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renewable energy
Trump Cares More About Growing Fossil Fuel Profits Than Shrinking Your Energy Bill
Many things the Trump administration does are simply designed to waste energy, because that is good for the incumbent producers, i.e. Big Oil.
May 20, 2025
It would be tempting to dismiss U.S. President Donald Trump’s many functionaries as idiots, because many of them are. Here, for instance, is a transcript of leaked audio from a recent staff meeting led by acting Federal Emergency Management Agency director David Richardson, a man with no experience in disaster management (but who did write what the reliable Kate Aronoff described as a bad autobiographical novel with the inspired title War Story). Anyway, put yourself in the place of the FEMA staff hearing this highly relatable anecdote:
The other day I was chatting with my girlfriend, she's from Texas. She's got like huge red hair. Like, she's from Texas. And I said something and she said, well, you know, oh, I know what it was. I said, how come it takes so long to drive 10 hours from Galveston to Amarillo? And she said, well, you know, Texas is bigger than Spain. I didn't know that. So I looked at the map. Texas is huge! I mean, if you put it in the middle of Europe, it takes up most of Europe up. However, they do disaster recovery very, very well, and so does Florida, okay. So, we should be able to take some lessons learned on how Florida and Texas do their disaster recovery, we’ve got to spread that around and get other folks do it some way. And there should be some budgeting things that they have, I bet. I bet Gov. [Greg] Abbott has a rainy day fund for fires and tornadoes and disasters such as hurricanes, and he doesn't spend it on something else.
But if there’s endless idiocy at work (some of it as cover—if I was taking flak for my $400 million flying bribe I’d start tweeting about Taylor Swift and Bruce Springsteen too), there’s also a kind of underlying feral cunning. All the stupid stuff heads in the same direction.
For example, the administration announced earlier this month it would get rid of the Energy Star program, which rates various appliances by their efficiency so that consumers (and landlords and building owners) can make wise choices.
“The Energy Star program and all the other climate work, outside of what’s required by statute, is being de-prioritized and eliminated,” Paul Gunning, the director of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Office of Atmospheric Protection, told employees during the meeting, according to the recording obtained by The New York Times. Mr. Gunning’s office itself is also slated for elimination.
This is a program begun by Republicans—former EPA administrator William K. Reilly wrote a fond reminiscence yesterday for The Washington Post, who pointed out that if you were actually worried about, say, waste, then this would be the last program to cut:
The program costs $32 million in annual federal outlays to administer but has saved consumers $200 billion in utility bills since 1992—$14 billion in 2024 alone. The averted air pollution, which was the EPA’s initial objective, has been considerable, equivalent to the emissions of hundreds of thousands of cars removed from the road.
But what if you wanted to burn more fossil fuel? What if you wanted to stretch out the transition to cheap, clean renewable energy? Well then it would make a lot of sense.
Or take last week’s news, from EPA administrator Lee Zeldin, who vowed that he would eliminate the “start-stop” technology in cars because “everyone hates it.” This feature keeps your car from idling at stoplights—when you tap the accelerator the car turns back on. It’s not mandatory for carmakers, and drivers can turn it off with a button. But, as Fox News points out,
The feature can improve fuel economy by between 4% and 5%, previous EPA estimates showed. It also eliminated nearly 10 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions per year as of 2023.
Meanwhile, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, according to excellent reporting in Heatmap News Friday, is taking federal money designed to convert a steel plant to electricity and hydrogen and instead using it to convert the steel plant to… the fossil fuel it’s already using. The company, its CEO explained, is working with the Department of Energy (DOE) to “explore changes in scope to better align with the administration’s energy priorities,” and those priorities, of course, are to use more energy.
