Trump Laughing All The Way To The Bank... At The End Of The World

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You would think, of course, that, faced with what's likely to happen in the years to come, humanity might have responded by working ever harder to bring our fossil-fuel usage under control. But not much such luck there, of course.

After all, China, the country that has moved in the most significant fashion on climate change by figuring out how to produce ever more green energy and sell globally the mechanisms-solar panels, batteries, and wind turbine equipment-that make it (as well as stunning numbers of electric vehicles ), continues to pour the most greenhouse gases into the atmosphere of any place on Earth.

And though other countries are indeed beginning to try to switch to green power, when you look at this endangered planet of ours, explain to me how, in 2024, the American people by a slight majority (even if not quite 50% of the vote) managed to reelect as president one Donald J Trump, a climate-change denier of the first order.

And in his second term in office, he's focused as much attention as he's capable of focusing (which, of course, is a distinctly limited amount) on blocking wind and solar projects while promoting ever more fossil-fuel production of every kind. (And of course, in the process, he's brilliantly ceding the vast and growing green-energy sales market to that other superpower, China.)

Let me guarantee you one thing: Someday, when it comes to the overheating of this world of ours, he will be seen as an almost unparalleled idiot, assuming that anybody then is seeing much of anything.

Consider climate change, in fact, a potential global disaster that deserves a far more horrifying name. And consider it just the latest form of (in)human warfare to come to our attention, this time against the planet itself as a livable place for us.

And consider it as well no small thing that we humans have indeed produced a second way to essentially destroy this planet and ourselves.

A climate bomb of a president

As for that first one, it's still unsettling to think about the way the United States developed the atomic bomb and then used it twice in August 1945 to devastate the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and end World War II in the Pacific.

And those first two bombs did indeed represent, all too literally (or do I mean figuratively?), something new on this planet that, until that moment, had only been a dystopian fantasy - the possible future ability of humanity to totally devastate this planet of ours?

In fact, given human history, consider it little short of a miracle that, 80 years later, with at least nine countries now possessing atomic weapons, often in significant quantities-there are now an estimated 12,000 such weapons on planet Earth - one has never been used again in wartime (although more than 2,000 have been detonated in atomic tests in what still passes for peacetime).

And there can be little question that, were an atomic war to break out between any of the great (or even lesser) powers on this planet, we could indeed find ourselves thoroughly devastated.

Now, give us humans distinct credit since, having developed a first way to functionally do in this planet of ours and ourselves, we then came up with a completely separate, distinctly slow-motion version of planetary destruction via our use of fossil fuels-coal, oil, and natural gas-to pour what have come to be known as greenhouse gases that trap heat into the atmosphere, potentially broiling this planet in a process that's come to be known all too mildly as-yes!-“climate change.”

(Think of it, in fact, as a slow-motion version of atomic warfare happening right before our eyes every moment of every day.)

And unfortunately, when it became ever more obvious that this was indeed another way to do this planet in, the response was sadly all too different from atomic weaponry, with the urge to stop it proving far milder than it should be.

And of course, in 2024, Americans did indeed vote to reelect a presidential candidate all too literally committed to broiling this planet of ours (as, by the way, is Vladimir Putin, the ruler of one of the other great powers on this planet). Yes, the Don is indeed an atomic bomb or at least a climate bomb of a president his second time around.

And don't forget that, this time, among the donors celebrating his victory and inauguration with giant financial contributions was oil company Chevron with $500,000. (In fact, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has reported that, overall, oil companies invested $5 million in that inauguration alone-and even that may be a low estimate.)

And yes, his second time in office he did also launch his own version of a global nuclear arms race, but that, sadly, is the least of it, since he's distinctly determined to release ever more fossil fuels into our world, while doing anything he can to shut down wind power, in particular.