The news on green technology is surprisingly good. Both development and installation of renewable energy and industry are leaping ahead at rates I would not have thought remotely possible even five years ago. It’s the fastest energy transition in history—and ironically the pace has only accelerated of late thanks to Donald Trump’s madcap war on Iran, which is acting as a de facto carbon tax across the entire planet. Call it Trump’s Green New Deal.
Alas, the progress is coming far too late to head off severe climate disasters. After Canada and the American eastern seaboard were blanketed by another suffocating plume of wildfire smoke in recent weeks, much of Europe is now suffering the same fate. Great swathes of France and Spain are ablaze, with little relief on the horizon. And now weather forecasters are warning that it looks like the most powerful El Niño in recorded history is coming soon.
Climate change is not going to wait for America or any other country to sort out its political dysfunctions. We can confront climate reality or be run over by it.
Wildfires are probably the most obvious consequence of a warming planet, outside of the thermometer itself. It is a basic fact of chemistry that fires burn more readily in high temperatures—one leg of the classic fire triangle. Science has further demonstrated that not only is a hotter planet more prone to severe drought, but also periods of severe precipitation. A deadly pattern is taking shape in places like France, Australia, and California, where heavy rains drive explosive growth of undergrowth and shrubbery, which is then killed and toasted by the ensuing drought, creating a regional tinderbox just waiting for a spark.
Yet it turns out that wildfire smoke might be even worse than the fires themselves. Practically every piece of research on air pollution done in the last 20 years has shown it to be worse than previously thought—for instance, a recent study found that if your household members have asthma, replacing your gas stove with an electric-induction model cuts missed days of school or work due to the condition by something like 80 percent.
We can confront climate reality or be run over by it.
And wildfire smoke is particularly nasty, with lots of toxic gases and fine particulate matter that cause all kinds of deadly illnesses. (An indoor air purifier is basically a requirement for healthy living these days.) Another recent study found that the PM 2.5 (particulates under 2.5 microns) in wildfire smoke killed around 24,100 Americans per year between 2006 and 2020—and that does not include 2023, which saw the worst wildfire exposure event in American history, and now another comparable one just three years later. As Robinson Meyer points out at Heatmap News, until the last few years it basically didn’t occur to anyone to model what might happen if the hundreds of millions of people living in the great North American metro complexes got regularly inundated with choking wildfire smoke, because it wasn’t thought possible. Now the science has been done, and the estimated economic damages are literally larger than every previous estimated cost of climate change put together.
It turns out the blithe American economists who won the 2018 Nobel Prize in economics by arguing it would be basically fine for the economy to drive temperatures up by three degrees Celsius were even more wrong than I thought at the time.
The El Niño phenomenon is a change in the normal trade wind and sea currents in the Pacific Ocean. The science behind it is immensely complicated, but a key upshot is that the normal pattern of ocean circulation that brings up cold, nutrient-rich water off the west coast of South America is changed, resulting in an enormous increase in ocean surface temperatures across the central Pacific. The stronger the El Niño, the larger the hot spot, and the more ocean heat gets dumped into the atmosphere. Scientists expect the upcoming one to be the strongest ever measured by a “mind-blowing margin.”
The usual effects tend to include drought in Southeast Asia, heat waves in western Canada, a cooler American South, heavy rain in eastern Africa, and so on. But the stronger the El Niño, the less predictable it will be. The 1997-98 event, for instance, led to major flooding in California, a very severe drought in Indonesia, the worst tornado outbreak in Florida history up to that point, and pushed up global atmospheric temperatures by 1.5 degrees Celsius momentarily. What an even stronger one will do is anybody’s guess, but at a minimum it is highly likely to send global temperatures temporarily up past 2 degrees. Next year will likely be the warmest year in recorded history, and by a large margin. In that case, some kind of extreme weather is guaranteed all over the place.
The most obvious and convincing argument for electing Kamala Harris over Donald Trump was that she would continue Joe Biden’s climate policies, while Trump promised to tear them up. In office, he has fulfilled that promise and more, repealing most of Biden’s green tech subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act, doing all he can to freeze renewable investment, and waging a Khmer Rouge-esque war on American science and intellectual achievement writ large. That stove study mentioned above had a much smaller sample size than planned because Trump illegally yanked its funding halfway through.
It comes as no surprise that Trump is responding to the latest climate threats with witless belligerence. His latest tariffs on Canadian goods were justified in part by the wildfire smoke, as if Canadian officials are supposed to get out there and thin out all 1.2 billion acres of trackless boreal forest somehow. Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH) proposed imposing sanctions on Canada and top Canadian officials like they were members of al-Qaeda for the same reason. It bears mentioning, by the way, that several huge wildfires are burning as we speak across the American West.
America and the world would greatly benefit from a government that isn’t run by vindictive madmen, and hopefully even doing the right thing. But the majority of Americans who remain in at least passing contact with reality must demand more than what Biden was able to deliver.
The Hormuz crisis has created an opportunity for an accelerated energy transition at a time when gas price-weary Americans are open to embracing it. Yet while the IRA was impressive on its own, Trump has now put us even further behind. As I have previously argued, climate damages are quickly reaching the point that somebody is going to try cutting the global temperature, probably by releasing sulfate aerosols in the upper atmosphere. A small country or a medium-sized corporation could finance it by itself. The United States ought to be part of that study and debate, rather than hiring Trump’s pool guy to do it and causing an instant ice age.
