Honestly, doesn’t it befuddle you?

I mean, don’t you think we humans are kinda mad? And worse yet, at some deep level, we simply can’t seem to stop. All too often, we just can’t curb our urge to destroy.

Looking back, the desire to make war and obliterate our “enemies” is a deeply ingrained and repetitive pattern in our history. Each individual example can, of course, be explained (away) in its own fashion, but the overall pattern? Hmmm…

I mean, you can certainly “understand” the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Depending on your politics, you can explain it in terms of the threatening expansion of NATO or of a country run by an autocrat willing to see countless numbers of his people die (no, I’m not even thinking about the tens of thousands of dead Ukrainians) in order to take more territory — whether in parts of Georgia (no, not that Georgia!), Ukraine, or god knows where else — and make himself ever more impressively (or do I mean depressively?) imperial. Phew! That was a long one, but explanations about war-making tend to be that way.

And yes, if you want, you also can undoubtedly explain the ongoing nightmare in Gaza, beginning with Hamas’s horrific October 7th attack on Israel and followed by the outrageous urge of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his disturbingly right-wing compatriots to slaughter the population of that strip of land right down to the smallest child. In some grim fashion, given our history, such acts seem all too sadly human.

It’s been the rare moment when we’ve proven capable of not making war on ourselves somewhere on this planet. It seems to be in the bloodstream, so to speak.

You could also undoubtedly offer explanations for the endless — yes, that’s a reasonable word to use here! — not to speak of disastrous wars my own country has stomped into since World War II ended, first as the leader of the “free world” and then as the leader of who knows what. Those conflicts ranged from Korea in the 1950s and Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia in the 1960s and 1970s to Afghanistan and Iraq, among other places, in this century. And undoubtedly it’s even possible to explain (away) the nightmarish civil war still devastating Sudan that’s already displaced more than eight million people without being noticed by much of the rest of the world.

Something New in the Planetary Bloodstream

In a sense, war is human history. It’s been the rare moment when we’ve proven capable of not making war on ourselves somewhere on this planet. It seems to be in the bloodstream, so to speak (as in the endless streams, even rivers, of blood eternally being spilled). And in a sense, war, the urge to take someone else’s territory or simply kill endless numbers of… well, us… has certainly been in that very same bloodstream at least since the first great literary work of the Western world, The Iliad, was written. In some sense, you could say that, 3,000 years later, we’re all still in Troy.

Oh, wait, that’s both true and not, because there is indeed something new in the planetary bloodstream. And I’m not even thinking about our endless ability to find ever “better” and more devastating ways to kill one another — from the spear to the AR-15 semi-automatic rifle (reputedly now owned by one of every 20 Americans), the bow and arrow to the AI-driven drone, the hand grenade to atomic weaponry. (And don’t forget that Vladimir Putin is already threatening to use “tactical” nuclear weapons in Ukraine — never mind that some of them are significantly more powerful than the bombs that, in August 1945, obliterated the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.)

No, what I have in mind is that other way we humans have found to potentially devastate our world: the burning of fossil fuels. Yes, it started with the massive consumption of coal during the early stages of the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and it’s simply never ended. (China, in fact, now uses more coal than the rest of the world combined and continues to build coal power plants.) By now, with oil and natural gas added to the mix in staggering quantities, records are being set monthly as ever greater heat waves, increasingly violent storms, startling flooding, and devastating fires are becoming part of our everyday lives. Typical was Miami’s May heat index that recently hit an unheard-of 112 degrees Fahrenheit, 11 degrees higher than at any past date in May ever. That should hardly shock us, however, since, as that superb environmentalist Bill McKibben reports, “A new study out today shows that heat waves have tripled since the 1960s in this country, and that deaths from those hot spells are up 800%.” And, of course, far worse is predicted for the decades to come, as those burning fossil fuels continue to pour greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at record rates.

Forget what we officially call wars (anything but easy to do these days if you happen to be Gazan, Sudanese, or Ukrainian) and consider this the increasingly devastating new way we have of warring on ourselves and our planet. While there’s still a lot to learn about global warming, also known as climate change (terms far too mild for what’s actually happening), we already know far too much not to consider it the ultimate danger — other than nuclear war, of course. In fact, the difference between nuclear war and global warming could be that, since August 1945 (except for nuclear tests), such weaponry has never been used again, while the distinctly apocalyptic “weaponry” of climate change is still ratcheting up in a staggering fashion.

A War Against the World as We’ve Known It

Climate change is certainly something Americans should know about. After all, only the other week, Donald (“drill, baby, drill“) Trump sat down with a group of fossil-fuel CEOs and reportedly suggested that, for a billion dollars in campaign financing, a bribe of the first order, he would toss out all of Joe Biden’s attempts to rein in the oil, natural gas, and coal industries and encourage them instead to make further fortunes by turning this planet into a cinder. (In truth, that wasn’t really much of an offer, since he had already made it clear that he was planning to do just that anyway, starting on “day one” of his next term in office.)

Of course, who needs Donald Trump when, as the New York Timesreported recently, despite President Biden’s distinct attempts to limit the use of fossil fuels during his tenure in........

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