As the number two greenhouse gas emitter on the planet (historically largest), it’s incumbent on the U.S. to cut its emissions. The top three GHG emitters, China, the United States, and India, contribute 42.6 percent of total emissions, while the bottom 100 countries account for just 2.9 percent. Instead, we have an administration doubling down on burning fossil fuels and destroying all environmental regulation, including the EPA’s 2009 Endangerment Finding that was foundational to regulating GHGs even as wildfires sweep millions of acres in the Western U.S., Canada, France, Spain, Italy, and Northern Africa. Without radical and immediate reduction of fossil fuel burning, human, environmental, agricultural, and economic tolls are just beginning to reveal their terrifying potential.
I was born in 1961 when CO₂ in the atmosphere was 315 ppm and consider the 1970s my decade for coming of age. The 1970s had their share of tumult with the 20-year Vietnam War finally winding down on one end, over 58,000 American soldiers dead, and Vietnamese losses an unknown figure, but in the millions. The end of the decade saw Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran installed by the CIA and British MI6 in 1953, flee the country. His 26 years of rule were terror with his CIA-trained secret police, the SAVAK. The SAVAK was used to arrest, imprison, exile, and torture opponents. Today, the CIA admits the Shah’s reign was “undemocratic.”
It may have come to your attention we’re screwing around with Iran again, cost thus far $37.5 billion (according to former TV personality, Secretary of Defense, and white supremacist Pete Hegseth), and losing bigly. The cost of the war—in reality a war crime under the Geneva Conventions—is far greater than that lie; try $200 billion. According to Mark Zandi of Moody's Analytics, the cost to each of our households has been about $1000 so far. I’m sure you agree it’s worth it, though, to see little girls get blown up in the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School with a Peter Thiel Palantir AI assist, right?
The Pentagon and CIA have warned of the consequences of going to war with Iran for at least twenty years. Like Iraq, there were and are no weapons of mass destruction. Ali Khamenei, assassinated by American bombs, issued an oral fatwa against nuclear weapons in the mid-1990s. I particularly like this article from the ultra-conservative Atlantic Council twisting itself into a pretzel to claim the fatwa was a false narrative. Do they also think the Serial Liar and Chief’s words should be taken seriously? After nearly two weeks of daily arsenal-draining bombardment, Pumpkin Head is pausing the “campaign” not from an epiphany of wisdom (obviously) or a position of strength, but because we’re running out of munitions, an outcome predicted months ago.
At least the SAVAK served as inspiration. America now has a not-so-secret police force called ICE composed of racist, psycho dregs who get off on violence and arrest people who put food on our tables. ICE arrest totals, a murky figure, appear to be nearing 600,000. Rest assured our legal system can easily provide due process under the law for 1,500 arrests a day.
Arresting and incarcerating people in the “Land of the Free” is a full-time endeavor. We may be number two to China in releasing GHGs, but take pride, 2.3 million people are imprisoned in the U.S. That’s more than China, with just 1.7 million incarcerated as of 2020, a resounding per capita victory, and more than Russia, just 433,000 in gulags as of 2023. The U.S. boasts 25 percent of the world’s incarcerated with just five percent of its population. Thousands who haven’t been convicted of anything, merely held on unproven charges in America, are simply too poor to post bail. Many lose homes and jobs as a result. Some are held for years on charges that are eventually dismissed. Often this results in suicides. Teenager when arrested Kalief Browder is just one such case.
We have close to 750,000 homeless people, an upsurge of 100,000 since I wrote I’ll Be Homeless for Christmas in December 2023. The federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. You may think that’s grotesquely unfair, but I call it a neocapitalist victory. After all, how else can we support a fine South African apartheid product and Nazi-promoting trillionaire con man, whose wealth could only be built with $38 billion in government contracts? Musk, who thoughtfully builds cars you can’t escape when they’re burning and controls a ring of 10,413 satellites orbiting our planet, wisely knows that’s far too few. Thankfully, for our benefit, Elon has graciously vowed to launch a million AI satellite data centers into orbit so that we can be more gainfully unemployed, faster, and sit at home enjoying Grok-generated porn. Truly, what the world needs now is not love, sweet love, but more benevolent, uber-wealthy racists monitoring our lives for a better future. And don’t forget your Ray-Ban Meta glasses so you can surreptitiously record women’s breasts and butts.
Some may think Musk’s wealth is obscene. After all, it grew by a million dollars a minute in 2025. I say heavy is the head that wears the crown. And remember, Elon is a genetic assemblage that greatly resembles a spare parts human being—almost like you and me! If Elon spent $1 million per day, it would take him 2,740 years to spend $1 trillion. Oh, the burden. Here’s hoping he can upload his brain into a Tesla robot and spend it all.
Meanwhile, losers sleeping on park benches while homeless is a criminal offense according to our erudite and highly ethical “Supreme” Court. Face it, if the homeless were worth anything, they would be Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, or Charles Koch.
