[ As those Canadian wildfires suggest, we’re now living on a
new, not terribly recognizable, ever more perilous world in which not
just this country but Planet Earth itself is in decline. Climate
change is quickly becoming the climate emergency.]
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LIVING ON A SMOKE-BOMB OF A PLANET  
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Tom Engelhardt
June 15, 2023
TomDispatch
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_ As those Canadian wildfires suggest, we’re now living on a new,
not terribly recognizable, ever more perilous world in which not just
this country but Planet Earth itself is in decline. Climate change is
quickly becoming the climate emergency. _

A view from the George Washington Bridge in Fort Lee, New Jersey,
June 7, 2023., (Photo: Seth Wenig / AP // NBC Today)

 

As it turns out, it’s never too late. I mention that only because
last week, at nearly 79, I managed to visit Mars for the first time.
You know, the red planet, or rather — so it seemed to me — the
orange plane
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And take my word for it, it was eerie as hell. There was no sun, just
a strange orange haze of a kind I had never seen before as I walked
the streets of that world (well-masked) on my way to a doctor’s
appointment.

Oh, wait, maybe I’m a little mixed up. Maybe I wasn’t on Mars. The
strangeness of it all (and perhaps my age) might have left me just a
bit confused. My best hunch now, as I try to put recent events in
perspective, is that I wasn’t in life as I’d previously known it.
Somehow — just a guess — that afternoon I might have become a
character in a science-fiction novel. As a matter of fact, I had only
recently finished rereading Walter M. Miller,Jr.’s sci-fi
classic _A Canticle for Leibowitz_
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last visited in 1961 at age 17. It’s about a world ravaged by
humanity (using nukes, as a matter of fact) and, so many years later,
still barely in recovery mode.

I must admit that the streets I was traversing certainly looked like
they existed on just such a planet. After all, the ambience had a
distinctly end-of-the-world (at least as I’d known it) feel to it.

Oh, wait! I checked the news online and it turns out that it was
neither Mars, nor a sci-fi novel. It was simply my very own city, New
York, engulfed in smoke you could smell, taste, and see, vast clouds
of it blown south from Canada where more than 400 wildfires
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then burning in an utterly out of control, historically unprecedented
fashion across much of that country — as, in fact, all too many of
them still are. That massive cloud of smoke swamped my city’s
streets and enveloped
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most famous buildings, bridges, and statues in a horrifying mist.

That day, New York, where I was born and have lived much of my
life, reportedly had
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worst, most polluted air of any major city on the planet
— Philadelphia
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take our place the very next day — including an air quality index
that hit a previously unimaginable 484
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That day, my city was headline-making in a way not seen since
September 11, 2001. In fact, you might think of that Wednesday as the
climate-change version of 9/11, a terror (or at least terrorizing)
attack of the first order.

Put another way, it should have been a signal to us all that we —
New Yorkers included — now live on a new, significantly more
dangerous
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and that June 7th may someday be remembered locally as a preview of a
horror show for the ages. Unfortunately, you can count on one thing:
it’s barely the beginning. On an overheating planet where humanity
has yet to bring its release of greenhouse gasses from the burning of
coal, oil, and natural gas under any sort of reasonable control, where
summer sea ice is almost certain to be a thing of the past
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a fast-heating Arctic
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where sea levels are rising ominously and fires, storms, and droughts
are growing more severe by the year, there’s so much worse to come.

In my youth, of course, a Canada that hadn’t even made it to summer
when the heat hit record levels and fires began burning out of control
from Alberta in the west to Nova Scotia and Quebec in the east would
have been unimaginable. I doubt even Walter M. Miller, Jr., could have
dreamed up such a future, no less that, as of a week ago, 1,400%
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the normal acreage of that country, or more than 8.7 million acres,
had already burned (with so much more undoubtedly still to come); nor
that Canada, seemingly caught unprepared, without faintly enough
firefighters
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despite recent all-too-flammable summers — having
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in fact, to import them
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around the world to help bring those blazes under some sort of control
— would be in flames. And yet, for that country, experiencing its
fiercest fire season ever, one thing seems guaranteed: that’s only
the beginning. After all, United Nations climate experts are now
suggesting that, by the end of this century, if climate change isn’t
brought under control, the intensity of global wildfires could rise
by another 57%
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So, be prepared, New Yorkers, orange is undoubtedly the color of our
future and we haven’t seen anything like the last of such smoke
bombs.

