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climate change
Trump, Hegseth, and Hell on Earth
Some of the very worst people history has devised have now landed on the beaches of our world, armed to the teeth, and intent on turning this planet into a heat zone.
Jun 15, 2026
What a planet! I only wish I could tell my grandfather about it. He arrived in this country, an immigrant from what’s now Ukraine, in March 1888—or so his daughter, my Aunt Hilda, wrote me once upon a distant time. Here’s how she began that long-ago message to me: “Your grandfather, Moore Engelhardt, a boy of 16, arrived in New York from Europe in March 1888. It was during the famous blizzard, and after a sea voyage of about 30 days. He had no money. He often said that he had a German 50-cent piece in his pocket when he landed. His trip had to be in the cheapest part of the ship—way down below steerage. Poor boy, I’m sure he was seasick a good deal of the time. Since he was alone, he sort of attached himself to a family of a lot of children and, for the first few months in America, I imagine he slept behind the stove in somebody’s kitchen.”
As a boy of 14, he had, my aunt reported, challenged the local rabbi where he lived to give him back some of the money his father had donated to the rabbi—money his mother had made and that they needed just to live. And when the rabbi refused, he evidently hit him and then ran away from home. The rest, as they say, is history.
I barely knew him. He died when I was about five years old and I have only the faintest memory of standing beside him, holding his hand, while he leaned on his cane. But in the end, he managed to turn that 50 cents into a business in Brooklyn, New York. He got clobbered in (but made it through) the Great Depression of the 1930s, and even built a couple of buildings in Brooklyn that he named after my dad and Hilda. Sometimes I wonder what he’d think about our strange Trumpian world today. After all, we’re on an increasingly disturbed planet, where, in some places, as the heat rises, the storms intensify, wildfires grow ever fiercer, sea levels rise, and... well, you get the idea... ever more people are finding that they simply can’t stay in their worlds anymore and migration of the sort my grandfather once engaged in is growing exponentially.
And President Donald J. Trump doesn’t like that one little bit. I have no doubt that, had he been president back in 1888, he would have wanted to chuck my grandpa, a wandering Jew from what’s now Ukraine, out on his ear.
And yet, you might also think of “our” president as a migration-causer extraordinaire. After all, whether he likes it or not, he is indeed the climate-change president. And give him credit, though he’s not the sun (not faintly), he certainly has proven himself distinctly capable of upping the heat in this world of ours exponentially and I don’t just mean by doing everything he can under the (yes!) sun to deny that climate change is even happening. Of course, he’s labelled it a “con job“ and claimed its potential threat to our health is a “scam.”
What he’s attempting to do on (and to) this planet of ours will, in the not-at-all-distant future, prove to be a disaster of an almost unimaginable sort—from trying to increase the use of coal, oil, and natural gas, to interfering in plans to use wind and solar power. In doing so, of course, he’s also turning our future over to that other great imperial power of the moment, the New Green Power of Planet Earth, China (despite the fact that it’s also still using record amounts of fossil fuels). Someday, without a doubt, Donald Trump will—yes!—undoubtedly be seen as the D(and a 1/2)P or Disaster (and a Half) President.
Even his fierce attempts to get rid of any immigrants (who aren’t, of course, White South Africans) by flying them first to deportation camps and then out of the country are only further heating this planet of ours, as Alexandra Villarreal of the Guardian pointed out recently. That staggering number of flights is “producing hundreds of thousands of metric tons of climate-damaging carbon emissions as officials shuttle unprecedented numbers of people to detention centers far from home and deport them to countries across the world.” US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s air operations are estimated to have pumped 370,240 tons of carbon emissions into the air in 2025 alone, “up 88% from the year before.”
Imagine that! Fortunately, as the (remarkable) Guardian also reported, explain it as you will, red states actually seem to be leading Democratic-led states in the build-out of clean-energy capacity. Despite its powerful links to the gas and oil industry, Texas, for instance, is now the country’s leading clean-energy superpower because of its remarkable build-out of wind power. Recently, it even overtook California (yes, California!) when it comes to utility-scale solar power. (Yikes! Who would even believe it? Not Donald Trump, that’s for sure!)
Still, it is remarkable to have had a climate-change-denier elected president of the most powerful country on Earth not once, but twice! And that’s not all that he and his crew are denying. Only recently, for instance, Secretary of Offense (oops, sorry, Defense) Pete Hegseth compared the (non-White) immigrants now entering Europe to the soldiers who stormed the beaches of Normandy, France, in June 1944 (one of whom I knew as a kid). As he put it recently, “Sadly, today, different European beaches are stormed by different dangerous ideologies. Beaches in Spain, in Italy, in Greece and Bulgaria. Boats and men arrive. When will European capitals do something about that invasion?”
As I sit here sweating on an early June day in New York City that has almost hit 90 degrees in a world heating towards the boiling point ever faster, I’m all too aware that Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth, and the rest of that grim clan have launched their own invasion—of planet Earth itself. They have indeed landed on the beaches of our world, armed to the teeth, and intent on turning this planet into a heat zone. (And we haven’t even noticed the half of it yet because our oceans have so far absorbed so much of that heat.)
Yes, there are obviously many, many problems when it comes to Trump, Hegseth, and crew, but in the end, none matters more than their urge to heat this planet to the boiling point. Their version of governing certainly gives the phrase “hell on earth” new meaning.
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I’ve Been Organizing Climate Strikes Since I Was 12. Colombia’s Santa Marta Conference Is Giving Me Hope Again.
It is easy to lose hope for combating the climate crisis in times like these. But while the US government has relinquished its leadership, others are stepping forward.
Apr 25, 2026
It can feel like a lifetime ago, but I grew up in an era of hope for combating the climate crisis. It was an era filled with energy to fight against fossil fuels—and leaders who seemed like they might finally listen to us. An era in which a livable future for all of us seemed almost feasible.
I’ve been organizing climate strikes since I was 12.
I began by protesting outside Brooklyn Borough Hall, not far from my house in Brooklyn, New York. Then I started attending meetings with Fridays For Future NYC, the New York City chapter of Greta Thunberg’s organization. I quickly became enraptured with the energy of the youth climate movement. Through it, I met some of my best friends, as we organized six strikes together in middle and high school.
In my senior year of high school, I was a core organizer for the March To End Fossil Fuels, a 70,000 person march in September 2023, that brought together a diverse cast of organizers—from the Center for Biological Diversity to the NAACP. I felt lucky to be a part of such a massive effort.
The United States may not be there, but Canada, Australia, and Brazil, among other countries, will be.
Actually phasing out fossil fuels, a topic older organizers told me had once been fringe, was now in the front and center of New York City streets and on the front page of The New York Times. By the end of 2023, I was Fridays For Future’s North American Delegate to COP28 in Dubai, an international climate conference that zeroed in on fossil fuels. It was all anyone was talking about, from grassroots organizers to the US negotiators.
Other fossil fuel phaseout activists and I were actually able to meet multiple times with the lead negotiators for the US, Trigg Talley and Sue Biniaz. The negotiators seemed receptive to adopting fossil fuel phaseout language in the COP28 Global Stocktake Text. We didn’t achieve that, but the phrase “transition away from fossil fuels” did appear in the final text. It was the first time the words “fossil fuels” had ever been included in the final text in the history of COPs.
When we got home from COP28, we were able to meet with John Podesta, who was then President Joe Biden’s top climate advisor. We urged him against allowing the construction of the CP2 liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminal. Biden announced a pause on pending decisions for new LNG export projects, including CP2, on January 26, 2024. Finally, it felt like we were winning.
Looking at the news today, that era feels so far away.
Trump administration officials recently gathered in my hometown of Brooklyn to announce their plan to swiftly construct a $1 billion natural gas pipeline in New Jersey and New York Harbor. Construction on CP2 began this past June, and the Trump administration has pulled out of the Paris Agreement. While I still attended COP30 this past year in Belem, Brazil, the US federal government did not send a single negotiator, much less a delegation.
It is easy to lose hope for combating the climate crisis in times like these. But while the US government has relinquished its leadership, others are stepping forward.
In late April, Colombia and the Netherlands are convening the first-ever Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels in Santa Marta, Colombia. This will be the biggest step away from fossil fuels we’ve seen since the March to End Fossil Fuels.