Occam’s Razor, I think, would lead us to say that many things the Trump administration does are simply designed to waste energy, because that is good for the incumbent producers, i.e. Big Oil. That’s not a particularly sophisticated rule for understanding their actions, but remember: Trump was bankrolled by the fossil fuel industry, and that industry has always wanted us to waste energy. Remember all that endless Trump nonsense about low-flow shower heads? They cut the use of hot water by about 40%. Ditto incandescent bulbs, which use 75-90% more energy, and which Trump is trying to bring back. It’s strange to be pro-waste, but there you are. This administration is garbage in every way.
That all of this costs consumers money is obvious—but we don’t really pretend to care about consumers any more. Remember: two dolls and five pencils apiece. No, the ultimate customer for the Trump administration is the oil industry. And really for the GOP as a whole: It became increasingly clear this week that the Republican congressional majority is all too willing to gut the Inflation Reduction Act, even though that will come at a big price to consumers, in its effort to help Big Oil.
And Big Oil is in trouble. Power demand in New England hit an all time low in late April, because so many homes now have solar panels on top. In, um, Saudi Arabia solar arrays are springing up left and right. Bloomberg’s David Fickling chronicles the “relentless” switch toward spending on clean energy, albeit too slowly to hit the most important climate targets. A new global poll of business executives found that 97% were eager to make the switch to renewable energy for their companies, on the grounds that
Electricity is the most efficient form of energy, and renewables-generated electricity a value-add to businesses and economies. In many countries, fossil fuels, with their exposure to imports and volatility to geopolitical shocks, are a liability. For business, this isn’t just inconvenient. It’s dangerous. Volatility drives up costs, turns strategic planning into guesswork, and delays investment.
That’s how sensible people with sensible goals—like making their businesses work, think. But it’s exactly the opposite of how our government now imagines its role. The DOE put their strategy pretty plainly in a filing to the Federal Register last week: Their goal, they said, was “bolstering American energy dominance by increasing exports and subsequently the reliance of foreign nations on American energy.” If you’re a foreign government, that about sums it up: Either you can rely on the sun and wind which shine on your country, or you can rely on the incredibly unreliable U.S. China, meanwhile, is essentially exporting energy security, in the form of clean energy tech.
So the goal for the rest of us, as we resist Trump and resist climate change, is pretty clear: Do everything we can to speed up this transition to clean energy, here and everywhere. Solar works, solar is cheap, and solar is liberating.
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Climate Hope—and Wisdom—From Abroad
As Trump tacks tariffs onto films from “foreign lands,” we can still be inspired by other countries’ environmental visions, from China’s affordable electric vehicles to Germany’s balcony solar.
May 06, 2025
Every once in a while our mad king hits on an accidentally poetic turn of phrase in one of his strangely punctuated missives. In one of this week’s movie-based announcements (not the one about reopening San Francisco’s notorious island prison, which apparently followed a showing of Escape From Alcatraz on the Palm Beach PBS station) (not PBS’ fault, support them here), he declared that he was henceforth “instituting a 100% Tariff on any and all Movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands.”
It was the last phrase—“foreign lands”—that attracted me; it conjures up European monarchs of earlier centuries dispatching sailors to see if fountains of youth or dragons or some such might be found off the edges of existing charts. (No, as it turned out, just Indigenous people who could be forced to part with their “foreign lands”). It’s a reminder that for Trump, and for many of us, a myopic focus on what’s happening here is a mistake, because we’ve long assumed that we’re at the head of the world. That unconscious supremacy—born in the actual enormous lead we had in living standards in the rubble of World War II—no longer makes much sense. So just a quick survey of what those funny people in other places are up to.
The rest of the English-speaking world seems set to keep moving forward into a working energy future. And the rest of Europe too.
Take China, emerging as Earth’s first electro-state. The Wall Street Journal had an excellent account this week of just how far our economies are diverging. Autos are a key piece of technology, one that produces both a large supply and technology chain, and a clue to a country’s identity. In America, Peter Landers, pointed out, the “standard family choice” is a $50,000 gas-fired SUV; in China,
A majority of new vehicles sold in China are either fully electric or plug-in hybrids, and a look around the recent auto show in Shanghai showed that local makers have mostly stopped introducing new gasoline-powered models. In the U.S., by contrast, the traditional combustion engine still powers about 8 in 10 new vehicles.