Oh, and that June evening, once I was home again, I turned on the NBC
nightly news
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which not surprisingly led with the Canadian fires and the smoke
disaster in New York in a big-time way — and, hey, in their
reporting, no one even bothered to mention climate change. The words
went unused. My best guess: maybe they were all on Mars.

BEEN THERE, DONE THAT

In fact, you could indeed think of that June 7th smoke-out as the 2023
climate-change equivalent of September 11, 2001. Whoops! Maybe
that’s a far too ominous comparison and I’ll tell you why.
 

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On September 11, 2001, at the World Trade Center in New York, the
Pentagon in Washington, and aboard four hijacked jets, almost 3,000
people died
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That was indeed a first-class nightmare, possibly the worst terrorist
attack in history. And the U.S. responded by launching a set of
invasions, occupations, and conflicts that came to be known as “the
global war on terror.” In every sense, however, it actually turned
out to be a global war _of_ terror, a 20-plus-year disaster of
losing conflicts that involved the killing of staggering numbers of
people. The latest estimate from the invaluable Costs of War Project
is: almost a million
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deaths and possibly 3.7 million
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ones.

Take that in for a moment. And think about this: in the United States,
there hasn’t been the slightest penalty for any of that. Just ask
yourself: Was the president who so disastrously invaded Afghanistan
and then Iraq, while he and his top officials lied through their
teeth
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the American people, penalized in any way? Yes, I do mean that fellow
out in Texas who’s become known for his portrait painting
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his old age and who, relatively recently, confused
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decision to invade Iraq with Vladimir Putin’s to invade Ukraine.

Or, for that matter, has the U.S. military suffered any penalties for
its record in response to 9/11? Just consider this for starters: the
last time that military actually won a war was in 1991. I’m thinking
of the first Gulf War and that “win” would prove nothing but a
prelude to the Iraq disaster to come in this century. Explain this to
me then: Why does the military that’s proven incapable of winning a
war [[link removed]] since that
9/11 terror attack still get more money from Congress than the next
— your choice — 9
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on this planet combined, and why, no matter who’s in charge in
Washington, including cost-cutting Republicans, does the Pentagon
never — no, absolutely _never_ — see a cut in its funding, only
yet more taxpayer dollars? (And mind you, this is true on a planet
where the real battles of the future are likely to involve fire and
smoke.)

There may indeed be a “debt ceiling” in this country, but there
seems to be no ceiling at all when it comes to funding that military.
In fact, Republican hawks in the Senate only recently demanded
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more money for the Pentagon in the debt-ceiling debate (despite the
fact that, amid other cuts, its funding was already guaranteed to rise
by 3% or $388 billion). As Senator Lindsey Graham so classically put
it about that (to him) pitiful rise, “This budget is a win for
China.”

Now, I don’t mean to say that there’s been no pain anywhere. Quite
the opposite. American troops sent to Afghanistan, Iraq, and so many
other countries came home suffering
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wounds to severe post-traumatic stress syndrome. (In these years, in
fact, the suicide rate among veterans has been unnervingly high
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And did the American people pay? You bet. Through the teeth, in fact,
in a moment when inequality in this country was already going through
the roof — or, if you’re not one of the ever-greater numbers
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billionaires, perhaps the floor would be the more appropriate image.
And has the Pentagon paid a cent? No, not for a thing it’s done
(and, in too many cases, is still doing
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Consider this the definition of decline in a country that, as Donald
Trump and Ron DeSantis continue to make desperately clear, could be
heading for a place too strange and disturbing for words, a place both
as old as the present president of the United States (should he win
again) and as new as anyone can imagine.

