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Transcript
Some say the world will end in fire. Some say in ice. Robert Frost wrote that in 1920. With more than a century gone by, we have a verdict. It’s fire for the win.
Hi, I’m Paul Krugman. I thought I’d talk today about a story that should be getting even more play than it is. I mean, there’s so much going on, but, you know, Europe is on fire. There are massive wildfires in France and Spain that have forced the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of people, are menacing Bordeaux and not too far from Madrid. This, of course, follows on the enormous Canadian wildfires that for a while gave Toronto the worst air quality on the planet and turned the skies orange and the air foul across a large part of the eastern United States.
And that, in turn, followed on that deadly heat dome in Europe that killed thousands of people.
Okay. It’s pretty awful. It’s also something that was predictable and predicted. If you go back — I’ve been looking at a 2012 report from the UN, their climate project, that very clearly forecast growing incidents of extreme weather, extreme heatwaves, storms, flooding, and by implication, at least, wildfires. This was clearly in the cards.
In fact, the story that somehow has not become standard is that climate scientists pulled off something that was extraordinary in intellectual terms. They got the basic outlines of what was coming and in many ways even the numbers on what was coming right decades in advance. In any kind of rational world we would be hailing them as heroes and very much listening to them about what we should be doing now.
Of course where we are is that climate scientists are reviled. Climate change is almost crowded out of the political discussion and there’s a fair bit of actual personal persecution of people like Michael Mann and so on who are being punished for the sin of being right.
Okay, of course, it’s more than just that. Now, there are sort of multiple levels to the climate story.
At one level, it’s, you know, there are powerful vested interests that don’t want you to take global warming seriously. Fossil fuel interests are dying as an industry, but they’re dying slowly and they’re doing their best to take us all with them. And they have enormous influence in this administration.
That feeds into something else, which is very true of the people now running the federal government, which is they hate science. So this is across the board. There’s almost always some financial interest, but it’s not just follow the money. It’s just a real hatred of the whole scientific enterprise. And so in an obvious sense, the climate denial is of a piece with the determination of RFK Jr’s health department to find a link between vaccines and autism. There have been many studies saying, no, it’s not there, but that’s not the answer they want.
And they just kind of hate the idea of scientists, they hate the idea of objective research of any kind. And so that feeds right into the climate denial.
And then, actually, it’s even broader and deeper than that. I don’t think you can really understand what’s going on in this administration without saying that there’s a kind of hatred of the intellect, not just science, but really any kind of hard thinking. I mean, at some, not very deep level, it’s an obvious correlation between Trump saying that the reason that we had fires in Canada is because the Canadians didn’t rake their forests, — all, by the way, two million square miles of boreal forest in Canada. You know, there’s just this absurdity, this kind of evil absurdity of the whole situation.
And Pete Hegseth, having presided over the humiliation of the U.S. military because we were not ready for 21st century warfare and the Iranians were. So he’s busy suffering casualties and of course trying to hide them, suffering enormous damage and complete failure of war aims in the face of drones and missiles and basically this new world in which the Ukrainians are showing the way.
This is warfare, which still requires some people, still requires enormous personal courage. But the decisive arms of battle are machines, fairly advanced machines, although cheap compared with the expensive hardware we have. And so here you have Pete Hegseth, faced with all of that, and he thinks that what the U.S. military needs is more testosterone. And that’s not a metaphor. Literally, he wants to give testosterone shots.
The truth is that even the ancient Spartans didn’t win battles just by flexing their biceps. Intellect was an important part of war, even in the 5th century B.C. But now, above all, consider the craziness of thinking that it’s all about brawn and muscles and good grooming. Oh my god.
But this is all hatred of basically anything that involves hard thinking. Again, the deep point is it’s not even exactly, I think, that people in this government are lying about climate, that they’re lying about military stuff. I mean, yes, of course there’s a lot of lying, but I’m not sure they even really have the concept that there is objective reality. And they certainly hate anybody who tries to argue that what they’re saying is objectively, empirically not true.
How did we get here? I’ve been writing about oligarchy, and it’s certainly true that the big money — and the big money has never been bigger — that the big money has thrown its weight behind these deeply anti-intellect, anti-science people. This is in the long term, and not very long term, really against their own interests, but the short term lure of tax cuts and a corruptible government — because they’ve got the money to do the corruption — I guess outweighs that.
And also, of course, quite a few of the mega-billionaires are themselves caught up in this. If we all get through this, Elon Musk and the general awfulness of the people who somehow end up with hundreds of billions of dollars is going to be a cautionary tale for generations to come.
Anyway, that’s where we are. What can I say? I’d really like to not talk about depressing stuff, and I will now and then, but boy, we are in quite a state.
And the sky is blue right now, so I guess I should go out and spend some time outdoors while we still can. Take care.