The price difference is overwhelming. Chinese car buyers no longer need to debate whether an EV can be made affordable, not when a decent starter model costs $10,000 and a luxury seven-seater with reclining massage chairs can be had for $50,000. Because of customer demand, even the low-end models come with advanced driver-assistance software.
Ten thousand dollars for a “decent starter model.” We’re not talking junk: “a new Toyota electric-powered sport-utility vehicle for about $15,000, complete with sunroof and cup holders.” Some of this comes because Chinese automakers are paid less (enough, however, to afford a new car); some of it comes from increasingly roboticized factories; and some of it comes from government subsidy. Because the government has decided it wants to own the future: Whose cars do you think are going to do better in, um, “foreign lands”? Bloomberg, in March, reported that Chinese automakers were “taking over roads from Brazil to South Africa”:
In South Africa, China-made vehicles account for nearly 10% of sales, or about five times the volume sold in 2019. In Turkey, Chinese brands claimed an 8% share in the first six months of 2024, up from almost none in 2022. In Chile, they have accounted for nearly a third of auto sales for several years running.
China sends more vehicles abroad than any other country, and its passenger car exports surged nearly 20% to 4.9 million in 2024 alone, according to the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers—from less than 1 million in 2020.
In Brazil,
Luiz Palladino, 61, an engineer who has owned GM and Honda vehicles in the past and currently drives a Haval H6 EV, compared the car with much more expensive luxury cars.
“The moment I got into the car I thought: It’s in line with BMWs, Audis, with top-notch car finishing,” he said. “It has everything I want.”
Ok, that’s China (where thanks to huge solar buildout the use of coal for electricity dropped 5% in the first quarter, even as electricity demand surged). Now let’s look at Britain, where humans first learned to burn fossil fuels in quantity in the 18th century. There, the Labor government is apparently set to announce that all new homes will come with solar panels up top.
Housebuilders would be mandated by law to install solar roof panels on new properties by 2027 under new rules, seen by The Times, which ministers have claimed would slash energy bills and reduce emissions.
The change was estimated to add about £3,300 to the cost of building a semi-detached or terraced house and just under £4,000 for a detached property.
However, it was expected that new homeowners would recoup the extra costs within four years, with an average three-bedroom semi-detached saving more than £1,000 a year on energy bills.
This makes eminent sense because
Fitting solar power during construction is much cheaper than adding it to older buildings, which requires costly scaffolding and often new wiring. The payoff will be lower bills for consumers and lower emissions from buildings, which have become the second-biggest carbon polluter after transport.
And it comes despite the efforts of former British Prime Minister (and current Saudi lobbyist) Tony Blair to scupper such advances. Keir Starmer has four more years on his electoral mandate; Canada’s Mark Carney five, and after last week’s smashing election win Australia’s Anthony Albanese has three; the rest of the English-speaking world seems set to keep moving forward into a working energy future. And the rest of Europe too.
In Germany, for instance, as many as 3 million apartments may now have “balcony solar” arrays, solar panels that can be bought for a few hundred euros at the equivalent of Home Depot, hung from the railing of your veranda, and plugged straight into the wall, where they provide a reasonable amount of power. As France 24 reported recently:
City authorities in Frankfurt gave Christoph Stadelmann, a 60-year-old teacher, half of the 650 euros ($676) he paid for his kit at the beginning of last year.
Stadelmann expects to make his money back within three years.
Mirjam Sax said she would recommend balcony solar panels in spite of Germany's sometimes grey weather.
"If you've got a balcony, if you've got a bit of sun, you can put up a panel or two to see if it's worth it," she said.
"It's easy, and there's a price for every budget."
You can’t do that in America, because our country has fallen behind these foreign lands. As Grist reported last week, Underwriters Laboratory, which certifies appliances, hasn’t bothered to do the work to approve the systems, which means they can’t legally be installed in most places.
