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Call Him Apocalyptic Don
The Three Ultimates?
Let's face it: Electing Donald Trump was nothing short of a suicidal act.
And that's something we humans seem to have a genuine knack for these days. If you don't believe me, just consider those record-setting burned-out areas around Los Angeles. Admittedly, that was Nature (with a capital N), but given a grim helping hand by You Know Who. You can thank big oil, big coal, and big natural gas for that (and, in the future, add President Donald Trump to that list in a big-time way). Yes, things do turn out to burn far more fiercely on an overheating planet. And they get wetter faster, too (though not in Los Angeles when rain was truly needed). The phrase now is "climate whiplash," and if you think it's fun living under a lashing weather whip, think again.
Mind you, despite what at least some of us now know, the human crew (that's us) is continuing to pour greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in a distinctly record fashion. And as if things weren't bad enough when it comes to ultimate destruction on this planet of ours, just under 50% of the American voting public only recently elected You Know Who again as president to lend a helping hand. In his inaugural address, Donald Trump promised to do just that. As he put it, all too bluntly:
"We will drill, baby, drill. America will be a manufacturing nation once again, and we have something that no other manufacturing nation will ever have: the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on Earth. And we are going to use it. We will bring prices down, fill our strategic reserves up again, right to the top, and export American energy all over the world. We will be a rich nation again. And it is that liquid gold under our feet that will help to do it. With my actions today, we will end the Green New Deal and we will revoke the electric vehicle mandate, saving our auto industry and keeping my sacred pledge to our great American autoworkers."
As he summed it up, "America's decline is over." But the planet's is already deeply underway and he's clearly about to lend it a remarkably helping hand. As a matter of fact, his pick for Energy Secretary, oil executive Chris Wright, has denied that climate change is even linked to greater and more deadly fires on this planet. Of course, to put all this in perspective, even before Donald Trump returned to the White House, the U.S. was already producing more oil and natural gas than any other country now or in history. And that was under a president actually trying to take some steps to mitigate climate change. Well, so long to that!
Mind you, last year, for the first time in recorded history, this planet's annual temperature hit 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average -- and it was also the hottest year ever, beating 2023, the previous record-holder, while every year in the last decade has been record-setting compared to any of the years of the previous decade or, for that matter, the rest of human history. And if that's not an accomplishment (of a grim sort), I don't know what is. Worse yet, given the rising levels of carbon dioxide in this planet's atmosphere, thanks in part to a global fire season from hell, expect more and far grimmer to come (and come and come and come).
"Investing" in Nuclear Devastation
Historically speaking, we humans have had a knack for many things, including exploring and settling just about every inch of this planet, successfully raising vast crops to feed enormous numbers of us, and inventing endless things from the fountain pen and telephone to the car and computer. However, among our many skills, perhaps the greatest when it comes to our future has been our eerie ability to discover ways to do ourselves and this planet, partially, or completely, or at least as we've known it all these endless thousands of years" yes, in.
Of course, human history has been anything but lacking in ways of doing ourselves, or others we've come to loathe, in. Since the clubs of the Stone Age, humans have come up with endlessly more devastating weaponry: the spear, the sword, the rifle, the machine gun, artillery, planes with bombs" you know the litany as well as I do.
And then, as World War II ended, there were those nuclear weapons. I don't have to bore you with a substantive description of them, right? They were, after a fashion, a remarkable wartime invention and, of course, were used twice on August 6th and 9th, 1945, to totally devastate the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Almost 80 years later -- and consider this a distinct accomplishment -- knowing what such weaponry could potentially do, no more of them have ever been used in wartime. Not a single one.
Still, explain it as you will, there are now an estimated 12,000 (no, that is not a misprint) nuclear warheads on Planet Earth, many of them staggeringly more powerful than the bombs that destroyed those two Japanese cities. In the 80 years since Nagasaki was nearly obliterated, eight countries have joined the United States in going nuclear and undoubtedly, given time, more will follow. And such weapons -- initially just bombs -- are now deployable on planes, ships, or via land-based missiles (also known as our "nuclear triad"). And I wouldn't be surprised if someday such weapons were also placed in space. It's now generally believed that a major nuclear war on this planet would not only cause unimaginable levels of immediate death and destruction but potentially create a "nuclear winter" that could, in the end, kill billions of us.
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