And if you’re one of the 37 percent of Americans who can’t afford a $400 emergency without offering your daughter to Ghislaine Maxwell, that also makes you a loser. Speaking of Ghislaine, she may yet be pardoned by Pumpkin Head. I do like to share good news. Clearly this is a case of equal rights. If men can traffic children for Donald Trump’s and Bill Clinton’s pleasure, so should women.
More good news. The military budget goose steps along to the tune of $954 billion in 2026, more than the next six countries combined. We may be losing the emissions crown to China, but we still care about blowing up people for the American way, which is raping the gasping planet for profit. The military budget request for 2027 is $1.7 trillion, nearly double. This is visionary, truly a break from failed societal models of the past. They say America has lost its world leadership. Clearly, this is not true, and if you disagree, I’ll ICE you.
As you may have gleaned, I live in America, where medical debt drives over 66 percent of personal bankruptcies, and 100 million Americans are the source of their own problems by irresponsibly getting sick. This does, however, provide the benefit of industry growth in the single largest source of debt collection in our fair nation. Neocapitalists know the importance of driving private “equity” (the very word means just and fair) and closing small hospitals. This is undeniably brilliant and keeps the gross in gross domestic product. Closing rural hospitals also saves us from the ever-attractive temptation of crushing medical debt when our fingers get lopped off in the combine from being distracted by fake historic drought and crop failure. With the help of AI in between uploading stealthy pictures of breasts, I’m designing crops that need no water and have fire retardants built into their genetic structure.
America, where the sanctity of life is upheld by women dying of miscarriages or being forced to carry rape pregnancies by doctors afraid to provide basic medical care for fear of abortion laws now made on a state-by-state basis. Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization made abortion a roll of the dice for medical providers in twenty-one states so far. Porsha Ngumezi bled to death in Texas, lacking a D & C procedure (dilation and curettage) for fear of prosecution. An Ohio woman, Christina Zielke, nearly died from the same. A Texas doctor who tries to give proper care as your wife, daughter, or girlfriend bleeds out can face up to 99 years in prison under the Human Life Protection Act or Texas Heartbeat Act, and American life expectancy ranks 61st in the world.
As the capitalist class sociopaths wring the last profits out of us, we’re witnessing the world burn up. France and Spain have evacuated 330,000 to 350,000 people so far. Since writing The Western U.S. is Burning Down just a few weeks ago, Oregon has blazed into the lead for acres lost.
Here are the statistics for land lost to fire in the Western U.S. as of July 29.
The heatwaves that have caused the horrifying wildfires of Europe had already taken 1400 lives a number of weeks ago. No doubt this figure has climbed.
No rain is in the forecast as a fourth consecutive heatwave sweeps Western and Southern Europe and North Africa. Northern Africa is barely mentioned at all, revealing the colonial racist bias that permeates our mainstream media. Unless we stop burning fossil fuels, this is the new normal, except for one significant difference: with every pound of CO₂ released, the results can only worsen. Additionally, every hectare burned is a carbon sink lost, compounding the problem. BTW, for reference American readers, a hectare is 2.47 acres. As of July 29, 250,000 hectares are estimated to have burned in Europe with two or three months of fire season left.
So far at least 330,000 people have been evacuated in France and Spain alone. Many will return to burnt-down homes, destroyed communities, and jobs forever lost. For the elderly and handicapped, the challenges are greater, perhaps insurmountable.
People have died, at least fourteen civilians and two firefighters that I’m aware of. Inevitably, this number will go up. People also die from broken hearts years later. This is literally true, not just a quaint expression. They won’t be part of the statistics.
As horrifying as the human tragedy is, in certain ways I feel worse for the animals. Domesticated or wild, they’re innocent to what we have made the planet, undeserving of this fate. Any of us who have had relationships with animals understand their emotions, and ours are undeniably similar. More critically, their deaths—from the insects that churn our soil to the birds that take to the air to temporarily escape the flames—are consigned to return to a destroyed environment, adding to the disaster of the human-caused Sixth Extinction. Current extinction rates are estimated to be 100 to 1,000 times higher than natural background extinction rates. That spread indicates more research is necessary, but regardless, even at the lower number, it measures a fatal and unprecedented disaster. Reminder, the Black Summer of Australia took an estimated three billion animal lives.
This is far more than a moral or ethical dilemma, it’s the unraveling of the deeply interwoven fabric of life that makes our existence possible. Habitat destruction is the primary driver of human-caused extinction. Yes, the environment changes over time, and species come, go, and evolve. However, the relevant issue is the unprecedented, blinding fossil fuel-powered speed with which we have altered the world.
In one video I watched, deer attempted to flee a blazing woodland only to be stopped by a fence and driven back into the fire. The terror and pain they felt was no different from what we would feel because ALL life is related back to the seas billions of years ago when the first single-celled organisms arose. Call it God, call it science, but the DNA in a plant that converts sunlight to energy is the same genetic code that allows us to convert food to energy. Every living entity came from the same original source. This is not an insult to humanity, it is profoundly beautiful.
Will we awaken to see the beauty that surrounds us in time? Already, much has been forever lost. Or will we continue to become Death, the destroyer of worlds?
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.