The United States may not be there, but Canada, Australia, and Brazil, among other countries, will be. This is a crucial first step toward formal Fossil Fuel Treaty negotiations, and it is just the beginning of Fossil Fuel phaseout policy becoming the center of attention again.
We need a fast, fair, fossil fuel phaseout—and I have hope for it now, because of Santa Marta.
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Killing Climate Lies That Kill
This game of lies started decades ago with big oil and gas corporations, long before “fake news,” disinformation and misinformation were a thing. It's only gotten worse.
Nov 14, 2025
Blatant lies are putting the people and our planet at risk. Often told for profit or power’s sake, they hurt economic, environmental, and social standing of most of us at the expense of a few. In this nasty game, those who strive to expose the truth and stand up for progress pay the steepest price. And they are environmental activists, journalists, scientists, and ordinary citizens defending their communities.
This month, two pivotal global summits happen that could bring change. In Bangkok, Thailand, the International Civil Society Week brought together over a thousand citizen activists from around the world. In Belem, Brazil, COP30—the global climate conference—will see governments, businesses, scientists, and many others negotiate. Citizen activists and civil society may finally have a say there. The last three climate summits held in countries where there’s little democratic freedom and heavy reliance on oil production shunned them.
To fight the lies that stall progress, Brazil has launched a Global Initiative for Information Integrity on Climate Change at the climate summit. The civil society week declaration calls strongly for both climate action and ending disinformation. Global civil society leaders like Oxfam, ActionAid, and Greenpeace as well as hundreds of grassroots organizations from Afghanistan to Zambia have endorsed.
However, buzzwords like disinformation and lack of information integrity, in their sophistication, often dull the impact. Perhaps they feel inauthentic. We need to think outside the box to engage in more authentic conversations involving people with diverse viewpoints.
For starters, let’s call false information what they are, lies. Lies that pervert the progress, hurt the many, and kill those who speak up. This game of lies started decades ago with big oil and gas corporations, long before “fake news,” disinformation and misinformation were a thing. What has gotten worse is that they are now blatantly colluding with governments and political leaders around the world to protect their short-term gain.
Those who stand to lose the most in the game are ordinary folks, especially those who struggle to make a daily living or don’t have the resources to defend themselves.
Let’s be clear: this isn’t only about “social justice.” The climate lies stall economic growth. The United Sates, once the global champion of the free market, is today doomed to become uncompetitive. President Trump, sponsored by American oil oligarchs blatantly lied at the United Nations earlier this year. His claims that renewable energy is dangerous, expensive, and unreliable will hurt the economic progress of the United States and the world.
He attacked countries making progress on renewable energy. The narrative of lies leads to decisions and bullying of nations and communities. When Trump raised tariffs against solar panels made in Southeast Asia, workers lost jobs. This includes Thailand, where civil society week was held.
Examples are many from Trump and other regimes. Russian bots, European and Australian leaders, too, have spread lies about the unreliability of renewable energy, including false threats of job loss and a rise in commodity prices. China, despite being the global leader in renewable energy, attacks environmental activists.
The lies kill. In the past decade, over 2,000 activists have paid with their lives for speaking up and standing up to protect forests, rivers, and community resources. They stood up against coal and oil extraction, mining, logging, land grabbing, and large-scale development that destroyed communities.
Civil society and activists who speak up get labelled foreign agents or eco-terrorists. They are arrested, harassed in public and in courts, and bullied online. This is despite their efforts to try to protect us. Every year, climate disasters, worsened by fossil fuels and harmful developments, kill tens of thousands and displace millions. The lies kill both blatantly and silently.
For the lies and bullying to end, we must engage in an open, honest, and empathic conversation. We need to have dialogue with diverse viewpoints. And this is not easy because all of us are burdened with our daily struggles and comfortable with information consumption habits. Hearing difficult truths and contradicting points of view are stressful.
Civil society, movements, development organizations, and media are losing relevance and trust among the general public. We have failed at listening, speaking, and interacting with farmers, women workers, students, young men, doctors, and business folks. Yes, we do speak up, but well-intentioned campaigns often end up merely preaching to the choir.
We get likes on social media, signatures for petitions, and like-minded folks at street protests. But that isn’t enough to build empathy and build a majority movement, even with those who are most likely to suffer from climate lies and bullying. To connect with people and come together with people, we must first care about who they are. As agents of social change, it is not just about playing to an audience but taking care as an ethical duty.
At the same time, we must shout out at the big fat liars, Big Oil, and their colluding partners in media and politics. Citizens, journalists, movements, and governments must stand for science, reason, and progress. This means urgently demanding an end to fossil fuels and moving to green energy while also protecting communities at risk during the transition. We must also defend the activists who stand up for our rights and the planet.
More of us must act today and stand with those who do. The argument for collective demand and action for climate progress isn’t just moral. Let’s call it collectively selfish–it may just improve our health and economic and social well-being.
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Trump and the Autumn of the Liberal International Order
Trump's radical “America first” foreign policy seems primed to accelerate the decline of Washington’s international influence and degrade (if not destroy) the world order that the US has sustained since the end of World War II.
Oct 07, 2025
In his novel The Autumn of the Patriarch, which is eerily evocative of our current political plight, Gabriel Garcia Marquez described how a Latin American autocrat “discovered in the course of his uncountable years that a lie is more comfortable than doubt, more useful than love, more lasting than truth, [and] became convinced… that the only livable life was one of show.”
In amassing unchecked power spiced with unimaginable cruelty, that fictional dictator extinguished any flicker of opposition in his imaginary Caribbean country, reducing its elite to a craven set of courtiers. Even though he butchered opponents, plundered the treasury, raped the young, and reduced his nation to penury, “lettered politicians and dauntless adulators… proclaimed him the corrector of earthquakes, eclipses, leap years and other errors of God.” When his slavishly loyal defense minister somehow displeased him, the autocrat had him served up, in full-dress uniform laden with military medals, on a silver platter with a pine-nut garnish to a table full of courtiers, forcing them to dutifully consume their slice of the cooked cadaver.
That macabre banquet presaged a recent luncheon President Donald J. Trump hosted at the White House for this nation’s top tech executives, which became a symphony of shameless sycophancy. Billionaire Bill Gates praised the president’s “incredible leadership,” while Apple CEO Tim Cook said it was “incredible to be among… you and the first lady” before thanking him “for helping American companies around the world.” Other executives there celebrated him for having “unleashed American innovation and creativity… making it possible for America to win” again and making this “the most exciting time in America, ever.” As Trump served up the corpse of American democracy, those tech courtiers, like so many of this country’s elites, downed their slice of the cadaver with ill-concealed gusto.
With Congress compliant, the Supreme Court complicit, and media corporations compromised, President Trump’s vision for America and its place in the world has become the nation’s destiny. Since the inauguration for his second term in office in January 2025, he has launched a radical “America first” foreign policy that seems primed to accelerate the decline of Washington’s international influence and, more seriously and much less obviously, degrade (if not destroy) the liberal international order that the US has sustained since the end of World War II. Largely ignored by a media overwhelmed by daily outrages from the Oval Office, that initiative has some truly serious implications for America’s role in the world.
Trump’s Geopolitical Vision
Amid a torrent of confusing, often contradictory foreign policy pronouncements pouring out of the White House, the design of the president’s dubious geopolitical strategy has taken shape with surprising, even stunning speed. Instead of maintaining longstanding security alliances like NATO, Trump seems to prefer a globe divided into three major regional blocs, each headed by an empowered autocrat like himself—with Russia dominating its European periphery, China paramount in Asia, and the United States controlling North and much of South America (and Greenland).
Reflecting what Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called a “loathing of European freeloading” and Vice President JD Vance’s complaint that Europe has abandoned “our shared democratic values,” President Trump is pursuing this tri-continental strategy at the expense of the traditional transatlantic alliance embodied in NATO that has been the foundation for US foreign policy since the start of the Cold War.
Admittedly, Trump’s reach for complete control over North America does lend a certain geopolitical logic to his otherwise quixotic overtures to claim Greenland, reclaim the Panama Canal, and make Canada the 51st state. In Trump’s vision of fortress America, the country’s more compact defense perimeter would encompass the entire Arctic, including Greenland, march down the mid-Atlantic with an anchor at the Panama Canal, and encompass the entire Pacific. Not only does such a strategy carry the high cost of alienating once-close allies Canada and Mexico, but every one of its key components comes laden with a potential for serious conflict, particularly the administration’s plans for the Pacific, which run headlong into China’s ongoing maritime expansion.
