While the U.S. Fiddles, the World Burns
We can't make progress on anything while we are stuck in Trumpland
I’m going to start with some irony: a passage from a news service, Al Jazeera, based in Qatar, an oil sheikhdom:1
There is a violence to the light, the kind that makes you shield your eyes – even at 7am. With farmers unable to work outside, livestock under heat stress and crops failing, the United Nations is concerned that the heatwaves are pushing food supply “to the brink”. Even more alarming is that the extreme heat is causing not just heart attacks, but also kidney injury, affecting sleep quality and exacerbating numerous chronic conditions, including diabetes, respiratory illnesses and mental health conditions…
…The impacts of this year’s heatwave are still being analysed. But for everyone who lived through it, this was a relentless two-month emergency, with no respite. Well into the heatwave – after temperatures remained above 104°F for 40 consecutive days – the Modi government implemented its much-awaited Heat Wave Action Plan.
As with every crisis, Modi had turned this deadly heatwave into a branding opportunity. With cameras rolling and citizens queueing up, government officials were seen forcefully wiping faces with towels whose origins were unknown.
Much like COVID certificates that carried his photo, India’s newly rolled-out “cooling points” – unveiled across the national capital – were plastered with the prime minister’s face, and the taxpayer-funded heatwave action plan is the latest in a series of loyalty programmes that expect the public to remain indebted to the ruling party.
The author, Indian investigative journalist Vidya Krishnan, is describing a national leader who surely sounds familiar to anyone who’s paid attention to Trump over the years. It’s not a stretch of the imagination to insert Trump’s name for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
In Maharashtra’s Vidarbha region, temperatures reached 116.42 °F. On April 26.
Krishnan writes:
Census workers have died, as have voters who stepped out in the recently concluded West Bengal election. A man who boarded a bus to attend a wedding died before he reached his destination.
Modi, like Trump, is essentially a climate denialist. He’s letting his country burn, and people die, with policies that encourage climate change rather than thwart it.
Krishnan tells us how:
There is an orgy of tree-felling across the worst-affected cities. In Nashik, despite protests, heritage banyan trees that have stood for decades, if not centuries, are being cut down. In Pune, too, old trees are making way for a four-lane highway. In Bengaluru, trees are making way for a metro train and in Kashmir, which has never experienced such heat, mulberry, walnut and chinar trees have to go for wider roads and “smarter” cities.
The Trump regime, as I’ll document later in this report, is also promoting climate change. The methodologies the two regimes use are different. The effects are the same.
In India, summers start early. April and May are the hottest months. After that comes the monsoon season to offer a respite, if devastating floods from torrential rains that often accompany the monsoon season are your idea of a respite.
Monsoon season is highly anticipated in India for its vital rains, which water and enrich the soil for agriculture.
Ironic twist: This year’s enhanced El Niño is expected to reduce rainfall in India to around 90% of normal rates.2
But monsoons also cause a lot of trouble, especially in the lowlands of India’s neighbor, Bangladesh, where coastal areas disappear inch by inch every year from massive flooding.
Krishnan’s article points out that 380 million Indians “are living in conditions that exceed the capabilities of human physiology” as a result of unrelenting high temperatures.
Temperatures similar to those in India are beginning to show up in the United States.
Phoenix hit 118°F on two days in July and August 2025.3 These temperatures are not possible, from a biological standpoint, for humans to endure.
The body reaches a stage where it can no longer cool itself when the temperature reaches 95°F, according to Harvard University’s South Asia Institute.
There were 122 days when the temperature in Phoenix rose to 100°F or more.4
A heat wave hits Europe
As I write this, Paris is reaching temperatures of 105.6°F in a heat wave that has already killed dozens.5
Air conditioning isn’t plentiful in Paris, where most residential rooftops are covered in zinc, a weather-resistant and highly recyclable metal that, unfortunately, absorbs heat.
Paris’ 105.6°F day was the hottest in recorded history, according to France’s national weather service, Météo-France.
French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu declared a national health emergency as the nation closed the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre museum, and other tourist sites.
In the UK, temperatures hit 97°F and 97.5°F on Wednesday and Thursday. Officials were warning that Friday (June 26, 2026) would see higher temperatures, possibly reaching 111.7°F. London has even less air conditioning than Paris. 1,200 U.K. schools have already been closed during the heat wave. Train passengers are being told to only travel on Britain’s beloved train tracks when necessary.
Spain is recording the hottest June in recorded history, too, and Germany is bracing for the same heat dome to arrive on Friday (June 26).
