The Heat and the War

Over the past few days the Southwest has sweltered. A March heat wave is absolutely shattering records — hundreds of the daily sort, dozens of monthly highs, and in some spots temperatures have even obliterated April heat records.

Some of these temperatures are as much as 40 degrees F above normal. Las Vegas cracked 95 degrees on Saturday and opened a bunch of cooling stations around the city — the sort of thing they're a bit more used to doing in July. Fort Collins, Colorado — elevation, 5,004 feet — hit 91 degrees. That's two degrees higher than next month's record.

Though the records are impressive, this is, of course, just How Thing Are Now. A report from World Weather Attribution found that the heat wave would be "virtually impossible without human-induced climate change." Another way to put it is that the likelihood of this event has increased by a factor of 800. Elsewhere so far this year, Australia had its worst heat wave in a decade and a half, South Africa suffered some of its worst wildfires on record, and heat and fire in Argentina and Chile killed dozens of people. Hot, wet, and on fire.

Meanwhile, a war. A stupid, brutal, almost impossibly unnecessary war. A war waged by a small cadre of unruly children suffering from some combination of psychopathic malevolence, bigoted religious fervor, personal greed of a sort that would make Scrooge blush, a world-historic case of Dunning-Kruger, and of course a lack of both object permanence and theory of mind. The most ill-suited people in recent (?) human history to launch a war of aggression in the most complicated region in the world, giddily bombing away.

These things — the heat, the war — are related, of course, because of the Strait. The Strait, and the island, and the various other geographic landforms and massive pieces of human construction that help prop up a global energy system clinging like a toddler refusing to go to bed to its dirty past.

Iran has functionally closed the Strait of Hormuz, a place on a map the people responsible for the war totally could have pointed to a few weeks ago and how dare you suggest otherwise, resulting in a burgeoning energy crisis that will affect pretty much everyone. Mix that with strikes on various oil and gas facilities not just in Iran but in Qatar and Bahrain and the UAE and so on, by both sides of this, again, utterly unnecessary conflict, and you have various analysts and economists and such sweating oily bullets.

"We’re seeing direct attacks on multibillion dollar infrastructure that’s going to take as long as five years to fix," one told The Hill. The damp and sundowning president threatened to blow up Iranian power plants if the Strait was not reopened — a war crime, if you're scoring at home, joining probably countless others but at very least Pete Hegseth's "no quarter" claim, for which he belongs in the Hague for simply saying it out loud — which another said was a "ticking timebomb of elevated uncertainty."

There are other industries and critical supplies that are threatened — fertilizer, maybe most importantly, along with pharmaceuticals — but the energy shock created by — AGAIN — the dumbest war anyone has launched for a century is what connects us back to record temperatures in Fort Collins. The Southwest is baking precisely because the world collectively decided, over decades, to not address the fundamental problems with a fossil fuel-based energy system. The war is about to cause the worst economic shock in close to two decades because that system, somehow, still reigns.

It has help, of course. Spain, which has managed to shift close to 60 percent of its electricity supply to renewables, has so far enjoyed far lower wartime energy prices than its neighbors. Its reward, courtesy of the New York Times, is headlines like "Spain Says the Sun Shields It From Rising Gas Costs. Is That True?" Yes. The answer is yes. Thank you.

I confess that a frankly silly number of things do this to me, but I have been thinking once again these past weeks about the line from a 1983 EPA report about global warming: ""[T]he shift away from fossil fuels perhaps could be instituted more gradually and therefore less expensively if energy policies were adopted now rather than several decades later."

This war, absurd on its face and devastating in its execution, would have a different character if that advice had been heeded. The counterfactuals are too complicated to tease out, but it probably wouldn't be happening at all — Trump's childlike desire to "take the oil," shouted to the skies for a full decade now, wouldn't play in a world where oil is considered, appropriately, to just suck ass. And in that world, the solar-powered version where the reality TV host never had the chance to make an ExxonMobil executive Secretary of State, the temperature in Fort Collins is downright comfortable right now.