Demolishing the Liberal International Order
At a broader level, President Trump’s foreign policy represents a forceful repudiation of the three key attributes of the “liberal international order” that has marked US global hegemony since the end of World War II in 1945: alliances like NATO that treated allies as peer powers, free trade without tariff barriers, and an ironclad assurance of inviolable sovereignty for all nations, large and small. In a matter of months, Trump has crippled NATO by expressing doubt about its critical mutual-defense clause, imposed an escalating roster of punitive tariffs antithetical to free trade, and threatened to expropriate several sovereign states and territories.
Not only is his ongoing demolition of Washington’s world order inflicting a good deal of pain on much of the globe—from Africans and Asians denied the US Agency for International Development’s lifesaving medicines (and potentially suffering 14 million deaths) to Eastern Europeans threatened by Russia’s relentless advance—but it also undercuts America’s future position on a post-Trumpian planet. His successor could, of course, try to reconcile with Canada and Mexico, placate an insulted Panamanian leadership, and even repair relations with NATO. But the president’s ongoing demolition of Washington’s world system is guaranteed to do lasting, long-term damage to the country’s international standing in ways that have so far eluded even informed observers.
To grasp the full extent of the harm Trump is inflicting on America’s place on this planet, it’s important to understand that Washington’s “liberal international order” is nothing more than the latest iteration of the “world order” that every global hegemon has created as part of its apparatus of power since the 15th century. To understand our own present and future, it’s necessary to explore the nature of those world orders—how they formed, how they functioned, and what their survival and destruction tell us about America’s declining imperial power.
Twain suggested that empire abroad would, sooner or later, bring autocracy at home—an insight Trump confirms with his every tweet, every speech, every executive order.
For the past 500 years, every succeeding global hegemon—Spain, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States—has not only amassed wealth and military strength but also used that extraordinary power to propagate a world order that often transcended its narrow national interests. And once the inevitable imperial decline set in, a fading global hegemon often found that its world order could serve as a diplomatic safety net, extending its international influence for years, even decades beyond its moment of imperial glory.
While even the most powerful of history’s empires eventually fall, such world orders entwine themselves in the cultures, commerce, and values of countless societies. They influence the languages people speak, the laws that order their lives, and the ways that so many millions of us work, worship, and even play. World orders might be much less visible than the grandeur of great empires, but they have always proven both more pervasive and more persistent.
By structuring relations among nations and influencing the cultures of the peoples who live in them, world orders can outlast even the powerful empires that created them. Indeed, some 90 empires, major and minor, have come and gone since the start of the age of exploration in the 15th century. In those same 500 years, however, there have been just four major world orders—the Iberian age after 1494; the British imperial era that began in 1815; the Soviet system that lasted from 1945 to 1991; and Washington’s liberal international order, launched in 1945, that might, based on present developments, reach its own end somewhere around 2030.
Successful global empires driven by the hard power of guns and money have also required the soft power of cultural and ideological suasion embodied in a world order. Spain’s bloody conquest of Latin America soon segued into three centuries of colonial rule, softened by Catholic conversion, the spread of the Spanish language as a lingua franca, and that continent’s integration into a growing global economy. Once permanent mints were established in Mexico City, Lima, and Potosí during the 17th century, Spanish galleons would carry millions of minted silver coins—worth eight reales and thus known as “pieces of eight”—across the globe for nearly three centuries, creating the world’s first common currency and making those silver coins the medium of exchange for everyone from African traders to Virginia planters.
During its century of global hegemony from 1820 to 1920, though it seldom hesitated to use military power when needed, Great Britain would also prove the exemplar par excellence of soft power, espousing an enticing political culture of fair play and free markets that it propagated through the Anglican church, the English language, an enticing literature, authoritative mass media like the global Reuters news service and the British Broadcasting Corporation, and its virtual creation of modern athletics (including cricket, football or soccer, tennis, rugby, and rowing). On a higher plane of principle, Britain’s protracted anti-slavery campaign throughout much of the 19th century invested its global hegemony with a certain moral authority.
Similarly, the raw power of US military and economic dominance after 1945 was softened by the appeal of Hollywood films, civic organizations like Rotary International, and popular sports like basketball and baseball. Just as Britain battled the slave trade for nearly a century, so Washington’s advocacy of human rights lent legitimacy to its world order. While Spain espoused Catholicism, and Britain an Anglophone ethos of rights, the United States, at the dawn of its global dominion, courted allies through soft-power programs that promoted democracy, the international rule of law, and economic development.
Such world orders are not the mere imaginings of historians trying, decades or centuries later, to impose their own logic on a chaotic past. In each era, the dominant power of the day worked to reorder its world for generations to come through formal agreements—with the Treaty of Tordesillas dividing much of the globe between Spain and Portugal in 1494; the 1815 Congress of Vienna (convened to resolve the Napoleonic wars) launching a full century of British global dominion; the San Francisco Conference in 1945 drafting the United Nations charter and so beginning Washington’s liberal international order; and the Moscow meeting in 1957 assembling 64 communist parties at the Kremlin for a shared commitment to socialist struggle and putting the Soviet Union atop its own global order.
Just as the British imperial system was far more pervasive than its Iberian predecessor, so Washington’s world order went beyond both of them and the Soviet Russian system, too, to become deeply embedded on an essentially global scale. While the 1815 Congress of Vienna was an ephemeral gathering of two dozen diplomats whose influence faded within a decade or two, the San Francisco conference of 1945 formed the United Nations, which now has 193 member states with broad international responsibilities. By the start of the 21st century, moreover, there were nearly 40,000 “UN-recognized international nongovernmental organizations” like the Catholic Relief Services, operating “in the remotest corners of the globe.”
But the similarities were perhaps more important. Note as well that both victorious powers, Great Britain and the United States, used those peace conferences to launch world orders that militated successfully against major wars among the great powers, with the pax Britannica lasting nearly a century (1815-1914) and the pax Americana persisting for 80 years and still counting.
Empires Fade but World Orders Persist
If world orders are so pervasive and persistent, why don’t they last forever? Each transition from one to the next has occurred when a massively destructive cataclysm has coincided with major social or political change. The rise of the Iberian age of exploration was preceded by a century of epidemics, known as the Black Death, which killed 60% of the populations of Europe and China, devastating their respective worlds. Similarly, the British imperial era emerged when the ravages of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe coincided with the dynamism of the industrial revolution launched in England, unleashing the power of coal-fired steam energy and formal colonial rule to change the face of the globe.
After the unprecedented devastation of World War II, Washington’s leadership in rebuilding and reordering a damaged planet established the current liberal international order. By the middle decades of our present century, if not before, global warming caused by fossil-fuel emissions will likely equal or surpass those earlier catastrophes on a universal scale of “disaster magnitude,” with the potential to precipitate the eclipse of Washington’s world order. Compounding the damage, President Trump’s sustained, systematic attack on America’s “liberal international order”—its alliances, free trade, and institutions like the UN—is only serving to accelerate the decline of a system that has served the world and this country reasonably well since 1945.
After the Fall
Even if the empire that created it suffers a complete collapse, a deeply rooted world order can usually survive that fall, while serving as a kind of diplomatic safety net for a fading power. The Iberian empires had lost their preeminence by the 17th century, but even today Latin America is deeply Catholic and Spanish remains the main language for much of the continent.
Understanding its limits as a small island nation with a vast global empire, Great Britain conducted a relatively careful imperial retreat that enfolded former colonies into the British Commonwealth, preserved the City of London’s financial clout, retained international influence as Washington’s strategic partner, and maintained its global cultural authority through civil institutions (the Anglican Communion, the British Broadcasting Corporation, and leading universities). Today, a full 50 years after the end of its empire, Great Britain still plays a role in world affairs far beyond its small size as a nation of just 70 million people living in a country no bigger than the state of Oregon.
Even though it’s been 35 years since the Soviet empire collapsed with spectacular speed, testifying eloquently to the crude coercion and economic exploitation that lay at its heart, Moscow still maintains considerable diplomatic influence across much of the old Soviet sphere in Eurasia.