Overall, the heat wave was expected to impact 94 million people in Europe, according to reports by Agence France-Presse, a French news agency not owned by Rupert Murdoch.6
The European heat wave isn’t a unicorn event
The World Health Organization, from which the Trump regime withdrew the United States,7 has estimated that more than 200,000 people have perished during the last four years from various maladies caused by excessive heat.8 The headline for the WHO’s statement was: “Nearly all of those deaths were preventable.”
Regarding the current wave:9
“The weather pattern itself is not particularly unusual, but the temperatures are,” said Friederike Otto, the climate scientist who leads World Weather Attribution. “Or at least they used to be, without human-induced climate change.”
In their analysis, the researchers used temperature records to estimate how the odds of heat waves of different intensities had changed over the decades because of global warming. Their results indicate that a European heat wave comparable in likelihood to this week’s would have produced average daytime temperatures that were about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit cooler in the 2000s and 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit cooler in 1976.
The heat dome is being pushed up from North Africa, where it’s also brutally hot. Much of Morocco hit 111.2°F. Egypt has regularly seen 104°F temperatures throughout much of the nation. This same African heat dome is pushing Saharan dust plumes deep into Europe.10
According to Nature Magazine:11
Scientists say the danger lies not only in how hot individual days become, but in the wider climate conditions surrounding them. Drought is amplifying extreme heat, while dry soils are feeding heat back into the atmosphere. Expanding cities trap warmth in concrete and asphalt, increasing exposure at work, at home and in the fields.
A recent study tracking heatwaves in Algeria from 1979 to 2023 found that their number has doubled since the early 1980s, with a marked acceleration since 2017. Average maximum temperatures during heatwaves rose from about 44.9°C in 1979 to nearly 46.8°C in 2023, while the longest recorded heatwave lasted 51 consecutive days in 2023.
“The duration of exposure to heat may be more dangerous than reaching a maximum temperature for one day,” [Geologist Nouh] Rabouh says.
Global warming is spreading disease
Studies show that new pathogens creating new epidemics have been spawned by climate change.12
According to a study led by The Global Health Network at Oxford’s Nuffield Department of Medicine involving 3,752 health professionals and researchers across 151 countries, malaria, dengue, tuberculosis, and HIV/AIDS are increasing across the globe. The report says that climate change, along with socioeconomic disparity and inequality, are the key drivers.
It doesn’t help, of course, that the Trump regime and its cult denigrate vaccines on the regular.
Scientists are also alarmed at the potential of zombie viruses. No, not viruses that can turn you into a zombie, but viruses that have been hibernating in the permafrost for centuries.13
Virologist Marion Koopmans of the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam says:
“We don’t know what viruses are lying out there in the permafrost but I think there is a real risk that there might be one capable of triggering a disease outbreak – say of an ancient form of polio. We have to assume that something like this could happen.”
Scientists are trying to lay down a network of monitoring stations in areas where permafrost is disappearing, but, of course, are getting no cooperation from the Trump regime, which is laser focused on death and mayhem.
El Niño is coming
An El Niño event occurs when the Central and Eastern Pacific Ocean heats up to higher than normal temperatures. Temperatures there have already been higher than ever in recorded history for 20 days in June.
El Niño is a normal climate event, but climate scientists are worried that climate change is likely to make this one worse, and they’ve already got the goods, via these higher temperatures, to back up their theories.
Climate models can’t accurately predict what kind of climate events El Niño might trigger, but scientists are bracing for massive flooding along the U.S. Western coast.14
Another concern is that El Niño will accelerate the roasting of large chunks of the earth this year.
Climate change has already added 6 to 12 inches of water to coastlines in some locations along the California coast over the last few decades. This year’s El Niño could add another six inches.
You may not have a lot of sympathy when you see videos of Malibu homes crashing into the ocean, but keep in mind that mainstream media tends to focus on calamities facing rich people instead of the millions of poor people who also suffer.
It’s already too late
According to climate scientists, the world has already reached the point of no return on mass destruction and loss of life resulting from climate change.15
The Yale School of the Environment speaks to this in non-scholarly terms that even a Trumpanzee can probably understand:
The world is poised to overshoot the goal of limiting average global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, as for the first time, a three-year period, ending in 2025, has breached the threshold. And climate scientists are predicting devastating consequences, just as the world’s governments appear to have lost their appetite for tackling the emissions that are causing the warming.
The 1.5-degree target was set at the Paris climate conference a decade ago.
So what does the United States do under Trump? It withdraws from the Paris Climate Agreement.
