What will it take to cause “shock and awe” over increasingly frequent and devastating catastrophic climate events? Consider this context: “The average temperature in 2024 was 1.6C above preindustrial levels, data from the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) shows.” (see story in The Guardian, 1/10/2025.) Climate science predicts the devastating consequences clearly. Even so, LA burning becomes a shock and also a political football.
International climate dodgers in the guise of political leaders still chatter mindlessly about worries that we might not hold the line at 1.5 degrees Centigrade additional heating above average pre-industrial levels, and pretend that they have made solid (voluntary) commitments to reduce carbon emissions. Well, too late for such charades; we are already past that. The knowledge of the danger was there decades ago. Now, the data are clearer than ever. The path past 1.5 has not even slowed, yet politics remain unmoved as LA burns.
For at least a couple of years now, it has been obvious to me that the only way we will see any serious movement from the power elites of most industrial nations is when a climate catastrophe occurs that is so severe that it precipitates a major mobilization of citizens demanding that government and industry take extreme action to salvage what we can of any remaining habitability on planet Earth.
Political Perversity as LA Burns
Right after writing last week’s edition of “LOOK UP! The Hopeful Realist Newsletter,” in which I lamented the environmental fragility of that great world city, I became aware of the extreme Santa Anna winds and ensuing firestorms in and around Los Angeles. Frequent seasonal local wildfires in the Santa Monica Mountains, Malibu, and the coastal high-end residential areas have been a near constant for many years. LA’s elites just kept building their multimillion dollar mansions in the hills overlooking the Pacific’s beautiful Santa Monica Bay.
Eventually, insurance companies began to raise rates severely, then refuse to write policies to cover the high risk of fire. Well, folks said, if they want to risk it let them build their glittering monuments to their business success. Of course, now we all pay for the extreme measures fire fighters have to take there and in multiple locations where the 100 mile per hour winds take hot embers. Of course, these residents did not start the fires, but they helped fuel the damage to their communities and to broader public goods.
It is pretty obvious that the extreme draughts and other unprecedented weather events of recent years result from the unprecedented changes in climate, clearly documented, that have grown over the two hundred years of the industrial age, and especially the extreme acceleration of extractive disruption and profligate consumerism over the last fifty years. As they say, this is not rocket science. It is, however, rock solid basic science. The evidence is in and it is conclusive. Yet, politically, what do we get?
Trumpery Prevails.
Almost a decade ago, I ran across the word, ‘trumpery’ somewhere and looked it up out of curiosity. Maybe it would be somehow related to the vindictive foolishness I saw in the 2016 upstart candidate at that time. I had discovered David Kay Johnson’s coverage of ‘The Donald’ years before when he was a racist real estate grifter and fake actor. (Don’t get me started on the fakery of “The Apprentice.”) Johnson had tracked Trump’s antics since early in his checkered career as a silver-spooned entrepreneurial newcomer in the New York City real estate market, riding on the coattails of his father’s ruthless business practices, and his money. His hanging out with Jeffrey Epstein on the perverse party scene was also a clue…
Well, the dictionary definition fit well. Here are some synonyms from the Oxford dictionary thesaurus: froth, trivia, nonsense, sham, fake, lie, forgery, dissimulation. It listed only two antonyms: truth and fact. Well, that about sums up the politics of MAGA Trumpery. It represents a cult of confusion, deceit, fear, and hate generated by a wannabe autocrat.
As we move anxiously into his four-year attempt to deconstruct our partial democracy and install his own personal dictatorship, in direct violation of the Constitution of the United States of America, it becomes more and more important to understand how and why so many Americans fall for the con artist that is Donald Trump. I’ll be posting some of my analysis of this issue on my new Substack platform, Illusions Transformed.
Truth and Lies
Even though we have heard so many similar lies so often repeated that they seem part of the real world, when—it is still hard to say it—the president-elect, Donald J. Trump, accused the Democrats, and Governor Gavin Newsom in particular, for causing the Los Angeles firestorms, it was still shocking to hear such nonsense, such Trumpery. (I capitalize the word trumpery because its definition so closely fit the man, and obviously, I am calling out the amusing if sad association of the meaning of the word with the name of its perpetrator.) ‘The Donald’ does in fact embody the meaning of the word, Trumpery.
Now, one might assume that the average American citizen would understand that the increasingly anomalous extreme weather events that increasingly plague diverse places on Earth, are tightly correlated with the exponential pollution of the planet and destruction of its ecosystems. The effect of CO2 added to the atmosphere was understood over a hundred years ago. The “greenhouse effect” as it was called, heats the Earth by sending more solar energy back to earth due to the simple physics of reflectivity. Similarly, the albedo effect allows the darker arctic seas to absorb much more heat when the bright white ice above it is gone and no longer reflects energy back into space.
Well, all that is now common knowledge for anyone who follows the increasingly detailed scientific facts, including the effects of extreme and extended draughts, hurricanes, floods, etc. The political-cultural problem arises because a population that reads at the average level of fifth grade, and people who suffer from loss of pride, are culturally detached, and feel politically abandoned, even the highly educated ones, are susceptible to demagoguery to exploit their fear with conspiracy theories and hate speech targeting all sorts of bogy men and putative evil.
In this context, it is not surprising that Fox-infested minds encouraged to engage in confirmation bias, living in ideological silos, can actually blame a current politician for events caused by complex trends that began decades before Gavin Newsom was even born. It is easy to find fault with just about any politician, but when the sum total of politics is reduced to nothing more than demonizing the other, no significant amount of reasoned analysis of real world facts and empirical threats to humanity is possible in the public discourse. Now, it is left up to shock and awe even more severe than LA burning…
Robert MacNeil Christie, Author 