Without Donald Trump’s systemic subversion of the liberal international order and its chief creation, the United Nations, the United States might have retained sufficient international influence to lead the world toward a shared governance of a global commons on a planet whose environment is sorely threatened—its seas depleted, water evaporating, storms raging, heatwaves soaring, and its Arctic wildly warming. Instead, the United States has fully ceded leadership of the campaign against climate change to China, while not only denying its reality but blocking the development of alternative energy projects critical not only for the planet but for America’s global competitiveness. While China is already leading the world in efficient electric vehicles and low-cost solar and wind power, Trump’s America remains firmly wedded to an economy based on high-cost carbon energy that will, in the fullness of time, render its output grossly overpriced, its industries uncompetitive, and the planet a disaster zone.
Back in 2011, six years before Trump first entered the Oval Office, political scientist G. John Ikenberry argued that, while the US ability to shape world politics would decline as its raw power retreated, its “liberal international order will survive and thrive,” including its emphasis on multilateral governance, open markets, free global trade, human rights, and respect for sovereignty. With Trump having essentially demolished the US Agency for International Development’s global humanitarian work and sent a “wrecking ball” toward the United Nations, while condemning it in a recent speech to its General Assembly—“I ended seven wars… and never even received a phone call from the United Nations”—it would be difficult to make such a sanguine argument today.
Instead, Mark Twain’s classic futuristic assessment of American world power seems more appropriate. “It was impossible to save the Great Republic. It was rotten to the heart. Lust for conquest had long ago done its work,” he wrote in an imagined history of this country from a far-off future. “Trampling upon the helpless abroad,” he added, “had taught her, by a natural process, to endure with apathy the like at home.” After watching the US occupation of the Philippines in 1898 descend into a bloodstained pacification program replete with torture and atrocities, Twain suggested that empire abroad would, sooner or later, bring autocracy at home—an insight Trump confirms with his every tweet, every speech, every executive order.
Whether the United States will emulate Britain in a managed global retreat with minimal domestic damage or fulfill Mark Twain’s dismal vision by continuing to attack its own world order, diminishing if not destroying its legacy, is something for future historians to decide. For now, listening to Trump’s recent rant at the UN complaining about a stalled escalator and condemning climate-change science as a “green scam” and “the greatest con job ever perpetrated,” ordinary Americans should have received a clear sign that their president’s autocratic aspirations are subverting their country’s claims to world leadership, both now and in the future.
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Climate Change Fueling 'Most Widespread and Damaging' Droughts in History: UN Report
"This is not a dry spell," said the co-author of a new U.N. report. "This is a slow-moving global catastrophe."
Jul 03, 2025
Climate change is driving "some of the most widespread and damaging drought events in recorded history," according to a report published Wednesday on global drought hotspots.
Over the past two years, droughts have fueled increased food insecurity, dehydration, and disease that have heightened poverty and political instability in several regions of the world, according to research by the U.S. National Drought Mitigation Center (NDMC) and the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD).
"This is not a dry spell," says Dr. Mark Svoboda, report co-author and NDMC Director. "This is a slow-moving global catastrophe, the worst I've ever seen. This report underscores the need for systematic monitoring of how drought affects lives, livelihoods, and the health of the ecosystems that we all depend on."
The report examined conditions in some of the globe's most drought-prone regions. They found that the economic disruption caused by droughts today is twice as high as in 2000.
In Eastern and Southern Africa, which have been blighted with dangerously low levels of rainfall, more than 90 million people face acute hunger.
Somalia has been hit particularly hard, with 4.4 million, more than a quarter of the population, facing "crisis level" food insecurity in early 2025. Zambia, meanwhile, faced one of the world's worst energy crises last year when the Zambezi River dried up, causing its hydroelectric dams to run critically low.
Other drought-plagued regions have seen wide ranges of ecological and economic disruptions.
In Spain, low levels of rainfall in 2023 devastated olive crops, causing olive oil prices to double. In the Amazon Basin, low water levels caused a mass death of fish and endangered dolphins. The Panama Canal became so depleted that trade vessels were forced to re-route, causing multi-week shipping delays. And in Morocco, Eid celebrations had to be cancelled due to a shortage of sheep.
Recent studies of drought have found that they are increasingly caused not by lack of rainfall, but by aggressive heat, which speeds up evaporation. The areas hit the hardest over the past two years were ones already suffering from the most severe temperature increases. It was also exacerbated by a particularly severe El Niño weather cycle in 2023-24.
"This was a perfect storm," says report co-author Dr. Kelly Helm Smith, NDMC Assistant Director and drought impacts researcher. "El Niño added fuel to the fire of climate change, compounding the effects for many vulnerable societies and ecosystems past their limits."
Though the effects of droughts are often felt most acutely in areas already suffering from poverty and instability, the researchers predict that as they get worse, the effects will be felt worldwide.
In 2024, then the hottest year on record, 48 of the 50 U.S. states faced drought conditions, the highest proportion ever seen. Drought in the U.S. has coincided with a dramatic increase in wildfire frequency and severity over the past 50 years.
"Ripple effects can turn regional droughts into global economic shocks," Smith said. "No country is immune when critical water-dependent systems start to collapse."
The researchers advocated for investments in global drought prevention, but also for broader measures to address the existing inequalities that make droughts more severe.
"Drought has a disproportionate effect on those with few resources," Smith said. "We can act now to reduce the effects of future droughts by working to ensure that everyone has access to food, water, education, health care and economic opportunity."
The researchers also emphasized the urgency of coordinated action to confront the climate crisis.
"The struggles...to secure water, food, and energy under persistent drought offer a preview of water futures under unchecked global warming," said Svoboda. "No country, regardless of wealth or capacity, can afford to be complacent."
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Anti-Poverty Campaigners Cheer Spain-Brazil-South Africa Plan to Tax the Grotesquely Rich
"People are fed up with billionaires' greed eroding the environment and communities we depend on," said one supporter of the new initiative. "It's time for world leaders to listen and act."
Jul 01, 2025
A new plan backed by the governments of Spain, Brazil, and South Africa to tax the fortunes of the uber-rich drew hearty cheers from anti-poverty campaigners, environmental activists, and unions when it was announced on Tuesday.
As described in an announcement by the Spanish government, the initiative aims to create coordination between governments on the taxation of high-net-worth individuals to ensure they are not shuffling money abroad to avoid proper taxation.
"The proposal aims to incentivize and guide different countries to join the initiative and address policy, administrative, and data deficiencies, ensuring that high-net-worth individuals are taxed more efficiently in line with their wealth," the Spanish government explained. "To achieve this, it is necessary to foster international cooperation in multilateral forums to promote and facilitate the implementation of evidence-based reforms and ongoing experiences regarding the taxation of large fortunes in different countries."
The plan—crafted by the governments of Spain and Brazil and presented at the United Nations' Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development being held in the Spanish city of Seville—was quickly praised by an assortment of international nonprofit organizations as an essential tool for tackling global wealth inequality.
Kate Blagojevic, associate director for Europe campaigns for environmental the advocacy group 350.org, described it as "a bold move by Spain and Brazil" that she said could provide funding for clean energy investments around the world, including in countries that lack the resources to make such investments.
"We want more countries to join this coalition so that billionaires and multi-millionaires help to foot the bill for the climate damage they have caused and decrease the huge gap between the rich and the poorest," she said, while also calling for the United Kingdom, France, and Germany to sign on.
Susana Ruiz, the tax justice policy lead at the anti-poverty organization Oxfam, emphasized that international coordination on taxation of high-worth individuals was a serious proposal to address a crisis in global democracy, which she said was being undermined by the corrupting influence of vast sums of money being held by a tiny number of people.
"This extreme inequality is being driven by a financial system that puts the interests of a wealthy few above everyone else," she said. "This concentration of wealth is blocking progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals and keeping over three billion people living in poverty: over half of poor countries are spending more on debt repayments than on healthcare or education."
Fred Njehu, the global political lead for Greenpeace’s Fair Share campaign, deemed the tax plan essential at a time when nations are behind their renewable energy goals and when wealthy elites such as Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos can go all-out for a lavish three-day wedding in Venice.
"Financing is urgently needed for climate action and public services, not for polluting space travel and luxury weddings," he said. "This new coalition of governments working to tax the super-rich adds to the growing global momentum to make the world’s wealthiest pay their fair share. People are fed up with billionaires' greed eroding the environment and communities we depend on. It's time for world leaders to listen and act."
And Leo Hyde, the campaigns and media coordinator at the Public Services International union, praised the plan and said that was the result of years' worth of advocacy by unions and other organizations.
