This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
One thing you can count on: when it comes to world-ending possibilities on this planet of ours, nothing ever seems to get better. Consider it amazing that we humans, in our strange and remarkable version of ingenuity, have come up with not one but two ways to essentially wipe out everything that might matter to us on this planet (ourselves included). The first, atomic weaponry, which has been with us for almost 80 years now and is still spreading, offers a more or less instantaneous way of doing ourselves in. The other, climate change, represents a slow-motion version of ultimate disaster.
And as TomDispatch regular Norman Solomon reports today, those two ways (and those who are working to try to stop them) are now starting to blend, after a fashion -- and so they should, since the same creature managed to come up with both of them. Worse yet, last year, a near-majority of my fellow Americans managed to elect a president (again) backed by all those fossil-fuel billionaires, the very forces behind climate change. Donald J. Trump won with what quite literally was an apocalyptic "drill, baby, drill" campaign slogan and is now, for the second time, president of the country that produces more crude oil and exports more natural gas than anyplace else on earth. Meanwhile, of course, the U.S. has the second-largest nuclear arsenal on the planet and is planning to invest an estimated $1.7 trillion in "modernizing" it in the decades to come.
In a sense, it's hard to imagine a more devastating human reality than essentially opting for the ultimate end of your own species in a private voting booth (though, of course, India and Pakistan only recently skirted the edge of opting for that other way of doing this planet in, nuclear weapons, in a faceoff that ended just short of war). And, of course, in the age of Donald Trump, when it comes to climate change, that slow-motion apocalypse, the news isn't getting any better. After all, only recently, in the wake of the 10 hottest years in -- yes! -- human history, the World Meteorological Organization reported that, in the years to come, this planet could conceivably set a new record by experiencing 12 months that would be two degrees centigrade hotter than the average for the preindustrial era with all the devastation of record droughts, floods, storms, and wildfires that would undoubtedly go with it.
In truth, in 2025, we exist on what could well prove to be a failed planet and, in that context, let Solomon consider what at least some of us are trying to do about it. Tom
Is Nuclear Winter a Climate Issue?
The Ultimate Environmental Disasters Are Still Siloed
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.
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