More from Yale:
Without an abrupt change of course, the warming will only accelerate. James Hansen, the Columbia University climatologist who first put climate change on the world’s front pages during testimony to Senate hearings in 1988, believes we could hit 2 degrees C as soon as 2045, a forecast based on several climate models under a high-emissions scenario.
The reason for the escalation is that the climate system is in a pincer grip. First, emissions of planet-warming gases remain stubbornly high, and second, natural carbon sinks are weakening. The result is an accelerating rise in atmospheric concentrations of CO2. 2024 saw the biggest jump ever.
The Yalies point out that changes to our lives won’t come slowly. Devastating and sudden climate events will shock us into reality. That’s already started for wildfire victims and many people who live in coastal areas who can’t insure their homes or pay mortgage-like rates for flood insurance (hello, Florida).
The United States has become an active participant in climate change
Now we come to the worst of it all. I’m talking here, of course, about the Trump regime’s cataclysmic disregard for climate change and the policies that were urgently needed a decade ago to get it under control.
The United States’ abandonment of climate change policies, of course, was highly preventable had a small group of (mostly) men (mostly young) not rejected a sane, female professional to be their president.
The following bullet points describe just a few of the many actions the regime has taken to encourage climate change. I’m borrowing heavily here from the words of the Climate Action Campaign, which has been tracking the regime’s systematic attack on Planet Earth:16
4/13/2026: The regime “paused the distribution of essential grant funding for NOAA operations, research, and extreme weather monitoring. Climate change is fueling more powerful and deadly extreme weather, and Trump’s actions to withhold funding for a critical agency like NOAA leave states and communities less prepared and more vulnerable when the next extreme weather event occurs.”
6/16/2026: “The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) unveiled a proposal to revise regulations overseeing grants awards. The rule requires political appointees to approve grants, forcing agencies to overhaul the process for reviewing and dispersing billions in funding to public and private university research and threatening future scientific progress.”
https://www.eenews.net/articles/trump-targets-science-in-ombs-grants-revamp/
6/4/2026: The regime “announced a plan to spend $700 million of taxpayer money to prop up 13 current coal plants across the country and build new coal plants in two different states.”
6/1/2026: “[The] Department of Energy rewrote the rules governing a portion of an $8.8 billion home energy rebate program to bar households from accessing funds when replacing gas appliances with cleaner and more efficient electric models. The new guidance prohibits so-called “fuel switching,” limiting rebates to households that already own electric appliances.” ” https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/01/climate/energy-rebates-home-appliances.html
5/14/2026: “The EPA is delaying pollution limits on light-and medium-duty vehicles for two years, handing polluters another corporate giveaway that will force higher costs on drivers, and cause and exacerbate chronic respiratory disease”. https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/us-epa-proposes-delaying-enforcement-biden-vehicle-pollution-rule-2026-05-14/
4/9/2026: The Trump regime initiated a “Forest Service reorganization that will shut down 50 of the agency’s 70 research stations. Experts are very concerned as the closures could cause major disruptions as the Pacific Northwest heads into a potentially severe wildfire season.” https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/03/climate/forest-service-research-stations.html
4/9/2026: The EPA proposed “weakening protections built around the well-documented risks of toxic coal ash contamination. The proposed changes to coal ash pollution safeguards would exempt more than 100 ash dumps from federal cleanup rules, roll back groundwater monitoring requirements, and weaken oversight of one of the nation’s largest toxic waste streams.”17
https://subscriber.politicopro.com/article/2026/04/epa-to-loosen-coal-ash-requirements-pro-008659073/24/2026: “The Interior Department announced a plan to use $982 million of taxpayer money to pay French company TotalEnergies to cancel offshore wind projects in New York and North Carolina. The terms include a requirement that TotalEnergies use these taxpayer-provided funds to instead invest in fossil fuel projects across the United States.”
3/12/2026: “Trump’s so-called ‘Energy Dominance Council’ has resorted to releasing 172 million barrels of oil from the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve to address the spike in prices.”
3/12/2026: “The Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against California’s clean car rules, which set limits on tailpipe pollution. This follows the Trump adminstration’s rollbacks to Biden-era car efficency standards.”
2/12/2026: “Trump signed an executive order directing the U.S. Department of Defense to purchase electricity from coal-fired power plants. The White House also said they would provide funding ($175M) to five coal plants in West Virginia, Ohio, North Carolina, and Kentucky to keep them online beyond their scheduled retirement dates.”
2/12/2026: “The Trump administration repealed the endangerment finding, the requirement that EPA must protect people from climate pollution. Established in 2009, it empowered the EPA to regulate six greenhouse gases through the Clean Air Act. The rollback makes climate denial official US policy. More pollution will lead to more climate change, and more death, destruction and illness.”