"The initiative aims to ensure a progressive and efficient global tax system with the aim of reducing social inequality," he said. "This builds directly on years of union-led tax justice campaigning that has already yielded significant victories, including the OECD global minimum corporate tax, Australia's public country-by-country reporting initiatives, and the ongoing UN tax treaty negotiations."
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Pick Your Fate, Humanity: Climate-Chaos Summer, Nuclear Winter, Both... or Neither
The forces that have done so much to heat the planet and drive the nuclear arms race are today stronger than ever. The fact is that both must be defeated before they bring us further to the brink of self-annihilation.
Jun 12, 2025
Thirty-five years after the start of the nuclear age with the first explosion of an atomic bomb, I visited the expanse of desert known as the Nevada Test Site, an hour’s drive northwest of Las Vegas. A pair of officials from the Department of Energy took me on a tour. They explained that nuclear tests were absolutely necessary. “Nuclear weapons are like automobiles,” one told me. “Ford doesn’t put a new automobile out on the highway until they’ve gone through a lengthy test process, driving hundreds of thousands of miles.”
By then, in 1980, several hundred underground nuclear blasts had already occurred in Nevada, after the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty required that atomic testing take place below the earth’s surface. Previously, about 100 nuclear warheads had been set off above ground at that test site, sending mushroom clouds aloft and endangering with radiation exposure not just nearby soldiers but downwind civilians as well.
My guides from the Energy Department were upbeat. The only sober words came after one old hand at nuclear testing asked me to turn off my tape recorder. “No head of state in the world has ever seen a nuclear bomb explosion,” he said. “To me, that’s scary. I don’t think anyone who has ever seen a nuclear explosion has ever not asked the question: ‘My God, what have we done?’”
Otherwise, the on-the-record statements I got that day amounted to happy talk about the nuclear arms race. When officials showed me a quarter-mile-wide crater caused by a hydrogen bomb named Sedan, they expressed nothing but pride. “Across the windy desert floor of the Nevada Test Site, the government guides talk enthusiastically about their dominion,” I wrote then for The Nation magazine. “As the wind whips through Yucca Flats, it whispers that, left to their own ‘devices,’ the nuclear-weapons testers will destroy us all. To allow their rationales to dissuade us from opposition is to give them permission to incinerate the world.”
At the time, it never occurred to me that gradual heating, due mostly to carbon emissions sent into the atmosphere, could devastate the world, too. My visit to the Nevada site took place a year before Al Gore, then a member of the House of Representatives, convened the first-ever congressional hearing on global warming in 1981. Bill McKibben’s pathbreaking book on the subject, The End of Nature, appeared in 1989. Since then, the escalating catastrophe of human-caused climate change has become all too clear to those paying attention.
Two Existential Threats — Unrelated or Twins?
“Nearly all major global climate datasets agree that, in 2024, human-caused global warming for the first time pushed Earth’s average surface temperature to more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average for a full calendar year, a level that countries around the world had agreed to do all they could to avoid,” Inside Climate News reported as this year began. Seven years ago, an authoritative scientific study “showed that warming beyond that limit threatens to irreversibly change major parts of the physical and biological systems that sustain life on Earth, including forests, coral reefs and rainforests, as well as oceans and their major currents.” It threatens, in short, to create what might be thought of as a climate-change heat wave on Planet Earth.
Meanwhile, the risks of a nuclear holocaust keep worsening.
A 2022 study estimated that “more than 5 billion could die from a war between the United States and Russia.” Detonating just a small percentage of the world’s nuclear weapons (which are now in the possession of nine countries) would cause “nuclear winter.” Writing in Scientific American last month after nuclear-armed India and Pakistan almost went to war, Rutgers University environmental sciences professors Alan Robock and Lili Xia explained:
“A nuclear war between India and Pakistan would produce smoke from fires in cities and industrial areas. That smoke would rise into the stratosphere, the atmospheric layer above the troposphere where we live, which has no rain to wash out the smoke. Our research has found that the smoke would block out the sun, making it cold, dark and dry at Earth’s surface, choking agriculture for five years or more around the world. The result would be global famine.”
I asked Robock whether he knew of efforts by the climate movement and groups focused on nuclear weapons to work together. “I don’t know of any,” he said. Noting that “nuclear war would produce instant climate change,” Robock added: “Global warming is real and already happening, whereas it has been 80 years since the last nuclear war. And that one produced horrific direct impacts of blast, fire, and radiation, but not climate change. Radioactivity is still the predominant fear from nuclear war… but nuclear winter would affect those far removed from the blast, and there are no direct examples to show people, except for famines produced by other causes.”
Since early in this century, Ted Glick has devoted himself largely to climate activism, with a dedication that has included long fasts. Some groups concentrating on peace or climate have begun to engage in joint efforts, he told me, “but there’s very little specific interactions that I know of when it comes to nuclear weapons, as distinct from a broader peace and anti-war focus, and the climate crisis.”
About the possibility of nuclear winter, he added:
“It could be said that it’s the ultimate climate issue because if it happened, the world’s climate would be probably unlivable for most if not all human beings and most other life forms for a very long time. However, the fact that, despite nuclear weapons existing for 80 years, there has never been since Hiroshima and Nagasaki any use of them is certainly one big reason why others of us aren’t prioritizing it. What is very clear is the threat to the world’s ecosystems and societies of continued societal dominance by the fossil-fuel industry. That is a much more certain existential threat. There is no question that if the world doesn’t decisively shift within years, not decades, away from fossil fuels, break its power over governments, the risk of worldwide ecological and social devastation is, imho, a certainty.”
Depending on Context
When I asked John J. Berger, author of the recent book Solving the Climate Crisis, to what extent nuclear winter should be viewed as a climate issue, he replied: “It depends on how the issue is contextualized. But in general, I wouldn’t confuse anthropogenic climate change stemming from fossil-fuel use with nuclear winter stemming from nuclear war. They are two distinct issues, although both impact the climate.”
Yet current literature from the Council for a Livable World emphasizes connections:
“There are two serious threats to all life on earth: nuclear war and climate change. Both are existential, both are preventable, and both are inextricably linked through their reciprocal effects on each other. Climate change is generating conflict and instability in areas where the risk of nuclear proliferation is already high, and any use of nuclear weapons would have disastrous effects on an already fragile environment. By acknowledging the link between these two issues, we can advocate for more action on both.”
The Union of Concerned Scientists and Physicians for Social Responsibility are among the few sizeable national groups that focus in a significant fashion on both climate change and nuclear weapons. Martin Fleck recently left PSR after working for the organization for 27 years, including as director of its Nuclear Weapons Abolition Program. “The strongest connection between climate and disarmament activism is this,” he said. “Climate science and abundant climate indicators show us that planetary human survival depends upon a rather dramatic paradigm shift from the current status quo and the way we are living as a species. The paradigm shift will necessarily include abandoning current, outrageous levels of military spending, military activity, and threats.”
He then added, “Nuclear winter is not a climate issue and I do not think it should be viewed as a climate issue… However, advances in climate science led to our current understanding of nuclear winter and nuclear famine, and the people who have led the way have been climate scientists. So I guess it is fair to say that nuclear winter and nuclear famine models reside in the realm of climate science.”
Working in a state beset with intensive nuclear industries ever since the Los Alamos laboratory opened secretly in 1943, Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, had a one-word answer when I asked about relationships, communication, or joint efforts between the climate movement and groups focused on nuclear weapons: “Nonexistent.”
Nuclear winter, he said, “hasn’t been viewed as a climate issue at all. It is, of course, the ultimate climate-changer, should nuclear war break out.”
Carbon and Fission
In California, the Tri-Valley CAREs organization has worked for more than 40 years scrutinizing and challenging the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which was founded in 1952, mainly to develop the hydrogen bomb. Scott Yundt, the group’s executive director, told me that “nuclear winter should absolutely be viewed as a climate issue. It represents one of the most severe and abrupt potential disruptions to global ecological systems. Yet in many mainstream climate narratives, it’s rarely discussed. Perhaps this is because nuclear winter is perceived as hypothetical or tied to geopolitical scenarios rather than immediate climate threats.”
