Image by Matt Palmer.

What self-destructive creatures we turn out to be!

Can you even believe it? Only recently, the United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP30, met in Brazil for two weeks. While 194 countries were represented there, the historically greatest fossil-fuelizer on the planet, Donald Trump’s United States, was, of course, missing in action (for the first time in 30 years). Worse yet, while the conference was underway, the Trump administration announced a new plan to open 1.3 billion acres (no, that is not a misprint!) of coastal waters to new oil and gas drilling. As for the conference itself, after floundering and almost foundering, its member nations barely agreed on a way more or less forward, what were termed “baby steps” toward a better (or at least less utterly disastrous) future. And yet, can you believe this? The final agreement didn’t even include the words “fossil fuels” or reaffirm in blunt language that they should be phased out! (President Trump must have been pleased!)

Hey, and if that doesn’t cheer you up enough, consider this: a White House spokeswoman responded to the conference with the claim that President Trump had “set a strong example for the rest of the world” by pursuing new fossil-fuel development while it was underway. “President Trump has been clear,” she said. “He will not jeopardize our country’s economic and national security to pursue vague climate goals that are killing other countries.”

Yes, indeed, what a world! After all, we’re talking about one of the two ways human beings have discovered to utterly devastate Planet Earth (the other, of course, being with nuclear weapons). And full credit is due. Consider us nothing less than remarkable creatures for coming up with not one but two ways to potentially do ourselves and this planet in.

Now, imagine this: “my” president, the man, inaugurated for a second time in January 2025, was the oldest nominee ever for that office and, should he complete this term, will be the oldest president in American history, older even than ancient Joe Biden when he left office (assuming, of course, that Donald Trump ever does leave office). And give him full credit: he’s essentially put his weight — and that’s no small thing, given that he’s been termed “technically obese,” even if his administration has been denying obese immigrants entry to this country — behind both ways of doing this planet in. After all, he only recently announced that, for the first time since 1992, the U.S. might once again begin testing nuclear weapons!

Duck and Cover

Now, imagine this: I was born in the final months of the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, just over a year before World War II ended. In my youth, I lived in a world in which the two great powers on this planet, my country and the Soviet Union, were threatening to do us all in atomically. I can still remember ducking and covering under my desk in grade school, hands over my head, as sirens howled outside the classroom window, indicating a Soviet nuclear strike. (It was, of course, just a test.) I can also remember getting duck-and-cover advice from the cartoon character Bert the Turtle, as well as wandering the streets of New York City and seeing (but paying little attention to) the common yellow fallout shelter signs that indicated where you should hide, were an atomic war to suddenly break out. And in my freshman year in college in New Haven, Connecticut, I can remember fearing, because of the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, that the world (or at least the East Coast version of it) might be obliterated in a potential nuclear holocaust.

Of course, none of that ever actually happened, and today, 80 years after the first (and last) two atomic bombs were actually used to destroy the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there are no longer nuclear tests or nuclear shelters of any sort. The last U.S. aboveground nuclear test took place in the 1960s and the last underground one in 1992. And few people seem to think about such weapons anymore or the planet-devastating war-making that could potentially go with them.

No matter that nine countries now possess nuclear weapons and — count on it! — more will do so in the future; or that nuclear-armed Israel and Russia are both involved in wars at the moment; or that, at one point, Russian President Vladimir Putin did indeed implicitly threaten to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine; or that, in May, nuclear-armed India and Pakistan, each possessing about 170 nuclear weapons, faced off against each other, however briefly, in a war-like fashion, with President Trump claiming that he had stopped a nuclear war from happening. (“I’m not going to have you guys shooting nuclear weapons at each other, killing millions of people, and having the nuclear dust floating over Los Angeles.”) Nor does it seem to matter that we now know a significant nuclear war could lead to a “nuclear winter” on planet Earth in which millions of us, including undoubtedly Bert the Turtle, would be likely to starve to death and the planet itself would be devastated.

Meanwhile, though the U.S. hasn’t tested an atomic weapon explosively since 1992, President Trump did recently suggest that he might be ready to do so again. As he put it, “Because of other countries testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis. That process will begin immediately.” It didn’t. Not yet at least.

No matter that no other country is, in fact, doing actual nuclear testing at the moment, though Russia is indeed testing nuclear delivery systems, or that the U.S. military hasn’t (yet) followed up on the president’s statement by preparing to do so. The only country to have openly tested a nuclear weapon since the 1990s is, in fact, North Korea. Nonetheless, my own country now has an estimated more than 5,000 nuclear weapons out of the more than 12,000 believed to be on this planet, whether aboard nuclear submarines that travel the globe’s oceans (while a “next generation” of nuclear subs is now being built), in missile silos on land, or in storage.

