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COMMENTARY


MY VISIT TO MARS, IN NYC: IS LIVING ON A SMOKE-BOMB PLANET OUR FUTURE?


THAT POISONOUS ORANGE HAZE IN NEW YORK WAS THE 9/11 MOMENT FOR CLIMATE CHANGE —
OR AT LEAST IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN


BY TOM ENGELHARDT


PUBLISHED JUNE 16, 2023 5:30AM (EDT)


A person looks out at the New York City skyline as it's covered with haze and
smoke from Canada wildfires on June 7, 2023 in Weehawken, New Jersey. (Eduardo
Munoz Alvarez/Getty Images)
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This piece originally appeared on TomDispatch.

As it turns out, it's never too late. I mention that only because last week, at
nearly 79, I managed to visit Mars for the first time. You know, the Red Planet,
or rather — so it seemed to me — the orange planet. And take my word for it, it
was eerie as hell. There was no sun, just a strange orange haze of a kind I had
never seen before as I walked the streets of that world (well-masked) on my way
to a doctor's appointment.

Oh, wait, maybe I'm a little mixed up. Maybe I wasn't on Mars. The strangeness
of it all (and perhaps my age) might have left me just a bit confused. My best
hunch now, as I try to put recent events in perspective, is that I wasn't in
life as I'd previously known it. Somehow — just a guess — that afternoon I might
have become a character in a science-fiction novel. As a matter of fact, I had
only recently finished rereading Walter M. Miller Jr.'s sci-fi classic "A
Canticle for Leibowitz," last visited in 1961 at age 17. It's about a world
ravaged by humanity (using nukes, as a matter of fact) and, so many years later,
still barely in recovery mode.

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Related

Canadian wildfires are choking Americans. Why air quality got so bad — and what
can be done

I must admit that the streets I was traversing certainly looked like they
existed on just such a planet. After all, the ambience had a distinctly
end-of-the-world (at least as I'd known it) feel to it.

Oh, wait! I checked the news online and it turns out that it was neither Mars,
nor a sci-fi novel. It was simply my very own city, New York, engulfed in smoke
you could smell, taste, and see, vast clouds of it blown south from Canada
where more than 400 wildfires were then burning in an utterly out of control,
historically unprecedented fashion across much of that country — as, in fact,
all too many of them still are. That massive cloud of smoke swamped my city's
streets and enveloped its most famous buildings, bridges and statues in a
horrifying mist.


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That day, New York, where I was born and have lived much of my life, reportedly
had the worst, most polluted air of any major city on the planet
— Philadelphia would take our place the very next day — including an air quality
index that hit a previously unimaginable 484. That day, my city was
headline-making in a way not seen since Sept. 11, 2001. In fact, you might think
of that Wednesday as the climate-change version of 9/11, a terror (or at least
terrorizing) attack of the first order.

On June 7, my city made headlines in a way not seen since Sept. 11, 2001. In
fact, you might think of that Wednesday as the climate-change version of 9/11, a
terror (or at least terrorizing) attack of the first order.

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Put another way, it should have been a signal to us all that we — New Yorkers
included — now live on a new, significantly more dangerous planet, and that June
7 may someday be remembered locally as a preview of a horror show for the ages.
Unfortunately, you can count on one thing: It's barely the beginning. On an
overheating planet where humanity has yet to bring its release of greenhouse
gasses from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas under any sort of
reasonable control, where summer sea ice is almost certain to be a thing of the
past in a fast-heating Arctic, where sea levels are rising ominously and fires,
storms and droughts are growing more severe by the year, there's so much worse
to come.

In my youth, of course, a Canada that hadn't even made it to summer when the
heat hit record levels and fires began burning out of control from Alberta in
the west to Nova Scotia and Quebec in the east would have been unimaginable. I
doubt even Walter M. Miller Jr., could have dreamed up such a future, no less
that, as of a week ago, 1,400% of the normal acreage of that country, or more
than 8.7 million acres, had already burned (with so much more undoubtedly still
to come); nor that Canada, seemingly caught unprepared, without faintly enough
firefighters, despite recent all-too-flammable summers — having, in fact,
to import them from around the world to help bring those blazes under some sort
of control — would be in flames. And yet, for that country, experiencing its
fiercest fire season ever, one thing seems guaranteed: That's only the
beginning. After all, UN climate experts are now suggesting that, by the end of
this century, if climate change isn't brought under control, the intensity of
global wildfires could rise by another 57%. So, be prepared, New Yorkers, orange
is undoubtedly the color of our future and we haven't seen anything like the
last of such smoke bombs.

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Oh, and that June evening, once I was home again, I turned on the NBC nightly
news, which not surprisingly led with the Canadian fires and the smoke disaster
in New York in a big-time way — and, hey, in their reporting, no one even
bothered to mention climate change. The words went unused. My best guess: maybe
they were all on Mars.


BEEN THERE, DONE THAT

In fact, you could indeed think of that June 7 smoke-out as the 2023
climate-change equivalent of Sept. 11, 2001. Whoops! Maybe that's a far too
ominous comparison and I'll tell you why.

On Sept. 11, 2001, at the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon in
Washington, and aboard four hijacked jets, almost 3,000 people died. That was
indeed a first-class nightmare, possibly the worst terrorist attack in history.
And the U.S. responded by launching a set of invasions, occupations and
conflicts that came to be known as "the global war on terror." In every sense,
however, it actually turned out to be a global war of terror, a 20-plus-year
disaster of losing conflicts that involved the killing of staggering numbers of
people. The latest estimate from the invaluable Costs of War Project is almost a
million direct deaths and possibly 3.7 million indirect ones.