He then added:
“Within coalitions made up of frontline communities, including those impacted by the oil and gas industry, toxic waste, and uranium mining, there is a strong and growing understanding of the deep systemic links between these issues and our work in Livermore. We see clear consensus around themes like environmental racism, government secrecy, the lack of meaningful community engagement, and the disproportionate burdens placed on low-income and Indigenous communities. In those spaces, nuclear weapons are not seen as separate from the climate struggle. They’re considered part of the same legacy of environmental violence and extractive industry. There’s solidarity and shared purpose among those of us directly impacted. However, we’ve also noticed that mainstream climate organizations and funders often treat nuclear issues as fringe or outside the scope of ‘climate’ work… This disconnect can be frustrating, especially when the communities we work with are living through the environmental fallout of nuclear activities and see those harms as deeply entangled with climate injustices.”
Basav Sen, director of the Climate Policy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, said that anti-nuclear and climate activists “both confront the same long-standing pattern of extractive environmental racism, which treats Indigenous, Black, Brown, and poor communities, and the land, water, and air they depend on, as disposable. In the southwestern U.S., the Pacific islands, and many other parts of the world, the very same communities who have been exposed to toxic radioactivity because of uranium mining and processing, nuclear weapons testing, and nuclear waste disposal, are also facing air and water pollution from fossil fuel extraction and burning, and from the consequences of fossil fuel burning such as droughts, wildfires, superstorms, and rising oceans.”
Yet, despite the convergence of those issues, Sen commented, “the degree of collaboration between these movements at the national and international level has not been significant. Locally and regionally, however, frontline communities impacted by climate change and by the nuclear weapons and nuclear energy supply chain have been consciously fighting these two systemic issues together.”
Since the mid-1980s, Jackie Cabasso has served as executive director of Western States Legal Foundation, one of the main groups tenaciously organizing against the Livermore lab. “Organizations such as my own have made serious efforts to reach out to climate activists since at least 2008,” she told me, adding that the outcomes have usually been disappointing. “From my perspective, the relationships, communications, and joint efforts have been mostly one-sided, with nuclear disarmament activists reaching out to climate activists and very little reciprocity.”
In addition, she has seen that “the climate movement generally seems to avoid addressing the climate impacts of wars and militarism. This is the case even though some individuals, and even some organizations, are involved in both sets of issues.”
A longtime leader of the Physicians for Social Responsibility chapter in the San Francisco area, Robert M. Gould, has devoted most of his national and regional work to climate change and related issues of environmental health. “While there has been an advance among organizations through the years on issues referable to environmental justice, there has been no significant uptake on issues of war/peace, nuclear weapons,” he wrote in an email. Gould added that, although nuclear winter “is a critical existential issue, there has been at most minimal uptake by the environmental movement, as with nuclear weapons and militarism in general.”
He also cited a major generational divide: “There are very few younger people involved in the anti-nuclear movement.”
Analyzing and Organizing
In the United States, the forces that have done so much to heat the planet and drive the nuclear arms race are today stronger than ever. The power of great wealth and huge corporations got us where we are now, with an escalating assault on nature and an unfathomable threat to humanity. Whatever connections (and differences) might exist between the ongoing war on the climate and the nonstop arrangements for possible nuclear annihilation, the superstructure making it all possible is right in front of us. Gauging its true dimensions is crucial for coming up with more strategic approaches.
These days, fatalism is an understandable feeling, but what’s truly needed is far greater support for activism. Organizers, whether for climate or against nuclear weapons, routinely face daunting obstacles. Funding is in short supply. The politics in Washington are, quite obviously, the worst in memory. And as activists struggle to make an impact, mainstream media outlets habitually skim the surface or, more likely, ignore the issues completely.
Media blind spots include the fact that military industries are big contributors to the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, while the Pentagon uses more fossil fuel than any other institution on the globe. And the U.S. government’s destabilizing war policies in the Middle East — where flashpoints could set off a nuclear war — are directly tied in with Washington’s perennial quest for ever more profitable access to the massive oil reserves in the region. Even if unwilling to directly address the dangers of nuclear weapons, the climate movement could do more to challenge a foreign policy that boosts both carbon emissions and the risk that rampant militarism could end up triggering nuclear winter.
With adversaries in common, the climate movement and activists for nuclear disarmament have an unexplored potential to work together. In profound ways, they could become effective allies in helping to save the world from unimaginable disasters.
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Canada Rebukes Trump—But That May Just Be the Start of Mark Carney's Role in History
I’ve been watching Carney for a long time and there's a few things you should know about this man, especially as the U.S. president tries to drag the world back onto the dead-end street of fossil fuels.
Apr 29, 2025
I want to tell you today about two potential bright spots.
The most obvious joy, of course, came last night in Canada, where citizens of the not-51st-state rejected a Trump-lite figure named Pierre Poilievre (who had been leading by 23 points on January 20!) and instead elected Mark Carney to lead their country. This has been correctly interpreted by all as a reaction to the ham-handed bullying of the canned ham currently resident in the White House. But though he was elected a little by accident (albeit after a brilliant campaign) it means something far more: in Carney we now have the world leader who knows more than any of his peers about climate change. And who knows roughly twenty times as much about climate and energy economics as anyone else in power. He may turn out to be a truly crucial figure in the fight to turn the climate tide.
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I’ve been watching Carney for a long time. A graduate, of course, of both Harvard and Goldman Sachs, he was governor of the Bank of Canada during the 2008 financial crisis and performed admirably enough that the queen asked him over to run the Bank of England. (It’s probably not quite how that works, but close enough). While in that job, he had the fun of trying to deal with the UK’s Brexit decision, and by all accounts again performed better than one might have expected. So now he gets the task of cleaning up after Trump’s insane tariffs.
But actually it’s the much bigger mess—the one in the atmosphere—that I suspect has long interested him most. In 2014, at a World Bank panel, he quite forthrightly pointed out that we would need to leave the “vast majority” of fossil fuel reserves in the ground if we were at all serious about holding the increase in the temperature of the planet below two degrees. This was, on the one hand, clearly obvious to anyone who had looked at the physics, but on the other hand not something that most leaders were willing to say at the time, or to this day. Those of us who had recently launched the fossil fuel divestment campaign found it to be a great boost—one of three or four crucial moments that turned this into one of the largest anti-corporate campaigns in history.
A year later, wearing a tux and speaking at an opulent dinner to the “names” who run the premier insurance brokerage Lloyds of London, Carney went further, giving one of the most important speeches of the climate era. It is well worth reading in its entirety, but here is the crucial section
Climate change is the Tragedy of the Horizon.
We don’t need an army of actuaries to tell us that the catastrophic impacts of climate change will be felt beyond the traditional horizons of most actors – imposing a cost on future generations that the current generation has no direct incentive to fix.
That means beyond: - the business cycle; - the political cycle; and - the horizon of technocratic authorities, like central banks, who are bound by their mandates.
The horizon for monetary policy extends out to 2-3 years. For financial stability it is a bit longer, but typically only to the outer boundaries of the credit cycle – about a decade.
In other words, once climate change becomes a defining issue for financial stability, it may already be too late.
This talk came in the run-up to the Paris climate talks, and it was one important reason they succeeded; Carney’s sober warning, and his insistence on the need for disclosure by countries and companies of their emissions, helped smooth the way for what is still the high water mark of climate progress.
And the next year, in 2016, he gave the Arthur Burns Memorial Lecture in Berlin. Again, it is worth reading in its entirety, but for a man who is now fully a politician, here is an important passage.
Underpinning the Paris Agreement is recognition that the stock of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere should not exceed the remaining carbon budget, which according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) amounts to 1000 gigatonnes of CO2 from 2011 onwards.
Countries have set their ambitions by submitting their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). At present, these commitments are of varying degrees of specificity, and most still need to be fleshed out to be consistent with the aggregate carbon budget. The Paris Agreement requires that NDCs be updated regularly and that each should be a progression on the last.
Crucially, the Paris Agreement provided an objective assessment that, even if all of the policies implied by the Agreement were implemented, global temperatures would rise by at least 2.7 degrees by 2100. In other words, the world has committed to do something, but not yet enough to meet its stated goals.
The man who said those clear and bold words now finds himself leading a nation hard hit by climate change: Canada has a front row seat the melt of the Arctic, which is the fastest-heating part of the earth; it has watched its boreal forests burn like never before in recent years.
But the man who said those bold words also finds himself leading a nation that contains Alberta, whose vast pool of tarsands makes its one of the biggest carbon deposits on planet earth.
