I am writing this from a hotel room in Bozeman, Montana. Outside, the Air Quality reading is 169 or “Unhealthy for All,” and Bozeman is 750 miles from Oregon where the smoke and dangerous pollutants (tiny lung-lodging PM2.5 particles) are blowing in from.
Being confined to a nice hotel room is nothing compared to what’s happening in Oregon and Washington where some 65,000 people and counting have been evacuated and the forest fires are historic—and now just days later California and Nevada, too, are in flames. In many ways—to us in the West—it’s reminiscent of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Yet, stunningly, this natural disaster is minimized in the East Coast media and, not so shockingly, utterly ignored by President Trump who is bumbling about the White House yammering helplessly about his failed Epstein Deflection War in the Middle East, paying serious attention only to the disintegrating Reflecting Pool and, of course, cheerfully grifting away.
IQ Air for Bozeman, Montana, at 1:30 PM, August 8, 2026
It’s crazy, it’s criminal, and it can only be seen as a traitorous finger to America held high in the polluted air. “I don’t think he cares,” smiled the Gen Z desk clerk at my check-in, and I had to laugh. “The dude will abide,” as Jeff Bridges said in the Big Labowski, and I note that Bridges lives on the Yellowstone River just over the first mountain outside my hotel window, presumably cabin-bound today as well.
At what point will Americans “GIVE A DAMN” as I saw on a sign taped to a door in this college town? At what point will a coughing and flooded citizenry rise up and realize nobody in the White House gives a rat’s ass about them? The point of the Trump Presidency is to steal as much as possible before their let-them-eat-cake attitude causes another kind of firestorm at the Midterms.
Unfortunately, most of the US media is doing nothing to help the citizenry see through the smoke and mirrors. Here’s a shot of ABC’s silly senior weatherperson Lee Goldberg who never, ever, mentions that climate change might have something to do with the conflagrations and floods outside his own studio window:
Lee, please, put on sunscreen and get a mask!
Has this dufus ever been seen in a raincoat, a parka, a hat, even sunglasses, let alone a mask for the smoke and small particulates? He always looks like he’s on his way to the natty Paul Stewart store in Manhattan or Ralph Lauren.
This is why we’ve come up with the term “The Other War” with our colleague David Helvarg at the LA Times. “The Other War” being climate change —which simultaneously with the Trump-Israeli War in Iran is killing as many or more humans, 25,000 and counting this summer in Europe alone.
As Katharine Hayhoe explains:
“The summer of wildfire continues, with more than 300,000 people forced from their homes as massive wildfires spread across France and Spain last week.
A wet winter followed by a hot, dry summer created “weather whiplash” that helped fuel the fires. Near Bordeaux, one fire burned an area four times the size of Paris and destroyed at least 240 homes. The heat there has been so extraordinary that 2026 alone has already brought more days above 40°C than the entire 105-year period from 1920 through 2025.”
This July is the hottest on record in America and in Europe and over the whole earth the last ten years have been the hottest in recorded history. This year is on track to be as bad—or worse.
And yet not only is the Greedy Old Fool in the White House ignoring reality, he is ignoring the pleas for federal FEMA aid to Democratic states. This is the criminal negligence of a psychopathic narcissist. Shucks, why put lipstick on a pig? The man is a sadist, old people dying, babies drowned, houses burned.
Looks like if you want to go outside next summer, you better get out and vote this November 3rd. Massively.
Throw the bums out.
But let’s end with a picture of how it was on a better summer day in Montana, and should be, could be, again, a lake where I was once officially baptised by my mother a mere 77 years ago—in Nature:
STEVE CHAPPLE IS A FORMER VISITING SCHOLAR FROM YALE AT THE SCRIPPS INSTITUTION OF OCEANOGRAPHY, A SR. FELLOW AT THE SAMUEL LAWRENCE FOUNDATION, AND THE AUTHOR OF 8 REASONABLY GOOD BOOKS, including LET THE MOUNTAINS TALK,LET THE RIVERS RUN: A Call to Those Who Would Save the Earth (David Brower with Steve Chapple (HarperCollins) and OUTLAWS IN BABYLON (S&S) now being turned into a streamer.
ONLY A WEEK TO GO TO THE SAN ONOFRE SYMPOSIUM: Nuclear Waste to Clean Energy.
REGISTER NOW
https://www.samuellawrencefoundation.org/san-onofre-symposium
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.