The Now Time.

Yes, he’s done quite a job so far and, in a way, it couldn’t be simpler to describe. Somehow, he’s managed to take the greatest looming threat to humanity and put it (excuse the all-too-appropriate image) on the back burner. I’m thinking, of course, about climate change.

My guess is that you haven’t read much about it recently, despite the fact that a significant part of this country, including the city I live in, set new heat records for June. And Europe followed suit soon after with a heat hell all its own in which, at one point, the temperature in part of Spain hit an all-time record 114.8 degrees Fahrenheit. And oh yes, part of Portugal hit 115.9 degrees as both countries recorded their hottest June ever. Facing that reality, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said (again all too appropriately): “Extreme heat is no longer a rare event — it has become the new normal.” The new normal, indeed! He couldn’t have been more on target!

And why am I not surprised by all this? Well, because whether you’re in the United States or Europe (or so many other places on this planet) these days, if you’ve been paying any attention at all, you’ve noticed that June is indeed the new July, and that, thanks to the ever increasing amounts of greenhouse gases that continue to flow into the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels, heat waves have grown more frequent and more intense. After all, we’re now on a planet where, without a doubt, heat is at an all-time-record high. After all, 2024, was the hottest year in history and the last 10 years, the hottest decade ever known. Worse yet, in the age of Donald Trump, this is clearly just the beginning, not the end (though somewhere down the line, of course, it could indeed prove to be exactly that).

An Ongoing Act of Global Terrorism

While this old man is online constantly reading publications ranging from the Washington Post to the British Guardian, he still reads the paper New York Times. And if that isn’t old-fashioned of me, what is? Can you even believe it? And its first section of news, normally 20-odd pages long, does regularly tell me something about how climate change is (and isn’t) covered in the age of Donald Trump. Let me give you one example: on June 21st, that paper’s superb environmental reporter Somini Sengupta had a piece covering the droughts that, amid the rising heat, are now circling this planet in a major fashion from Brazil to China, the U.S. to Russia. And yes, she indicated clearly in her piece that such droughts, bad as they may always have been from time to time, are becoming significantly worse thanks to the overheating of this planet from fossil fuel use. (As she put it: “Droughts are part of the natural weather cycle but are exacerbated in many parts of the world by the burning of fossil fuels, which is warming the world and exacerbating extreme weather.”)

The next day that piece appeared in the paper newspaper I read — a day when, as always, the front page was filled with Donald Trump — and where was it placed? Yep, on page 24.

And on the very day I happened to be writing this sentence, Trump was the headline figure in, or key to three of the six........

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