Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

I was out taking my afternoon walk in mid-September, wearing only khakis, a shirt, and an undershirt, and instead of feeling chilly, I was working up a distinct sweat and being passed regularly by younger people in shorts and t-shirts. Yes, it was a mid-July-style day in the early fall and while that might have been possible anytime in my life, it certainly was anything but typical.

I’m already 82 years old, which means my time on this planet of ours is limited. Still, I worry. When I’m with my grandkids, I sometimes try to imagine what their world might be like years (even decades) after I’ve left the scene — and it scares the hell out of me. And believe me, I use that word, “hell,” advisedly, given the overheating of this planet that we’re already experiencing. After all, the August we just passed through was either the hottest month ever or tied for that honor and this summer in the United States, my very own country, was possibly the hottest in its history, or at least the last 132 years of record-keeping. Note, for instance, that the world’s rivers now seem to be slowly drying up. Phew! I’m already sweating and, worse yet, keep in mind that, given how we humans are broiling this planet, it’s just a start!

If, once upon a time, you had told me about this world of “ours” and “our” “President” (and yes, I do indeed think all three of those words should be in quotation marks here), I simply couldn’t have imagined it. (And I doubt anyone else could have either.) Once upon a time (again), it wouldn’t have even seemed like a bad joke. Back in the 1960s and early 1970s, during those Vietnam War years of horror and protest, bad as things might have appeared, I still couldn’t have imagined this — and by this, of course, I mean such an absurd personification of imperial decline occupying the White House in an overheating Washington, D.C.

Yes, I’m indeed thinking about “our” once all too literally unimaginable “president,” Donald J. Trump. He is (you won’t be surprised to learn) unlike any president I’ve ever experienced in every imaginable way except (sigh) one. After all, having claimed in his first term in office that, unlike so many presidents before him, he would never go to war, it turns out that he just couldn’t stop himself and, the second time around, launched a globally devastating war against Iran. It’s already played havoc with this planet’s oil and natural gas supplies (on, of course, our overheating planet and at a time when he’s done everything he could to limit the use of wind and solar power). Meanwhile, “his” military, like all militaries, continues to pour fossil fuels into the atmosphere in a ferocious fashion by making war quite disastrously in both Iran and Somalia right now. And on this planet of (again) “ours,” climate change has given war new meaning.

Making War on Planet Earth

I was born in wartime in July 1944 and in some way on this ever-stranger planet of ours, wartime seems never to have really ended. In fact, if anything, it’s expanded from war as we’ve always known it — think World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan once upon a time and today, Iran, Somalia, Ukraine, and in a seemingly never-ending fashion Gaza — into a climate war on the planet itself. (And mind you, I’m not even going to discuss artificial intelligence in this piece, since I think it’s too eerie and futuristic for this old guy’s less-than-artificial but aging intelligence even to grasp, except to know that it, too, simply can’t end well.)

On this planet, nothing, it seems to me, really makes much sense anymore. After all, how could it be that the land (and, of course, I mean China) that’s making and selling more green energy products than any other country (or even whole sets of countries) is also pouring more fossil fuels into the atmosphere than any other country (or even combinations of countries)? Does that make any sense at all? Not to me and yet here we are — and, of course, here I am — in a country that, all too unbelievably (or do I mean, all too believably?), elected a full-scale climate-change denier to the White House for a second time in 2024.

In truth, does anything really make much sense anymore on this planet? How, in this perilous moment of ours, atmospherically speaking, could three major leaders — Benjamin Netanyahu, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump — continue to preside over countries whose militaries, via never-ending wars, continue to pour greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in a brutal fashion? In fact, the damage they’re causing should give the concept of war new meaning — it being no longer just a war on other human beings but on this planet itself as a livable habitat for us all.

In 1945, my country came up with a method for destroying whole battlefields, whole cities, whole countries, even potentially our planet itself. I’m thinking, of course, about the two atomic bombs that devastated the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6th and 9th in 1945, killing more than 200,000 people and ending World War II. It was the first potentially world-ending form of weaponry and, naturally enough, there was no way that, in the end (or do I mean the beginning?), the U.S. could ever have monopolized such a devastating means of destruction.

Today, on planet Earth, there are at least nine countries with nuclear weaponry and an estimated 12,000 or so such weapons in our world, significant numbers of them far more powerful than the ones used to end World War II in the Pacific. And — count on it! — there will be more to come. Given the nature of us, in fact, consider it a genuine miracle that another one has never been used in war (though more than 2,000 have been tested in peacetime).

In a certain sense, however, that may not be true anymore. After all, if you think about it, climate change should be considered a slow-motion version of atomic warfare. Should you doubt that, just ask one of the living firefighters (14 of them having died recently) struggling to deal with remarkable wildfires in this country. By mid-September, roughly 54,400 such blazes had burned through more than 8.4 million acres, which, as the Guardian reported, was 149% of the 10-year average and the Trump administration was doing remarkably little to help those firefighters.

These days, such raging wildfires are even killing orangutans in Borneo. But don’t doubt this for a second: the increasingly severe fires, droughts, and famines on this ever-hotter planet of ours are going to be killing us, too, and in ever greater numbers. Count on it — and so much else as well!

And hey, under the circumstances, who could deny that this is the perfect moment for the Trump administration to be deploying weapons in space for the first time? (What could possibly go wrong?) “Our” president may already have his trigger finger on the button to release some of them (since, months ago, he posted images of himself that way with a towering mushroom cloud and the phrase “TARGET DESTROYED”). After all, who wouldn’t want us to act elsewhere just the way we continue to act on this planet?

This piece first appeared on Tom’s Substack.