His predecessor Justin Trudeau could never figure out how to square those facts, because they are not easy to square (and also because Trudeau was a nepo baby to the max). But also because he came into power at a moment when fossil fuel was still cheaper than renewable energy, and hence clearly valuable. Carney comes into power when that equation has flipped: we now live on a planet where wind and sun provide energy more cheaply than gas and oil (and where the sane if brutal superpower, China, has clearly figured that out). That fact may give him room to move his country decisively in the right direction.
So here’s the second good thing I wanted to talk about, one that underscores the point I’m trying to make about Carney’s opportunity.
Over the weekend, American officials were in London as part of a large International Energy Agency Summit on the Future of Energy Security. It wasn’t about climate, really, though it did begin with a letter from the King pointing out that “events over recent years have shown that, when well-managed, the transition to more sustainable energy systems can lead itself to more resilient and secure energy systems.”
The U.S. was having none of that. Our man—someone named Tommy Joyce whose biography points out that he has sailed his monohull across the Pacific ocean with his wife, so that’s good—used the occasion to criticize renewables because they depended on China. He recommended that everyone buy a lot of American LNG to power their countries instead. As he put it:
“A typical offshore wind turbine requires four tonnes of a permanent magnet made in the form of rare earth elements and, since China, the supplier of nearly all of them, restricted their sale, there are no wind turbines without concessions or coercion from China.”
Which, true enough. But if your point is that countries don’t want to rely on undependable foreign nations for their energy supply, have you noticed that America has gone crazy in the last hundred days? China is ruthless, but they’re not erratic. (And they’re busy shoring up their climate bona fides). No one was going to say so to his face, but Joyce was describing last year’s world.
More to the point, even if you need to rely on China to build your wind turbine or your solar panel, you need to rely on them once. Because once it’s up, then you’re relying on the wind, the sun, and your stock of batteries, all of which seem eminently more dependable than Donald Trump or J.D. Vance.
And so, as Politico put it, Joyce received a “shrug.”
Joyce’s speech was met with silence. The “awkward but unanimous” moment was “telling,” said one European official who was in the room.
Responding to Joyce’s comments, U.K. Energy Secretary Ed Miliband told POLITICO: “I think overall, I would say that the general tenor of these discussions indicates where people are going, which is toward a clean energy transition.”
The U.S. won’t want to hear that—Trump’s plan is all about “energy dominance” through our control of hydrocarbons. And he’s still got people buying into it: LNG exporter Woodside today announced a $17.5 billion investment in new export terminals, with its CEO exulting over its “asset lifespan of more tha forty years.” Trump will do his best to help—he’s essentially compelling Asian nations to sign up for more LNG contracts on the threat of being tariffed. But my guess is that countries will look to buy as little as they can get away with, while they build up their renewable portfolios as fast as they can. For instance, here’s what Barbados’ energy minister Lisa Cummins explained to the London summit:
She added that, as well as suffering from fossil fuels through the climate crisis, Barbados spent over $1 billion importing fossil fuels to generate electricity in 2024. The Caribbean country’s biggest fossil fuel suppliers are Trinidad and Tobago and the US, but it aims to generate all of its electricity from renewables in 2030, using solar, wind and battery storage.
In the very short run, Trump’s insanity may help Alberta—if I had no choice but to depend on LNG, I’d rather buy it from Carney’s Canada, confident that a longtime central banker realizes a deal is a deal. (He seems unlikely, say, to put judges in jail when they disagree with him). But over the slightly longer term the same logic applies to Canada as the U.S., and it all complements Carney’s original 2014 insight: this stuff needs to stay in the ground. It will wreck the climate, and now it will wreck your economy.
I’d say that the rest of the world is going to recognize Carney as the most likely person to midwife us through this transition. I think he’s not done playing a world-historical role, and for that if nothing else we can thank Donald Trump.
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Earth Action Day: Unleashing Our Power for Our Planet
Last year was a disaster for the planet and its people. In 2025, we must all strive to do so much better.
Apr 21, 2025
Tomorrow — Tuesday, April 22nd — will mark the 55th anniversary of Earth Day. The power of those 20 million voices that came out on the streets on that first Earth Day decades ago led the U.S. to create the Environemental Protection Agency and the first generation of environmental laws addressing clean air, clean water, and the threat of toxics.
Fast forward to today. Under the “Our Power. Our Planet” banner, EARTHDAY.ORG, the global organizer of Earth Day, is calling on people from all walks of life to join in “Earth Action Day”—an effort to once again mobilize people power to tackle the current generation of environmental crises.
Last year was a disaster for the planet and its people. According to NASA, 2024 was the warmest year since temperatures began being recorded in 1880. In the U.S. alone, there were 27 climate and weather events resulting in at least a billion dollars of damage — second only to 2023 with 28 such events.
While a number of factors have contributed to the increase in these catastrophic events, research demonstrates that "human-caused climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of certain types of extreme weather that lead to billion-dollar disasters—most notably the rise in vulnerability to drought, lengthening wildfire seasons in the Western states, and the potential for extremely heavy rainfall becoming more common in the eastern states.”
The news about plastic pollution is similarly dark. Earth Action reported that on last September 5 – Plastic Overshoot Day – the amount of plastic waste exceeded the capacity of waste systems to manage. An estimated 220 million tonnes of plastic waste were expected to be produced in 2024, with 66 percent of the population living in places where the amount of waste exceeds local capacity. While negotiation of a strong global treaty on plastics last year held forth the promise of handling some of these issues, negotiators failed to reach an agreement and the talks drag on while the industry continues to pollute year after year.
All of this is taking place in the face of increasing scientific news about the harmful impacts of plastics on humans and their health. World Wildlife Federation reported that humans could be ingesting up to 5 grams of plastic each week and a recent report found that high levels of plastics have been found in human brains. Additional research has shown that plastics are associated with everything from cancer to endocrine disruption, which can impair reproduction, growth, and cognitive abilities. Wildlife is also suffering, with plastic ingestion and entanglement contributing to starvation and strangulation, among other issues.
For years we have been told by the plastics industry that we can clean up and recycle our way out of this problem , but continued use of plastics however means continued use of fossil fuels and recycling has been demonstrated to be largely myth due to factors including quality degradation, contamination, and non-recyclable content.
What is the common thread of all these challenges facing our planet and the survival of its people ? The cause of all of these threats can be traced to one source: human greed and disregard.
But the encouraging and hopefully inspiring news is that the solutions to these problems also rest in the hands of the people. We have the collective power not only to protect our planet but also to improve lives and livelihoods.
The link between greenhouse gas emissions and climate change is now scientifically indisputable. According to the United Nations, fossil fuels make up 75% of greenhouse gas emissions and 90% of carbon dioxide emissions. The good news from the International Renewable Energy Agency is that 90% of global electricity can and should come from renewable sources by 2050.
Slowing the climate crisis is only one of many reasons to switch to renewables. Renewable energy prices are falling, and in most places of the world today, it is the least expensive option. Other benefits range from preventing unhealthy air associated with the burning of fossil fuels to creating up to 30 million jobs to supporting energy security.
Whether you choose to power your home or vehicle with renewable energy, support community solar, or call on government leaders for more research and investment, the options for taking action to accelerate the transition to renewables are many. Similarly, as consumers we can choose plastic-free products, demand a reduction in the use of plastics from businesses, while at the same time pressuring government leaders to reduce production globally, end the use of toxic ingredients, and improve waste management systems.
So this Earth Action Day exercise your power! We need to demonstrate to our leaders in government and business that we are still here, we are a witness to their actions, and we will hold them accountable to do right by our planet and its people.
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Donald J. Trump, President of Bankruptcy and Decline
On living in the burn-baby-burn world of this monstrous individual.
Apr 08, 2025
From childhood, I think I had some eerie sense of just how bad it could get in America. After all, in junior high and high school, I was riveted by this country’s Civil War. Among all my toy soldiers — cowboys and Indians, British marching troops in red jackets, and plastic Army-green World War II soldiers (from my father’s war) — and those Landmark Books on American history that I piled up on my floor to create hills and valleys where I could play out the cowboy and Indian ambushes and battles I had seen at local movie theaters, my favorites were always the blue and grey lead soldiers of the Union and Confederacy, including Commanding General Ulysses S. Grant on a horse. (He’s still in the saddle on a small shelf beside the computer where, almost 70 years later, I’m writing this.)
