranteed to do his and his associates’ damnedest (and that’s distinctly the word to use) to finish Earth off as a reasonable place to exist.
Yes, the wars on this planet — the three of them in Ukraine, Gaza, and Sudan — are an ongoing nightmare of the first order, themselves pouring greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in an unnerving fashion. In fact, from the devastated Ukrainian borderlands to the utterly destroyed 25-mile-long Gaza Strip, we humans regularly seem to have the urge to create a set of hells on Earth. But none of that, short of actual nuclear war, would do what electing a “hot-button” president would.
A Trump victory could, in every sense, put us in a lost universe, floating not just in space but in a space growing hotter by the year.
It would represent a defeat of an almost unbearable sort for humanity on a planet growing ever less comfortable.
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