Let’s face it: Electing Donald Trump was nothing short of a suicidal act.

And that’s something we humans seem to have a genuine knack for these days. If you don’t believe me, just consider those record-setting burned-out areas around Los Angeles. Admittedly, that was Nature (with a capital N), but given a grim helping hand by You Know Who. You can thank big oil, big coal, and big natural gas for that (and, in the future, add President Donald Trump to that list in a big-time way). Yes, things do turn out to burn far more fiercely on an overheating planet. And they get wetter faster, too (though not in Los Angeles when rain was truly needed). The phrase now is “climate whiplash,” and if you think it’s fun living under a lashing weather whip, think again.

Mind you, despite what at least some of us now know, the human crew (that’s us) is continuing to pour greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in a distinctly record fashion. And as if things weren’t bad enough when it comes to ultimate destruction on this planet of ours, just under 50 percent of the American voting public only recently elected You Know Who again as president to lend a helping hand. In his inaugural address, Donald Trump promised to do just that. As he put it, all too bluntly:

We will drill, baby, drill. America will be a manufacturing nation once again, and we have something that no other manufacturing nation will ever have: the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on Earth. And we are going to use it. We will bring prices down, fill our strategic reserves up again, right to the top, and export American energy all over the world. We will be a rich nation again. And it is that liquid gold under our feet that will help to do it. With my actions today, we will end the Green New Deal and we will revoke the electric vehicle mandate, saving our auto industry and keeping my sacred pledge to our great American autoworkers.

As he summed it up, “America’s decline is over.” But the planet’s is already deeply underway and he’s clearly about to lend it a remarkably helping hand. As a matter of fact, his pick for Energy Secretary, oil executive Chris Wright, has denied that climate change is even linked to greater and more deadly fires on this planet. Of course, to put all this in perspective, even before Donald Trump returned to the White House, the United States was already producing more oil and natural gas than any other country now or in history. And that was under a president actually trying to take some steps to mitigate climate change. Well, so long to that!

Mind you, last year, for the first time in recorded history, this planet’s annual temperature hit 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average—and it was also the hottest year ever, beating 2023, the previous record-holder, while every year in the last decade has been record-setting compared to any of the years of the previous decade or, for that matter, the rest of human history. And if that’s not an accomplishment (of a grim sort), I don’t know what is. Worse yet, given the rising levels of carbon dioxide in this planet’s atmosphere, thanks in part to a global fire season from hell, expect more and far grimmer to come (and come and come and come).

“Investing” in Nuclear Devastation

Historically speaking, we humans have had a knack for many things, including exploring and settling just about every inch of this planet, successfully raising vast crops to feed enormous numbers of us, and inventing endless things from the fountain pen and telephone to the car and computer. However, among our many skills, perhaps the greatest when it comes to our future has been our eerie ability to discover ways to do ourselves and this planet, partially, or completely, or at least as we’ve known it all these endless thousands of years… yes, in.

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Of course, human history has been anything but lacking in ways of doing ourselves, or others we’ve come to loathe, in. Since the clubs of the Stone Age, humans have come up with endlessly more devastating weaponry: the spear, the sword, the rifle, the machine gun, artillery, planes with bombs… you know the litany as well as I do.

And then, as World War II ended, there were those nuclear weapons. I don’t have to bore you with a substantive description of them, right? They were, after a fashion, a remarkable wartime invention and, of course, were used twice on August 6 and 9, 1945, to totally devastate the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Almost 80 years later—and consider this a distinct accomplishment—knowing what such weaponry could potentially do, no more of them have ever been used in wartime. Not a single one.

Still, explain it as you will, there are now an estimated 12,000 (no, that is not a misprint) nuclear warheads on Planet Earth, many of them staggeringly more powerful than the bombs that destroyed those two Japanese cities. In the 80 years since Nagasaki was nearly obliterated, eight countries have joined the United States in going nuclear and undoubtedly, given time, more will follow. And such weapons—initially just bombs—are now deployable on planes, ships, or via land-based missiles (also known as our “nuclear triad”). And I wouldn’t be surprised if someday such weapons were also placed in space. It’s now generally believed that a major nuclear war on this planet would not only cause unimaginable levels of immediate death and destruction but potentially create a “nuclear winter“ that could, in the end, kill billions of us.

In short, there are now enough nukes on Earth to destroy any number of planets and, though one hasn’t been used in so many decades, don’t count on us when it comes to not, sooner or later, using some of them to engage in potentially world-ending behavior.

And worse yet, 12,000 such weapons turn out to be not faintly enough. Everyone always wants more, including my country, which is planning to pour a fortune into the “modernization” (I’m not kidding, that’s the word for it!) of the US nuclear arsenal in the decades to come. That “investment” will be to the tune of $1.7 trillion to $2 trillion dollars (no, that is not a misprint) to create, among other things, new Sentinel Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, a new stealth bomber, and new Columbia-class nuclear submarines.