In those days, thanks to my parents, I also subscribed to the history magazine American Heritage, whose editor was Bruce Catton, while, in my spare time, I feverishly read the Civil War histories for which he won a Pulitzer Prize. (I still have my ancient copies of Glory Road, This Hallowed Ground, and A Stillness at Appomattox.) At some point in those youthful years, my father even drove me to Gettysburg to see firsthand the site of perhaps the most crucial and devastating battle of that war.
I don’t think I ever truly imagined, though, what it might be like for this country to be at its own throat again, especially in the eerily strange way it is today. I never dreamed that the world I grew up in (despite Senator Joe McCarthy) could truly ever — yes, ever — begin to come apart at the seams. And yet, at this very moment, that very country, the United States of America, is at the edge of who really knows what, but nothing — I can guarantee you — that our children or grandchildren would be thrilled to play out on the floors of their rooms (or even their video screens). In truth, how in the world would you play Donald J. Trump and crew? To my surprise, I find that there are indeed Trump toys and an Elon Musk bobblehead, and even — can you believe it? — a Pete Hegseth action figure (or am I being conned?). Still, tell me how, on the floor of your childhood room, you would sort out Trumpworld and an America that appears to be coming apart at the seams, not in ancient history but right before our eyes on a planet where the same distinctly holds true.
“Drill, Baby, Drill”
I don’t know who the Bruce Catton of the future will be or what he or she (or, yes, in the age of Trump, they) might write, but I do know that there will be no Bull Run, no Gettysburg or Appomattox, no glory on that distinctly unglorious road to… well, who knows what. Count on one thing, though: it ain’t going to be pretty.
No, Donald Trump isn’t Jefferson Davis (and he certainly isn’t Abraham Lincoln), nor is he even, I suspect, a Benito Mussolini or Adolf Hitler in the making. He’s distinctly his own strange and strangely disturbed character. He’s the man who, until he was suddenly elevated to the presidency, was known mainly for being the host of the TV show, The Apprentice, in which contestants battled for jobs in his companies (“You’re fired!”), while he pulled in the dough; for a series of books written in his name by others; and, of course, for overseeing six companies that, with remarkable consistency, all went bankrupt before he was elected — yes! — president of the United States! Elected a second time no less, even after having been told “You’re fired!” by American voters in 2020. Under the circumstances, in the Trumpworld of this moment, no one should be surprised if bankruptcy once again becomes a subject of interest.
Think of him, in fact, as President Bankrupt. Though I have no way of knowing whether he’ll literally bankrupt this country as he and Elon Musk attempt to take it apart at the seams (while globally putting tariffs of all sorts on a striking variety of goods and sending the stock market plunging), there is indeed something distinctly bankrupt about the world he represents.
And in that sense of bankruptcy, he’s a far less singular figure than he so often seems. After all, in my grown-up lifetime, the way was prepared for Donald Trump in a striking fashion, whether you’re talking about making war on this planet (in this century, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.) or all too literally making war on this planet. We’re talking, of course, about the man who won the presidency the second time around on the slogan “drill, baby, drill,” and whose representatives are now doing their damnedest to take apart the Environmental Protection Agency, not to speak of the environment itself. In the end, loud as he is, however incessantly he babbles on, he may be overseeing a future “stillness,” if not at Appomattox, then across this planet itself.
Like every American president since George W. Bush invaded Afghanistan in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, President Trump is now engaged in his own war (guaranteed to end in a fashion no better than the others of this century), this time in Yemen. He’s already sworn that the bombing campaign he recently launched there (though Joe Biden’s administration did some of the same) won’t end anytime soon. As he put it, “I can only say that the attacks every day, every night… have been very successful beyond our wildest expectations… We’re going to do it for a long time. We can keep it going for a long time.” A long time, indeed, before there is ever again a stillness in Yemen.
And sadly, when it comes to wars, that’s the least of it for Donald Trump (and the rest of us). After all, though it’s seldom thought of that way, he’s at war with the planet in a fashion that’s no less brutal than what he’s now doing in Yemen. Of course, to put him in a proper wartime context, humanity is now essentially engaged in World War III (though no one thinks of it that way) on this planet, at least as a livable place for us and so many other species. And in that war, President Trump is distinctly a warrior first-class of a devastating sort.
In fact, just imagine for a moment, on that toy floor in your brain, how Americans could twice elect (slim though those majorities were) a man whose most significant “plank” in the last election was indeed the phrase “drill, baby, drill” and the promise that he would essentially fight the slightest attempt to bring this already desperately overheating planet of ours under any sort of control. He would instead do his damnedest to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency as a functional workplace, while “walking away from virtually every important climate policy on the books.” (After all, why would anyone want to protect the environment in which we all live???) He is, of course, also doing away with any efforts to deal with climate change, including almost instantly reversing some of Joe Biden’s relatively modest attempts to respond to global warming. Instead, he’s preparing to go all out to take the country that already produces more oil than any other on Earth (or in history), and also exports more natural gas than any other, into a blazing future.
Nothing is too remote for him to take a hammer to, not when it comes to the climate. His administration has even typically ended “a flagship foreign aid program to support renewable energy projects and increase electricity access across Africa” run by the now largely dismantled U.S. Agency for International Development. And all of what he’s done so far is only the beginning of what should be considered his climate war — which will also be a war against the rest of us and, above all else, against the future.
Despite the progress that has indeed been made globally when it comes to producing clean energy, the use of greenhouse-gas-producing fossil fuels remains on the rise on Planet Earth, even without Donald Trump in the White House. Now, of course, he’s intent in his own striking fashion and — the second time around this is indeed an appropriate word — tradition on bankrupting the planet itself as a livable place for the rest of us. And yes, he did indeed oversee those six bankruptcies earlier in his life, but historically they will prove to be nothing compared to the bankruptcy he’s likely to oversee in the next three years and nine months before he leaves office (if he does), while saying, “You’re fired!” to the American people and the world. In a country that distinctly seems to be coming apart at the seams — if not in a literal civil war, then in some kind of civil dissolution — think of him indeed as President Bankrupt (and that bankruptcy is going to play out on Planet Earth in a way that might once have been unimaginable).
Down, Down, Down
Not surprisingly, Donald Trump has already spent the first days of his second term in office, as Robert Reich put it recently, attempting “to intimidate lawyers, law firms, universities, the media, and every other institution of civil society.” And just to add one more thing to that list, he’s doing his best to devastate this planet.
The Earth is already feeling the heat. In 2024, the hottest year on record, according to the U.N.’s World Meteorological Organization (though these days you can say that of more or less any year, since the last 10 have been the hottest ever), there were a record 151 extreme weather events — heatwaves, floods, and storms — planet-wide that were worse than any previously recorded in whatever regions they hit. Take that in for a moment and then think about the fact that Donald Trump won the 2024 election by what may prove to be the most devastating 1.6% of the vote in history.
Madness, right? Imagine what those extreme weather figures might look like three years and nine months from today, after ever more record heat. And then try to imagine what books your grandchildren (or mine) might be reading in their rooms some years from now: The Road to Hell? This Damned Earth? A Stillness at [you fill in the blank, but be sure to make it loud and terrifying]?
Think of Donald Trump, then, not only as President Bankrupt, but President Decline. After all, he’s the leader of the country that, only 30-odd years ago, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, was considered the “lone superpower” on planet Earth and now is anything but. In that sense, Donald Trump represents something that might be considered old hat in this world of ours: the decline of empire. After all, the country that once, all too long ago, was led by a crew that liked to think of themselves as “the best and the brightest” is now led by a crew that could certainly qualify as the worst and the dumbest, and seems intent on creating an America that will prove to be a bankruptcy first class.
Not that there’s anything strikingly new about that in the history of empires. What’s new, of course, is that Donald Trump may, in his own fashion, be overseeing and intensifying a planetary bankruptcy as well, a kind of decline and fall that until now hasn’t been part of the human experience.
Of course, it’s possible that public opinion might just be starting to turn against him and the Republicans. And the civil-war-style mood might even be toning down a bit (though I wouldn’t count on that). Nonetheless, it’s not happening faintly soon enough to matter on a planet already heating to the boiling point.
For the foreseeable future, unfortunately, we will all be living in a burn-baby-burn world whose climate will be set by that expert in bankruptcies, Donald J. Trump.
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