1/27/2026: The regime withdrew from the Paris Climate Agreement.
1/12.2026: “The EPA published a final rule to dramatically weaken standards for smog-forming nitrogen oxide pollution from stationary sources as it seeks to rapidly accelerate the buildout of AI infrastructure and gas-fired plants to power them.”
1/12.2026: “According to a New York Times report, EPA will no longer account for the monetary cost of health harms when setting rules for air pollution, abandoning four decades of precedent at the core of the EPA’s mission. Air pollution costs the U.S. economy upwards of $800 billion a year, and oil and gas pollution alone is responsible for 91,000 premature deaths per year.”
12/22.2025: “The Interior Department ordered a blanket pause on offshore wind projects under construction, citing unspecified national security risks. Of the five impacted projects, the administration’s previous attempted pauses on two of them (including one under national security considerations) have been halted in federal courts.”
12/9.2025: “OMB Director Russ Vought announced plans to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a Boulder, Colo., lab responsible for some of the country’s most important research on extreme weather, air pollution, and the impacts of climate change like warming on ocean temperatures.” Note: A federal court has blocked this plan.
This list only includes climate change acceleration activities occurring this year (and December of 2025). The full list linked in the Footnotes is much more comprehensive.
The United States has become, thanks to those who created litmus tests they would never have applied to a man with similar qualifications, an active participant in global warming while the rest of the world burns.
More than a few of the young Gaza protesters, for example, who refused to vote for Kamala will, quite literally, be burned alive as a result of their litmus test.
The burning world rests at their feet, as does the current mayhem now overwhelming the Middle East. As does, ironically, the continued oppression of the very people they thought they were protecting. Netanyahu continues to declare that he’s not finished with Gaza, and has since set his sights on Southern Lebanon. Jared Kushner, Trump’s real estate grifter for the Middle East, wants to bulldoze Gaza, remove its inhabitants, and turn it into a glittering tourist mecca. He actually builds this type of policy into the treaties he’s assigned to negotiate in the Middle East.
To paraphrase something I wrote elsewhere: Our world has been seared as if its outer layer has peeled away, like a full onion roasting on a wildly inflamed grill while an idiot cook obliviously stares at his phone.
Meanwhile, thanks to Trump voters and nonvoters (same thing), the nation has become a pariah state, something the next administration will have trouble reversing, given how the U.S. has blown its reliability to smithereens under this regime.
It isn’t the next government that foreign nations will distrust when a new one finally starts trying to mend fences.
It’s American voters.
Fool me once, shame on you.
Fool me twice, shame on me.
Notes
The intensity of storms created by El Niño depend on whether the heated currents of El Niño rise to the surface of the ocean, which is something computer models can’t predict.
European Space Agency image credit:
Esa.int. “Europe Feels the Heat beneath Our Feet,” 2026. https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2026/06/Europe_feels_the_heat_beneath_our_feet.
The Climate Action Campaign (CAC) is a coalition of groups fighting the Trump regime and tracking its efforts to burn the world into a crisp. It includes:
Center for American Progress, Earthjustice, Environment America, Environmental Defense Fund, League of Conservation Voters, National Hispanic Medical Association, National Wildlife Federation, Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club, Union of Concerned Scientists, U.S. Climate Action Network, and WE ACT for Environmental Justice.
Some studies suggest that human beings might develop biological defenses against increased heat, especially in high-income areas and/or countries, but leave poor areas behind:
He, Cheng, Yixiang Zhu, Yichen Guo, Jovine Bachwenkizi, Renjie Chen, Haidong Kan, and Wafaie W. Fawzi. “Escalated Heatwave Mortality Risk in Sub-Saharan Africa under Recent Warming Trend.” Science Advances 11, no. 48 (November 28, 2025). https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.ady7379.
I’ve read some articles expressing a firm belief that the American oligarchy will use global warming as a cudgel to knock poor people off the planet. I won’t address that now, but nothing is truly beyond these people. In my novel MagicLand, and especially in the short stories adjacent to it, they wipe us all out with microbes created by technology instead.
You can find additional information on the Trump regime's environmental rollbacks during Clownshow 2.0 here:
https://abcnews.com/US/biggest-anti-environment-policies-enacted-trumps-1st-100/story?id=121125789
Thanks for reading!
Footnotes
Krishnan, Vidya. “India Is Being Left to Die in the Heat.” Al Jazeera, May 22, 2026. https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2026/5/22/india-is-being-left-to-die-in-the-heat.