Oh, and here’s a bit of cheery news about the second Trump administration: The remarkably unqualified fellow that President Trump has picked to run the National Nuclear Security Administration within the Department of Energy, former one-term congressman and (of course!) multimillionaire Brandon Williams, is expected to restart the explosive testing of American nuclear weapons, something that hasn’t happened since President Bill Clinton signed a nuclear test ban treaty (that Congress later refused to ratify). So the world could once again see nuclear weapons going off, even if at test sites.

Call us bizarre. Call us crazy. But up to 2 trillion dollars “invested” in the future utter devastation of this planet—and that’s only one country—who calls that good sense? And add to that a potential return to global open testing of such weaponry. How cheery! How delightfully end-of-the-world-y of us!

It’s Getting Hotter!

And worse yet, it seems that we humans weren’t satisfied with just one way to do in Planet Earth. However inadvertently, we’ve managed, as I indicated earlier, to come up with a second way to completely devastate this planet, at least as a habitable place for us and just about any other living thing. Admittedly, unlike nukes, climate change will take place in the global equivalent of slow motion and won’t have the ability to wipe out so many of us in a matter of hours, days, weeks, or even months. But in the long run, it distinctly may have the ability to turn ever more of this planet into a set of unlivable spaces.

And here’s a bizarre footnote to all of this. The idea that, sooner or later, burning fossil fuels a mile a minute will thoroughly devastate Planet Earth has hardly been missing in action. In fact, all too many Americans have already begun experiencing it in an ever more up close and personal fashion—as with Helene and Milton, those two devastating hurricanes last fall that gained such strength from passing across the wildly climate-change-overheated waters of the Gulf of Mexico. And who doesn’t remember the vast clouds of smoke that poured down on us from a wildly burning Canada back in the spring and early summer of 2023 in a historically unprecedented fashion?

It’s hardly a secret that the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas is at the heart of this phenomenon. And yet in this country in election 2024, almost 50 percent of Americans cast their votes for a man (and what a man he is!) whose key election line was the very one he repeated in his inaugural address: “drill, baby, drill.” (Of course, it might as well have been “burn, baby, burn.”) We’re talking about a guy who has called climate change “a big hoax” or, in the wake of Hurricane Helene, “one of the greatest scams of all time.”

And, of course, he walks into the White House determined to put significant (yes!) energy into producing yet more oil and natural gas, while reversing any of the Biden administration’s efforts to deal directly with climate change. (Mind you, to keep things in perspective, though Joe Biden did sink significant sums into dealing with the climate and developing alternate sources of energy, in his years in the White House the United States also produced more oil and exported more natural gas than any other country on Earth.) And, as promised, on Day One of his second term in office, Donald Trump, among so many other things, joined only three other countries—Iran, Libya, and Yemen—in withdrawing the US from the Paris climate accords.

Donald Trump? Really? Twice? What a loony crew we are!

To speak personally for a moment. I can’t even imagine spending my years from age 80 to 84 with President Heat Bomb actively working to do in our planet. To my mind, in fact, electing a long-term climate denier as president again might even be thought of as the ultimate suicidal act.

And Yet More?

In short (or long), humanity has so far come up with two ways to utterly devastate Planet Earth, one held in reserve and regularly “modernized,” the other actually underway in a reasonably slow-motion (and still stoppable) fashion. And when it comes to us, that—if I do say so myself—represents no small accomplishment (even if that hardly seems the right word for it). But don’t sell us short. Don’t for a second imagine that those two ways to destroy this planet as a livable place for, yes, us, represent the beginning and the end of the phenomenon.

I wouldn’t count on that, not for a second. I mean, don’t sell us short! (And yes, I’m repeating that phrase, but for good reason.) In truth, there are things that, at my age, I would rather not understand. But I would hardly be shocked if it turned out, for example, that artificial intelligence (AI) might prove to be—I won’t say “the” but only “a” (because I don’t want to sell humanity short)—third possible ultimate way we could do ourselves, if not this planet, in.

Can I tell you how AI could do such a thing? No, I’m too old to truly understand it. So let me instead quote Nobel Prize–winning computer scientist and physicist Geoffrey Hinton, sometimes called “the godfather of AI,” who said this about the phenomenon: “I am worried that the overall consequence of this might be systems more intelligent than us that eventually take control.” In other words, we humans, especially in the wake of Donald Trump’s recent electoral victory, seem distinctly like death-wish creatures and, at some future moment, humanity could truly find itself in a ditch.

In the meantime, it’s no small act to have voted Apocalyptic Donald back into power, a man ready, above all, to—yes!—drill, baby, drill (and burn, baby, burn)!