Image by Clay Banks.

Yes, give us human beings credit. In our relatively brief history, it’s no small thing to have come up with two different ways of thoroughly devastating Planet Earth and its inhabitants. One of them, of course, is the long-term, slow-motion version of planetary destruction that we’ve come to call climate change. And yes, we can already feel it. In recent years, this planet has set record after record when it comes to heat, the last 10 years being the hottest in human history. Meanwhile, from the oceans to the continents, in heatwaves, floods, and devastating storms, this world of ours has been feeling the heat in an unprecedented fashion and, mind you, with far worse to come.

Given how obvious all of this has become, we should get full credit not just for creating such conditions but for — at least some of us — ignoring them or, in the case of Donald J. Trump, that pal of fossil-fuel billionaires, doing far worse than that. After all, my country, which has already played such a major role in intensifying climate change, thanks to its record-setting production of greenhouse-gas-producing crude oil — more than any country ever (yes, ever!) — and natural gas, has also managed to elect a climate-change-denying president for the second time. And he’s quite bluntly dismissed the phenomenon as a “scam” and a “hoax.”

Worse yet — I hate to use the word, so I’m putting it in quotation marks — “we” elected him on a platform of “drill, baby, drill!,” which was the very phrase he most wanted to be identified with in his third run for the presidency. You couldn’t be much blunter than that and still succeed, could you?

In truth, he undoubtedly should be called Apocalyptic Don, since his immediate needs and desires, his urge to be the number-one person in this country and possibly the world, have functionally been wedded to the ultimate slow-motion destruction of this planet. Consider it an irony of sorts that, in his second term in office, the president who is against immigrants — no matter that his mother was one — is already acting in a way that, by heating the planet further and driving ever more people from their increasingly devastated lands, will increase that phenomenon immeasurably.

Irony? Don’t even think it! Not with Donald Trump in the White House, not after we’ve just passed through Earth Day 2025 with a president who seems determined to un-Earth us all.

Honestly, that “drill, baby, drill” phrase of his couldn’t have been blunter, could it? And worse yet, unlike so much else that he’s said, he really meant it! Now that he’s back in the White House for a second time, he’s already

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