These challenges will take time and effort to overcome, but they’re not insurmountable, advocates of the technology said. Even now, a team of entrepreneurs and research scientists, backed by federal funding, are creating these standards. Their work mirrors what happened in Germany nearly a decade ago, when clean energy advocates and companies began lobbying the country’s electrical certification body to amend safety regulations to legalize balcony solar.
In 2017, Verband der Elektrotechnik, or VDE, a German certification body that issues product and safety standards for electrical products, released the first guideline that allowed for balcony solar systems. While such systems existed before VDE took this step, the benchmark it established allowed manufacturers to sell them widely, creating a booming industry.
“Relentless individuals” were key to making that happen, said Christian Ofenheusle, the founder of EmpowerSource, a Berlin-based company that promotes balcony solar. Members of a German solar industry association spent years advocating for the technology and worked with VDE to carve a path toward standardizing balcony solar systems.
Happily, we have some “relentless individuals” here as well—Cora Stryker, for instance, who this year started Bright Saver—to bring the balcony technology to America. I talked with her at some length last week: I’ve stuck our exchange into question-and-answer format below
- Is America finally getting balcony solar!? Tell me about how you heard about this new development and got involved.
Yes! We’re already doing installations in the SF Bay Area and we are looking for early adopters to help us start a “balcony” plug-in solar movement in this country like the one we are seeing in Germany. As you know, plug-in solar isn’t just for balconies. It can go almost anywhere—in the backyard, the side of a house, in front of a garage, etc. My cofounders and I started Bright Saver because we believe that the benefits of producing clean energy at home should be available to everyone, not just homeowners with good roofs who can commit to spending $20-30k, although our system is also great for folks like me who have maxed out our rooftop solar capacity and want more power. Rooftop solar is all or nothing—what we are offering is a more modular, lower-commitment, more affordable, and versatile solar option as an alternative.
In this political climate, I think we are all looking for solutions that give the power to us, literally, rather than relying on government to solve climate.
I first heard about balcony solar when you started writing about it, actually! Then I met my cofounders Kevin Chou and Rupert Mayer—tech entrepreneurs who got the climate call—and I joined as the long-time climate advocate among us.
2) What's your hope for this project—how big can this get?
We can get big. Really big.
Seventy percent of Americans can’t get rooftop solar, but millions in that group want it. How can we produce more clean energy nationwide? We believe the solution is to address accessibility first, giving everyone an option to produce solar at home. This will give millions of Americans an option to become primary producers of their own energy, saving on electricity bills, and, we believe, bringing millions into the climate movement, giving us all hope that the power to address climate rests in our hands.
If we do this right, we follow in Germany’s footsteps, and produce several gigawatts of clean energy annually. However, unlike Germany, we can’t take the risk of letting it take 10 years to ramp up because we don’t have 10 years when it comes to climate. That’s why we started Bright Saver—to make this happen more quickly than it would on its own.
3) The U.S. has different wiring than Europe—explain if this is a problem and how it's overcome?
That’s been a structural—pun intended—concern for some time. In Europe, you can buy plug-in solar units at the grocery store for a few hundred Euros, plug them into the wall, and you’re done. Unfortunately, we can’t use those European systems because, as you point out, we have a 120-volt electrical system and most of Europe is on a 230-volt system.
Here, we are limited in the number of systems that are compatible with our electrical system and they are expensive and not easy to install. We exist to eliminate these barriers to adoption. For instance, as a nonprofit, we keep our prices low and we install the system, a complicated process that requires a licensed electrician.
My job is to put myself out of a job—if we jumpstart this movement now, we get more manufacturers into the game; competition drives down prices and increases ease of use, which stimulates more widespread adoption; and the virtuous cycle continues on market forces without us. In this political climate, I think we are all looking for solutions that give the power to us, literally, rather than relying on government to solve climate.
