[ The most devastating war on the planet is the war waged against
the planet.]
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A GLOBAL MAUI MOMENT  
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Tom Engelhardt
September 13, 2023
Tom Dispatch [[link removed]]

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_ The most devastating war on the planet is the war waged against the
planet. _

The effects of the wildfire in Lahaina on Maui , Getty Images

 

From the earliest kingdoms to late last night, history has been the
story not just of the rise of great powers but of their decline and
fall. So, normally, there would be nothing particularly out of the
ordinary about the aging America of Joe Biden and Donald Trump, a
classic imperial power distinctly in decline and threatening to split
into pieces.
As it happens, though, there’s something all too new about the
twenty-first-century decline and fall of that other great power of the
Cold War era — you know, not the Soviet Union. After all, the
present downhill slide of this country is happening on a planet that
itself is distinctly in trouble in terms of what’s always passed for
a decent human life — and _that_, believe me, is something new under
the sun. In fact, in some fashion, the scenario all of us, each in our
own fashion, are now living through may be the least known ever.

Think of it, if you will, as the orange-sky
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scenario. I’m sure you remember when New York City’s skyline went
orange thanks to the smoke from hundreds of wildfires then burning
across Canada that drifted our way. And though it’s hardly even
considered news anymore, as of August 25th, nearly three months later,
there were still 1,033 active wildfires scorching that country, 656 of
them “out of control.” Consider that and then try to get your mind
around a planet capable of producing such a phenomenon!

What’s different today is that, while those particular orange skies
may have been over parts of the eastern United States, what lay behind
them wasn’t just an all-American but a global story of decline.

NATURE’S WAR OF REVENGE

Let me imagine for a moment that I was on Maui in early August as that
first hint of smoke entered my house (not, of course, that I have a
house on that island). What followed was a fire of unprecedented
severity, fueled by fierce winds from a relatively distant hurricane
and invasive grasses dried by a “severe drought.” That fire then
burst into the town of Lahaina and burnt it to the ground, a
catastrophe that caused more than 100 known deaths and left hundreds
more missing
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I want to say that it was a fire “beyond compare,” especially in
Hawaii where, for most of its history, as Elizabeth Kolbert recently
reminded us
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“fire simply wasn’t part of the islands’ ecology.” But
honestly, when it comes to climate disasters, you can’t say
“beyond compare” about much of anything anymore. Not on this
planet, not now. Yes, climate change — the heat and lack of moisture
— had dried out that island’s largely alien greenery, making it
ever more combustible. There was also that hurricane, admittedly
hundreds of miles away but directing brutal fire-spreading winds
Maui’s way. And for context, consider that, since the 1950s, the
average temperature of Hawaii has risen by about two degrees and
summers have become increasingly brutal in terms of heat.

Still, the fire that destroyed Lahaina — 2,700 structures
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simply wiped out — was the deadliest in the United States in more
than a century. But count on one thing: 100 years from now, if there
still is a United States and another terrible fire occurs, no one will
be saying that it was the deadliest in “more than a century
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However sad it may be to write, ever more horrific fires are now the
definition of our future.

In the end, in fact, it doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about
Hawaii or Iran
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Algeria
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or Greece
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China
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or Spain
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Phoenix, Arizona
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island of Sardinia
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Across the planet, horrifying “natural” (though under the
circumstances, they should be considered distinctly unnatural) fire,
flood, and heat records were set this summer. Both June
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and July
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were the hottest versions of those months ever and 2023 is clearly
rushing
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toward its own global heat record. So, mourn for Maui now. After all,
a decade, no less a century, from now, nothing that happened this
summer will be remembered as the planet’s ongoing crisis only breaks
yet more records and grows ever more severe. Even today, when it comes
to heat, nothing — not even emperor penguins
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in Antarctica — is unaffected.

And it’s not just on land (or ice) either. Don’t forget the water.
As Bill McKibben noted recently
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“In the past hundred and fifty years, we’ve made the ocean soak
up, on average, the heat equivalent of a Hiroshima-size nuclear bomb
every second and a half; in recent years, that’s increased to five
or six Hiroshimas a second.” Imagine that! In other words, Hurricane
Idalia
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the first (and undoubtedly anything but last) hurricane of Florida’s
present storm season, crossed startlingly heated waters
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that had only recently set records
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gaining power from them as it hit the state as a category 4 storm.

War? It was once hell on Earth and — see the conflict in Ukraine,
where there are already almost 500,000 casualties
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with no end in sight — in so many ways it still is. However, in the
end, our wars, barring the use of nuclear weapons
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could prove to be next to nothing compared to nature’s war of
revenge on humanity. And yet, perhaps the most striking thing about us
is that, from Ukraine to Taiwan, we’re proving remarkably unable to
focus on what’s truly new and horrific about life on this planet.

