The Doomsday Clock Ticks Closer to the End of Humanity
How close does Project 2025 get us to global annihilation?
Look, I’m not an alarmist.
I live in Montana, within the blast zone of the Yellowstone Supervolcano, which means if it ever exploded it would cover my home in four feet of volcanic glass shards and pulverized rock and obliterate my part of the world immediately. If I would allow myself to concentrate too hard on the implications of a Yellowstone Supervolcano explosion, I would never sleep. Every diesel truck that rumbled past my house would make my heart lurch with anxiety.
I try not to think too hard about the Yellowstone Supervolcano, but I’m grateful for the strong-stomached scientists and researchers who do. Scientists help us understand the fallout of everything from volcano eruptions to hurricanes to flash floods to nuclear war.
Which brings me to the Doomsday Clock, which was created by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1947 to determine how close humanity is to destroying itself through nuclear escalation, climate change, and other man-made catastrophes. At midnight, it’s game over. The Earth, or at least the humans who occupy it, are toast.
As of its last update in January, the Doomsday Clock is at ninety-seconds to midnight, the closest its ever been. Escalations like Russia’s attack on Ukraine and conflict between Israel and Gaza caused the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to declare a possible global catastrophe. Record high temperatures, another crisis based on human behavior, added to the existential threat. Scientists are also concerned about advancing Artificial Intelligence, and doubt the benefits of the new technology outweigh its potential threats to civilization.
Rachel Bronson, head of The Bulletin, said scientists arrived in Chicago last week to begin “setting the clock” for 2025.
The point of the clock isn’t to be definitive but to inspire conversation about the ways in which humans flirt with their own extinction. Its creators would know. Many of them were among the group of scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project, the code name for the development of the atomic bomb.
How will the goals that right-wing extremists set in Project 2025 affect the Doomsday Clock? What will Trump’s impact be?
It isn’t lost on me that the Bulletin always sets the clock in late January, and every four years it occurs after a presidential inauguration. In January 2017, right after Trump was sworn in the first time, the Doomsday Clock ticked 30 seconds closer to midnight, thanks to Trump.
Shrinking the deadline from three minutes to 2.5 at the start of Trump’s term, one scientist based out of the University of Arizona, said statements Trump made during his transition to the White House demonstrated "a growing disregard for scientific expertise."
The Bulletin wrote an op/ed in The New York Times claiming, “Never before has the Bulletin decided to advance the clock largely because of the statements of a single person. But Mr. Trump's statements and actions have been unsettling."
They blamed a rise in global conflict and humanity’s failure to confront our dependence on environment-killing fossil fuels and nuclear arms, both of which they predicted would escalate during a Trump term.
They were right.
Who can forget Trump’s ridiculous Twitter pissing matches with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, including when he called him short and fat and insisted he had a bigger nuclear button? As a world leader, Trump was as immature and petulant as he was psychotic and dangerous.
But perhaps more demoralizing is the speed with which Project 2025 ushers us to the end of humanity through complacency about climate change. Project 2025 is right-wing extremists playbook for the Trump ascent to the presidency. Though Trump tried to distance himself from the 920-page book and many gullible voters believed him, we’re already seeing Project 2025 play out in his cabinet picks and suggested policies.
Pages 257 and 258 of Project 2025 discuss reversing Biden’s executive orders to “put the climate crisis at the center of U.S. foreign policy and national security,” which the Project 2025 authors say has made things more expensive. It argues that burning fossil fuels are cheaper, therefore food and transportation is cheaper for the working poor. This is the far right’s agenda to continue our dependence on fossil fuels, which undeniably warm the planet.
According to to the Berkley Center of Law, Energy, and the Environment, “If you don’t look at the social cost of carbon and the massive climate impacts and disruptions, then fossil fuels, in the very short term may be less expensive. But the cost of renewables is now competitive and continued investment and the end of fossil fuels is essential to surviving climate change.”
When the evidence of climate change is right in front of us, from wildfires that wipe out entire towns to disastrous flash floods to back-to-back hurricanes, it’s getting harder to deny that continued reliance on fossil fuel actually fights poverty rather than exacerbates it through dramatic and devastating weather events.
Bernard McNamee authored Project 2025’s section on scientific research. McNamee, a Trump appointee in his first term, says Trump should eliminate the Department of Energy’s offices dedicated to renewable energy, carbon management, and climate change, instead focusing solely on nuclear defense and national security.
In another attack on climate science in Project 2025, Thomas Gilman, who served under Trump as the chief financial officer of the Commerce Department, said the president should dismantle the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, which provides daily weather forecasts, severe storm warnings, climate monitoring to fisheries management, coastal restoration, and the supporting of marine commerce.
Part of this dismantling includes fully privatizing the National Weather Service (the kind folks behind weather.gov, which is depended on by farmers, ranchers, fisheries, meteorologists, contractors, pilots, data scientists, sailors, the U.S. military, on and on and on.
It’s clear from Project 2025 that the Trump administration doesn’t want the public to know the existential threat we are facing with climate change, and they know exactly how to dismantle the departments that would provide that information.
This is just one more factor ticking us closer to utter annihilation.
But not if the Yellowstone Supervolcano gets us first.