Worse yet, the U.S. military has plans to put $1.7 trillion — no, that is not a misprint! — into keeping the American nuclear arsenal in what passes for good shape over the next three decades, while producing yet more such weaponry in the years to come. And do you really feel confident that Israel or, in the future, Iran, or right now North Korea would never under any circumstances consider using such weaponry? Donald Trump certainly didn’t feel confident of that or why would he have bombed Iran’s still-peaceful nuclear sites this year?

And sadly, unlike in the 1970s and 1980s, there is no significant American or global protest movement calling on this country and other countries to reduce, not to say eliminate their nuclear arsenals. In some fashion, however strangely, the nuclear form of potential end times, of ultimate destruction, has generally been ignored (except, of course, by those producing, handling, or storing such weaponry).

And honestly, given the strange history of humanity and the growing nuclear arsenals on this planet, despite those 80 years of no use — I wish I could say uselessness! — do you truly feel confident that we humans will never consider using nuclear weaponry again?

The Slow-Motion Equivalent of Nuclear War

And consider it truly strange that we humans have come up with not one but two ways to potentially do ourselves and this planet in and the second one, unlike the nuclear version, is already quite literally in process. In some eerie sense, in fact, our world could indeed be considered, though it’s seldom thought of that way, as in a slow-motion, climate-change version of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After all, the rising heat that fossil-fuel burning continues to produce globally is already estimated to be killing a person a minute on this planet. That’s millions of us annually. And worse yet, it’s guaranteed to grow significantly harsher in the decades to come.

And when it comes to climate change, unlike nuclear warfare once upon a time, there are no warning sirens or shelters, nor are its “weapons” stored in arsenals. In their own strange fashion, they are instead being both produced and exploded right before our eyes. And strangely enough, while no nuclear war has yet happened, the climate-change version of such a conflict is distinctly ongoing. That means, whether you care to think about it or not, that each of us is now facing a slow-motion version of end-of-worldism in our own lives right now, even though most of the time you’d hardly know it.

Yes, the waters of this planet are heating and rising, wildfires growing ever fiercer, floods ever more extreme, and the temperature globally is distinctly climbing in a fashion that should be considered all too unnerving. After all, the last 10 years have been the warmest in human history; 2024 was the warmest year ever experienced, and 2025 looks likely to be the second or third warmest of all time. Unlike the nuclear version of ultimate destruction, in other words, the climate one is happening right now, even if in slow motion. And yet, here’s the truly eerie thing: most days, if you read the mainstream media or watch the mainstream TV news, climate change is seldom headline-making. You would certainly have little sense from the media that, at this very moment, we’re already in the midst of a distinctly apocalyptic, if slow-motion event. Most of the time, given what we humans are doing to each other from Ukraine to the Middle East, it’s at best secondary news.

In case you hadn’t noticed (and you surely have), whatever Donald Trump does — quite literally anything, even picking his nose, no less meeting in the White House with New York’s next mayor, Zohran Mamdani — instantly gets more attention than the world-devastating situation we’re living through every moment of every day (and night). Someday, if historians still exist on this planet of ours, I suspect Donald J. Trump will appear, in the grimmest sense imaginable, to be an eerie wonder of these eerie times; a president who, faced with a possible global Armageddon, did everything he could to bring it on, from opening ever more land and waters to fossil fuel production to shutting down anything that has to do with the production of renewable, non-carbon energy.

Though few would ever think of it this way, a child born today is, in truth, being delivered into the slow-motion climate equivalent of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and, for such a kid, there’s unlikely to be any ducking and covering. And yet not just Donald Trump but all too many other leaders globally are at work making things worse. It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about the president’s decision to open those 1.3 billion acres of coastal waters to further drilling for oil and natural gas, China’s willingness to build significant numbers of new coal-burning power plants, or Vladimir Putin’s desire to continue, even intensify the human activity that may put more heat-inducing carbon into the atmosphere than any other, military activities of just about any sort but, above all else, making war.

Only the other week, in fact, while the COP30 Climate Summit was underway, Donald Trump, the president of the world’s leading producer of oil and natural gas, the man who has done everything he possibly could to shut down green projects of any sort, met with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, whose state oil company, Aramco, remains a monster producer of oil and natural gas. And can there be any doubt that such a meeting at such a moment was intended to be a global slap in the face to efforts of any sort to bring climate change under control and an implicit (or perhaps I mean explicit) promise to take us all to hell in a handbasket?

As someone who, at 81, has kids and grandkids, I fear for the world that Donald Trump, Mohammed bin Salman, and so many other figures on this planet, including Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu, are preparing for them. Thought of a certain way, our planet is indeed experiencing the slow-motion, climate-change equivalent of nuclear war and yet it’s hardly even news. And if that isn’t truly bizarre, what is?

This piece first appeared on TomDispatch.

The post Climate-Change Summer or Nuclear Winter? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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