Tom Engelhardt

As mid-2024 approaches, the question remains: Can we humans stop making war on each other or preparing for yet more of the same and begin dealing with a planet heading to hell in a proverbial handbasket? Can we face the fact that the enemy is indeed us?

Amid the daily headlines about the nightmare in Gaza and the earlier ones about the war in Ukraine, that other war, the potentially ultimate one that humanity is waging on the planet itself (with the slow-motion equivalent of nuclear weapons — the burning of fossil fuels), is getting all too little attention. And yet it should be considered the equivalent, even if in slow-motion, of World War III.

Consider all of this, then, the deepest form of human madness and just hope that somehow, from the Middle East to Ukraine, Beijing to Washington, we can wake up to what we’re doing to ourselves before it’s too late.

It couldn’t be more inappropriate to use the term “new Cold War” right now on a globe where a previously unimagined version of a hot war is staring us all, including most distinctly the United States and China, in the face.

And sadly enough, in that war of nature, we humans are the terrorists and those fossil-fuel company CEOs are our very own Osama bin Ladens.

Increasingly, with the never-ending burning of fossil fuels, Ground Zero is no longer a single city of any sort, but this planet itself and, whether we’ve already found a third way to destroy ourselves (and so much else) or not, there is something awesomely ominous about our urge to destroy so much with our multiplying versions of fallout.