Pandey, Kundan. “Centre Identifies over 300 Vulnerable Districts amid El Niño, Weak Monsoon Fears.” Mongabay India, June 25, 2026. https://india.mongabay.com/short-article/2026/06/centre-identifies-315-vulnerable-districts-amid-el-nino-weak-monsoon-fears/.
Davis-Young, Katherine. “2025 Was Phoenix’s 2Nd-Hottest Year on Record.” KJZZ, 2026. https://www.kjzz.org/kjzz-news/2026-01-01/2025-was-phoenixs-2nd-hottest-year-on-record.
kjzz-news, ibid
Hamamdjian, Daniele, and Alex Holmes. “Temperature Records Smashed as Extreme Heat Wave Grips Europe.” NBC News, June 25, 2026. https://www.nbcnews.com/world/europe/europe-heatwave-france-spain-uk-record-temperatures-eiffel-tower-rcna351710.
Pulitzer Center. “Europe’s Historic Heat Wave and a Warning for the World,” 2026. https://pulitzercenter.org/blog/europes-historic-heat-wave-and-warning-world.
Per Semafor today (June 26, 2026):
A group of Democratic senators led by Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., introduced legislation requiring Trump to rejoin the World Health Organization and coordinate with the body on the Ebola response, Semafor’s Adrian Elimian scooped. The legislation would require Trump to take “all necessary steps” for the US to rejoin the WHO within 30 days after its enactment, and to immediately collaborate with the organization on the Ebola response.
Ford, Emily Ruth. “🟡 Semafor Washington, DC: Presidential Predicament | Semafor.” Semafor.com, June 26, 2026. https://www.semafor.com/newsletter/06/26/2026/semafor-washington-dc-presidential-predicament.
World. “Statement – Europe Lost 200 000 People to Heat in 4 Years yet Nearly All of Them Were Preventable.” Who.int. World Health Organization: WHO, June 11, 2026. https://www.who.int/europe/news/item/11-06-2026-statement---europe-lost-200-000-people-to-heat-in-4-years-yet-nearly-all-of-them-were-preventable.
Zhong, Raymond. “Climate Change Fueling Europe’s Ferocious Heat Wave, Scientists Find.” The New York Times, June 26, 2026.
Ruminato Gift Link 🎁 https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/26/climate/europe-heat-wave-climate-change.html. 🎁
Jones, Judson. “Saharan Dust Could Add an Apocalyptic Hue to Europe’s Unrelenting Heat.” Nytimes.com. The New York Times, June 25, 2026.
Ruminato Gift Link 🎁 https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/25/weather/blood-rain-dust-heat-wave-europe.html. 🎁
El-Said, Mohammed. “North Africa’s Heatwaves Are Lasting Longer, Hitting Harder.” Nature Africa, June 10, 2026. https://doi.org/10.1038/d44148-026-00147-3.
Oxford University. “New Study Warns of ‘Creeping Catastrophe’ as Climate Change Drives a Global Rise in Infectious Diseases,” December 2, 2025. https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2025-12-02-new-study-warns-creeping-catastrophe-climate-change-drives-global-rise-infectious.
McKie, Robin. “Arctic Zombie Viruses in Siberia Could Spark Terrifying New Pandemic, Scientists Warn.” the Guardian. The Guardian, January 21, 2024. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/jan/21/arctic-zombie-viruses-in-siberia-could-spark-terrifying-new-pandemic-scientists-warn.
Pulver, Dinah Voyles. “El NiñO Roars to Life. 5 Reasons Why It’s a Big Deal.” USA TODAY, June 25, 2026. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2026/06/25/strong-el-nino-growing-2026/90608470007/.
The, Overshoot (Yale School of the Environment) . “Overshoot: The World Is Hitting Point of No Return on Climate.” Yale E360, 2024. https://e360.yale.edu/features/1.5-degrees-tipping-points.
Climate Action Campaign. “Trump’s Climate and Clean Energy Rollback Tracker,” January 12, 2026. https://www.actonclimate.com/trumptracker/.
More on how Great Lakes communities are feeling about this here:
Ruminato Gift Link 🎁 https://www.chicagotribune.com/2026/06/13/coal-ash-pollution-epa-rollback-illinois-indiana/ 🎁
I can't give this a like because I hate all of it.
"mainstream media tends to focus on calamities facing rich people instead of the millions of poor people who also suffer." 👏👏👏
Your onion analogy is spot on. It's a catastrophe and my grandchildren, and young people all over the planet, will be the true victims. Excellent column.