4) What do you need from local authorities to really make this happen?
We are primarily installing units in the backyard or front yard, where we believe permits are rarely a concern. I have young kids, and I can’t think of any parents who got a permit to put a trampoline or a slide in the backyard. Similarly, the 800 watt units we are installing are impermanent structures which you plug into an outdoor outlet like an appliance. They are half the electricity load of a hair dryer, and we include a smart power meter to make sure they never backfeed into the grid.
What we need is local and state legislation like what just passed unanimously in Utah. As you know, that legislation eliminates the ambiguity when it comes to mounted plug-in systems so folks can put them anywhere that is convenient for them. In fact, part of our nonprofit’s mission is to build a national coalition of advocacy groups to help pass such legislation in all 50 states—so please get in touch if you know groups that might want to join our coalition!
5) Why do you need donations to get this started?
Without donations, we stay small and grow slowly. I’ve been approached by several venture capitalists who say to me, you have huge market potential—let’s talk! But we want to keep lowering and lowering prices as we get bigger, not feeling the pressure of investors wanting us to raise prices and increase profits. We are a nonprofit because, well, w're not here to profit—we are here to bring solar to everyone who wants it.
We have a big vision to give all Americans the option to become energy independent. We plan to include home battery storage in the future, but we are only four months old, we have limited funding, and we need to start somewhere. Donating or becoming an early adopter will make it possible for us to stay true to our mission of serving everyone with solar energy and growing the climate movement so that every household of every means can start producing their own energy from the sun.
Many thanks to Stryker and her friends for getting this off the ground (and if you think it tickles me that she first read about the concept in this newsletter, then you’re right; that’s why I do this).
And here’s the thing. Though Americans aren’t used to it, there’s sometimes something useful in being behind all those other foreign lands. They’ve figured out what needs to happen, and all we have to do is copy. That’s what China did for decades—maybe it’s our turn. And now I’m going to go watch a bunch of foreign movies before the tariffs kick in.
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The Apocalyptic Don Takes a Hit out on the Earth
Trump’s immediate needs and desires, his urge to be the number-one person in this country and possibly the world, have functionally been wedded to the ultimate slow-motion destruction of this planet.
May 02, 2025
Yes, give us human beings credit. In our relatively brief history, it’s no small thing to have come up with two different ways of thoroughly devastating Planet Earth and its inhabitants. One of them, of course, is the long-term, slow-motion version of planetary destruction that we’ve come to call climate change. And yes, we can already feel it. In recent years, this planet has set record after record when it comes to heat, the last 10 years being the hottest in human history. Meanwhile, from the oceans to the continents, in heatwaves, floods, and devastating storms, this world of ours has been feeling the heat in an unprecedented fashion and, mind you, with far worse to come.
Given how obvious all of this has become, we should get full credit not just for creating such conditions but for—at least some of us—ignoring them or, in the case of Donald J. Trump, that pal of fossil-fuel billionaires, doing far worse than that. After all, my country, which has already played such a major role in intensifying climate change, thanks to its record-setting production of greenhouse-gas-producing crude oil—more than any country ever (yes, ever!)—and natural gas, has also managed to elect a climate-change-denying president for the second time. And he’s quite bluntly dismissed the phenomenon as a “scam” and a “hoax.”
Worse yet—I hate to use the word, so I’m putting it in quotation marks—“we” elected him on a platform of “drill, baby, drill!,” which was the very phrase he most wanted to be identified with in his third run for the presidency. You couldn’t be much blunter than that and still succeed, could you?
Yes, he may himself be a blowhard, but he certainly doesn’t want the wind to blow for the rest of us.
In truth, he undoubtedly should be called Apocalyptic Don, since his immediate needs and desires, his urge to be the number-one person in this country and possibly the world, have functionally been wedded to the ultimate slow-motion destruction of this planet. Consider it an irony of sorts that, in his second term in office, the president who is against immigrants—no matter that his mother was one—is already acting in a way that, by heating the planet further and driving ever more people from their increasingly devastated lands, will increase that phenomenon immeasurably.