I was born 79 years ago on an Earth plunged into a global war, the
second of that century. It would conclude just over a year later after
my country discovered a way to end it all. I hardly need to tell you
that I’m thinking about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki and, in the decades that followed, the vast atomic arsenals
built up by the two superpowers of that era, the Soviet Union and the
United States. As it happens, Russia still has a humongous nuclear
arsenal
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and the U.S., with the second largest on the planet, is planning to
put up to $2 trillion
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“modernizing” it over the next three decades. Meanwhile, nine
countries now possess nuclear weapons — with the capacity of doing
to the planet
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what had once been done to those two Japanese cities.

The possibility that such weaponry could actually be used has, of
course, become a news topic because of the Ukraine War. But in 1945,
when J. Robert Oppenheimer (of movie fame
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was preparing the first test
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weapon in the New Mexican desert, no one knew that humanity had
already discovered another way to do the very same thing to itself,
even if in slow motion. From the industrial revolution on, by burning
fossil fuels and sending ever greater quantities of greenhouse gases
into the atmosphere, we’ve been preparing year by year, decade by
decade, century by century, for a different kind of apocalypse. Now,
we know — or at least should know — that we’re deeply engaged in
what could be a world-ending affair (or minimally an ending of the
world as we’ve known it all these centuries).

And these days, thanks to that, all of us are potentially living in
Lahaina
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in some fashion.

FOSSIL-FUEL-STYLE OSAMA BIN LADENS

For the last 22 years, the United States has been fighting a global
war on terror that, from Afghanistan to Iraq, Pakistan to Niger, has
been a disaster of the first order. So many of our taxpayer dollars
have gone into that “war” and ever rising
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Pentagon and national security state budgets. Meanwhile, the true war
of all wars on planet Earth — think of it as a global war _of
_terror — has simply worsened without a significant enough
mobilization to truly deal with it. It should be no surprise then
that, in 2023, the most greenhouse gases ever
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are entering the atmosphere.

In such a context, you might imagine that humanity — all of us —
would rally around, if not the flag, then the green banner of an
ecologically decent planet. And yet, that money pouring into the
Pentagon is going into the development of things like AI-run drones
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a future possible war with China over the island of Taiwan. And that
focus — China seems no less committed to such a future — only
ensures that
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the historically greatest greenhouse gas emitter (the United States)
and the greatest one of the present moment (China) will not ally in
any meaningful way to fight the true battle humanity faces. In other
words, that global war of terror, the one we’ve sparked (so to
speak), will only intensify.

In that sense, in launching his invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir
Putin’s greatest crime wasn’t simply against the Ukrainians, but
against humanity. It was another way to ensure that the global war of
terror would grow fiercer and that the Lahainas of the future would
burn more intensely. And that’s not just because any form of warfare
puts startling amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. (The
U.S. military, in fact, emits more carbon dioxide than whole countries
and is the world’s largest institutional emitter
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of greenhouse gases.) The war Putin launched, while undoubtedly a
major greenhouse gas producer, also has taken our attention off the
potentially most devastating war on this planet.

Meanwhile, though China leads the world
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in creating and installing alternative energy systems, it also
greenlights, on average
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two new coal-powered plants a week and is building six times more of
those plants than the rest of the world combined. And don’t forget
the major fossil-fuel companies that continue to ravage the planet in
search of present and future profits. In 2022, Chevron,
ConocoPhillips, Exxon, and Shell saw $1 trillion
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in sales and all four reported record profits.

Yes, you can certainly find evidence of parts of humanity acting to
rein in, if not simply eliminate, fossil fuels, even in places like
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Texas. It’s not that nothing whatsoever is being done. Joe Biden,
for instance, oversaw the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act,
which is spurring
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hundreds of billions of dollars of investments in clean energy
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(even if he also greenlighted
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the giant ConocoPhillips Willow project that could extract more than
600 million barrels of oil from an overheating Alaska during the next
30 years).

But in such a moment, the other party in the United States, once known
as the Republicans, is now filled with outright climate-change deniers
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and forceful supporters of the further development of fossil fuels. It
seems almost beyond imagining and yet, if polling
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is to be believed, the man who represents so many of them, Donald
Trump, has a genuine chance of ending up back in the White House.

While some of those Trumpublicans may be delusional, the CEOs of the
giant oil companies undoubtedly aren’t. They know just what their
companies are doing to our world. Thanks to its scientists, the top
officials of Exxon, in fact, had a remarkably accurate sense of what
kind
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of damage their products could cause back in — yes! — the 1970s
and the company’s response, in part, was to put money into
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think tanks promoting climate-change denial.

Don’t you wonder what any of those fossil-fuel CEOs will say to
their grandkids? I do.

Meanwhile, the global war of terror, which only becomes more
destructive by the month, has already put September 11th to shame in
Lahaina and elsewhere on this increasingly beleaguered planet of ours.
And sadly enough, in that war of nature, we humans are the terrorists
and those fossil-fuel company CEOs are our very own Osama bin Ladens.

Copyright 2023 Tom Engelhardt

Tom Engelhardt created and runs the website _TomDispatch.com_
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American Empire Project [[link removed]] and
the author of a highly 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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* Maui Fires; Fossil Fuels;
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