WILL THE CLIMATE VERSION OF 9/11 BECOME DAILY LIFE?

Throughout history, it’s true that great imperial powers have risen
and fallen, but lest you think this is just another typical imperial
moment when, as the U.S. declines
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China will rise, take a breath — oops, sorry, watch out for that
smoke! — and think again. As those Canadian wildfires suggest,
we’re no longer on the planet we humans have inhabited these last
many thousand years. We’re now living in a new, not terribly
recognizable, ever more perilous world. It’s not just this country
that’s in decline but Planet Earth itself as a livable place for
humanity and for so many other species
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Climate change, in other words, is quickly becoming the climate
emergency.

And as the reaction to 9/11 shows, faced with a moment of true terror,
don’t count on the response of either the United States or the rest
of humanity being on target. After all, as that smoke bomb in New York
suggests, these days, too many of those of us who matter — whether
we’re talking about the climate-change-denying Trumpublican Party
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the leaders of the Pentagon — are fighting the wrong wars, while the
major companies responsible for so much of the terror to come, the
giant fossil-fuel outfits, continue to pull in blockbuster
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no, record
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— profits for destroying our future. And that simply couldn’t be
more dystopian or, potentially, a more dangerously smoky concoction.
Consider that a form of terrorism even al-Qaeda couldn’t have
imagined. Consider all of that, in fact, a preview of a world in which
a horrific version of 9/11 could become daily life.

So, if there is a war to be fought, the Pentagon won’t be able to
fight it. After all, it’s not prepared for increasing numbers of
smoke bombs, scorching megadroughts
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ever more powerful and horrific storms
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melting ice, rising sea levels
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temperatures
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and so much more. And yet, whether you’re American or Chinese,
that’s likely to sum up our true enemy in the decades to come. And
worse yet, if the Pentagon and its Chinese equivalent find themselves
in a war, Ukraine-style or otherwise, over the island of Taiwan, you
might as well kiss it all goodbye.

It should be obvious that the two greatest
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gas producers, China and the United States, will rise or fall (as will
the rest of us) on the basis of how well (or desperately poorly) they
cooperate in the future when it comes to the overheating of this
planet. The question is: Can this country, or for that matter the
world, respond in some reasonable fashion to what’s clearly going to
be climate terror attack after terror attack potentially leading to
dystopian vistas that could stretch into the distant future?

Will humanity react to the climate emergency as ineptly as this
country did to 9/11? Is there any hope that we’ll act effectively
before we find ourselves on a version of Mars or, as Donald Trump, Ron
DeSantis, and others like them clearly wish, fossil-fuelize ourselves
to hell and back? In other words, are we truly fated to live on a
smoke bomb of a planet?

_[TOM ENGELHARDT created and runs the website TomDispatch.com
[[link removed]]. He was also a co-founder of
the American Empire Project
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praised history of American triumphalism in the Cold War, The End of
Victory Culture
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A fellow of the Type Media Center [[link removed]], his
sixth book is A Nation Unmade by War
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_Copyright 2023 Tom Engelhardt. _

_Cross-posted with permission. May not be reprinted without permission
from TomDispatch [[link removed]]._

_Follow TomDispatch on Twitter
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Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands
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final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s
novel Every Body Has a Story
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Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War
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as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century:
The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power
[[link removed]], John
Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World
War II
[[link removed]], and
Ann Jones’s They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from
America’s Wars: The Untold Story
[[link removed]]._

* wildfires
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* Climate Change
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* Climate Crisis
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* Canada
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* Canadian wildfires
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* Sept. 11
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* 9/11
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* George W. Bush
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* Afghanistan
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* Afghanistan War
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* Iraq
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* Iraq War
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* War on Terror
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* Terrorism
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* environment
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