Irony? Don’t even think it! Not with Donald Trump in the White House, not after we’ve just passed through Earth Day 2025 with a president who seems determined to un-Earth us all.
Honestly, that “drill, baby, drill” phrase of his couldn’t have been blunter, could it? And worse yet, unlike so much else that he’s said, he really meant it! Now that he’s back in the White House for a second time, he’s already doing his damnedest to increase drilling for oil and natural gas in the United States and globally, while he’s determined to bring back the worst of all greenhouse-gas producers, coal. And as if that weren’t enough, he’s been doing his damnedest as well to stop, if not humanity, then at least Americans from producing energy in ways that won’t pour yet more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. (Only his recent tariffs may stand in the way of his push to get oil companies to drill ever more.)
And hey, the president who hates “big, ugly windmills” has already been at work (if you don’t mind my using the word) torching wind-energy projects, including recently Empire Wind 1, which was to be the first major power project of its sort in a planned buildup of wind farms off the coast of New York State. Yes, he may himself be a blowhard, but he certainly doesn’t want the wind to blow for the rest of us, not if it in any way hurts the fossil-fuel industry (which put so many millions of dollars into his recent reelection campaign). And similarly, his administration is planning to place tariffs of up to 3,521% (no, that is not a misprint!) on solar panels imported from Southeast Asia. I mean, you get the idea, right?
Honestly, you couldn’t make this stuff up, could you? Or rather, once upon a time, if you had done so, no one would have believed you. And yet here we are, watching this planet on its way down, down, down, even if in a distinctly slow-motion fashion, with not just a single helping hand but at least two of them from the president of the United States. And if that isn’t apocalyptic, what is? In fact, it isn’t faintly unreasonable, when it comes to climate change, to call him (in Mafia terms) the Apocalyptic Don.
A World of Nukes
Of course, when you think about it, humanity could save itself from the long-term destructiveness of climate change in a remarkably easy fashion. All we would have to do is bring to bear on this planet the other form of ultimate destruction that has (in)humanity—that is, us—written all over it.
After all, when it comes to self-destruction, since August 6 and 9, 1945, when atomic bombs were dropped with devastating effect on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ending World War II, we humans have had the ability, then only potential but by the time of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis actual, to literally devastate this planet by creating what has come to be known as—forget global warming—a “nuclear winter.” We could by now destroy ourselves (or at least millions or even, over time, billions of us) with more or less the snap of a nuclear finger. Under the circumstances, consider it a largely unnoted and unmentioned miracle that, almost 80 years later, while such weaponry has spread far and wide, there has never been another Hiroshima- or Nagasaki-style catastrophe, no less one for Planet Earth itself (in terms of the potential destructiveness of such a nuclear winter and the large-scale global famine that would follow it).
Still, here’s the strange thing (or, in the age of Donald Trump, perhaps it would be safer to say, a strange thing): nuclear weapons and what they could do to this planet are distinctly not in the news anymore, with the sole exception not of the weaponry now possessed by nine countries—the United States, Russia, China, England, France, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea—but of the possible future nuclear arsenal of a nonnuclear power, Iran. In 2018, if you remember, Donald Trump tore up the nuclear deal by which that country had agreed never to make such weaponry, but he’s now back in negotiations with its leaders on a similar agreement.
What might the creature who has already devised two methods for devastating this planet come up with, in the future, that could prove no less (or even more) devastating?
And here’s the even stranger thing, so let me mention it a second time. Consider it the unmentioned miracle—yes, a genuine miracle—of our era (one otherwise remarkably lacking in them): In the nearly 80 years since that second atomic bomb devastated Nagasaki, while nuclear weapons have proliferated and grown potentially ever more devastating on Planet Earth, not one has ever been used again.