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Take that in for a moment. And think about this: In the United States, there
hasn't been the slightest penalty for any of that. Just ask yourself: Was the
president who so disastrously invaded Afghanistan and then Iraq, while he and
his top officials lied through their teeth to the American people, penalized in
any way? Yes, I do mean that fellow out in Texas who's become known for
his portrait painting in his old age and who, relatively recently, confused his
decision to invade Iraq with Vladimir Putin's to invade Ukraine.

Or, for that matter, has the U.S. military suffered any penalties for its record
in response to 9/11? Just consider this for starters: The last time that
military actually won a war was in 1991. I'm thinking of the first Gulf War and
that "win" would prove nothing but a prelude to the Iraq disaster to come in
this century. Explain this to me then: Why does the military that's
proven incapable of winning a war since that 9/11 terror attack still get more
money from Congress than the next — your choice — 9 or 10 militaries on this
planet combined, and why, no matter who's in charge in Washington, including
cost-cutting Republicans, does the Pentagon never — no, absolutely never — see a
cut in its funding, only yet more taxpayer dollars? (And mind you, this is true
on a planet where the real battles of the future are likely to involve fire and
smoke.)

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Maybe there's a "debt ceiling" in this country, but there's no ceiling at all
when it comes to funding the military. Republican hawks in the Senate recently
demanded yet more money for the Pentagon in the debt-ceiling debate.

There may indeed be a "debt ceiling" in this country, but there seems to be no
ceiling at all when it comes to funding that military. In fact, Republican hawks
in the Senate only recently demanded yet more money for the Pentagon in the
debt-ceiling debate (despite the fact that, amid other cuts, its funding was
already guaranteed to rise by 3% or $388 billion). As Sen. Lindsey Graham so
classically put it about that (to him) pitiful rise, "This budget is a win for
China."

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Now, I don't mean to say that there's been no pain anywhere. Quite the opposite.
American troops sent to Afghanistan, Iraq and so many other countries came
home suffering everything from literal wounds to severe post-traumatic stress
syndrome. (In these years, in fact, the suicide rate among veterans has
been unnervingly high.)

And did the American people pay? You bet. Through the teeth, in fact, in a
moment when inequality in this country was already going through the roof — or,
if you're not one of the ever-greater numbers of billionaires, perhaps the floor
would be the more appropriate image. And has the Pentagon paid a cent? No, not
for a thing it's done (and, in too many cases, is still doing).

Consider this the definition of decline in a country that, as Donald Trump and
Ron DeSantis continue to make desperately clear, could be heading for a place
too strange and disturbing for words, a place both as old as the present
president of the United States (should he win again) and as new as anyone can
imagine.


WILL THE CLIMATE VERSION OF 9/11 BECOME DAILY LIFE?

Throughout history, it's true that great imperial powers have risen and fallen,
but lest you think this is just another typical imperial moment when, as
the U.S. declines, China will rise, take a breath — oops, sorry, watch out for
that smoke! — and think again. As those Canadian wildfires suggest, we're no
longer on the planet we humans have inhabited these last many thousand years.
We're now living in a new, not terribly recognizable, ever more perilous world.
It's not just this country that's in decline but Planet Earth itself as a
livable place for humanity and for so many other species. Climate change, in
other words, is quickly becoming the climate emergency.

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And as the reaction to 9/11 shows, faced with a moment of true terror, don't
count on the response of either the U.S. or the rest of humanity being on
target. After all, as that smoke bomb in New York suggests, these days, too many
of those of us who matter — whether we're talking about the
climate-change-denying Trumpublican Party or the leaders of the Pentagon — are
fighting the wrong wars, while the major companies responsible for so much of
the terror to come, the giant fossil-fuel outfits, continue to pull
in blockbuster — no, record! — profits for destroying our future. And that
simply couldn't be more dystopian or, potentially, a more dangerously smoky
concoction. Consider that a form of terrorism even al-Qaida couldn't have
imagined. Consider all of that, in fact, a preview of a world in which a
horrific version of 9/11 could become daily life.

So, if there is a war to be fought, the Pentagon won't be able to fight it.
After all, it's not prepared for increasing numbers of smoke bombs, scorching
megadroughts, ever more powerful and horrific storms, melting ice, rising sea
levels, broiling temperatures and so much more. And yet, whether you're American
or Chinese, that's likely to sum up our true enemy in the decades to come. And
worse yet, if the Pentagon and its Chinese equivalent find themselves in a war,
Ukraine-style or otherwise, over the island of Taiwan, you might as well kiss it
all goodbye.

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It should be obvious that the two greatest greenhouse gas producers, China and
the U.S., will rise or fall (as will the rest of us) on the basis of how well
(or desperately poorly) they cooperate in the future when it comes to the
overheating of this planet. The question is: Can this country, or for that
matter the world, respond in some reasonable fashion to what's clearly going to
be climate terror attack after terror attack potentially leading to dystopian
vistas that could stretch into the distant future?

Will humanity react to the climate emergency as ineptly as this country did to
9/11? Is there any hope that we'll act effectively before we find ourselves on a
version of Mars or, as Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis and others like them clearly
wish, fossil-fuelize ourselves to hell and back? In other words, are we truly
fated to live on a smoke bomb of a planet?

Read more

commentary from Tom Engelhardt

 * War, what is it good for? Remarkably little if you're a "great" power in the
   21st century
 * When will climate change become the crucial issue in American elections?
 * Welcome to the Martians! We now live in a world stranger than science fiction



BY TOM ENGELHARDT



Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of
a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He is a fellow of the
Nation Institute and runs TomDispatch.com. His sixth and latest book is A Nation
Unmade by War (Dispatch Books).

MORE FROM Tom Engelhardt


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Air Pollution Canada Climate Change Commentary New York Tomdispatch Wildfires


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