Here’s what makes that strange indeed, even possibly miraculous: Nuclear weapons aside, it seems as if, at any moment, some of us humans are always at war. At this moment, in fact, at least three devastating wars are underway—in Ukraine, Gaza and associated areas of the Middle East, and Sudan, two of them involving nuclear powers (Russia and Israel).
Today, such world-ending weaponry can still be delivered by plane as in 1945, or by land-based missiles, or missiles on submarines and, according to the Federation of American Scientists, there are now an estimated 12,331 nukes in the arsenals of the nine nuclear powers, ranging from 5,449 in Russia’s and 5,277 in the American one to, at the other end of the scale, 90 for Israel and 50 for North Korea.
And don’t for a second assume that those nine will be the last countries to create nuclear arsenals.
Think, for instance, of South Korea, facing a nuclear-armed North Korea, or, yes, Iran, facing a nuclear-armed Israel. And yet, except for the years when such weaponry was tested in the open or underground (something the Trump administration has at least considered doing again), not one has ever been used.
Of course, recently, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman said his country “reserved the right” to use what are now known as “tactical” nuclear weapons (most of which are significantly more powerful than the ones dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki) in his war on Ukraine, but so far at least that’s been an empty threat. And yes, China continues to build up its nuclear arsenal at a rapid pace, making it the third great nuclear power after the U.S. and Russia to have the fate of the Earth in its hands.
And when it comes to my own country, unlike with climate change, Donald Trump has long seemed distinctly anti-apocalyptic when it comes to such weaponry. As he once put it, “You could destroy the world 50 times over, 100 times over. And here we are building new nuclear weapons, and”—referring to Russia and China—“they’re building nuclear weapons.” In a 2018 summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, he even called such weaponry “the biggest problem in the world” and has long warned of the possibility of a devastating “World War III.”
But no matter, the country he now rules (more or less) is still spending $75 billion annually and, as of now, planning to spend $1.7 trillion over the next 30 years to update or—the term of the day—“modernize” the American nuclear arsenal, while Russia and China are both working to update or, in China’s case, vastly expand theirs.
If you stop to think about it for a moment, that our world has not been devastated by nuclear weapons should, under the circumstances, be considered little short of miraculous.
Nuclear Winter or Climate-Change Summer?
Oh, and in case you feel relieved that, after so many decades, humanity hasn’t destroyed itself, despite having the ability to do so, take a breath. After all, it’s increasingly possible that, at some future moment, this planet could be blown apart without human beings initially doing much of anything. Yes, I’m thinking about artificial intelligence (AI), or worse yet, artificial general intelligence (AGI). After all, American military commanders like Air Force General Anthony J. Cotton are already talking about how “AI will enhance our decision-making capabilities” when it comes to nuclear weaponry and, even though he also warns that we should never allow AI to make nuclear decisions for us, letting another “intelligence” loose in the nuclear realm seems anything but a safe or sound thing to do.
Indeed, who knows what a future independent intelligence might decide to do with such weaponry on this planet of ours?
And there’s another thing that’s seldom thought about: What might the creature who has already devised two methods for devastating this planet come up with, in the future, that could prove no less (or even more) devastating? After all, there’s no reason to believe that there are only two conceivable ways to do in a world like ours.
Consider all of this, after a fashion, both a story of epic failure and, at least in the case of nuclear weapons, strange success.
Still, isn’t it odd that, although we don’t often think about it, at any moment we live on the edge of ultimate destruction, whether immediately via a nuclear war or in a long-term fashion via a slow-motion version of the destruction of this planet, leading not to nuclear winter but to what might be thought of as climate-change summer? And yet, while the reality of climate change has at least led to major protests in recent times, the continued nuclear arming of this country and the planet has not.
Consider all of this a strange mixture of epic failure and eerie success in a world that—thank you, Donald Trump (but by no means just him)—is becoming more deadly by the month.
Whether in the short or long run, we, our children, and our grandchildren stand an all-too-unreasonable chance of living on a failed planet.
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