The wildfires ravaging Los Angeles have killed at least 24 people, displaced 180,000 and scorched about 160km2 — an inferno driven by fierce winds and severe drought in what should be California’s wet season. It is a sobering reminder that the climate crisis is driving wildfires to become more frequent, intense and destructive — leaving ruined lives, homes and livelihoods in their wake.
US President Joe Biden responded by mobilizing federal aid. By contrast US president-elect Donald Trump, a convicted felon who was criminally sentenced on Friday, used the disaster to spread disinformation and stoke political division.
The climate crisis knows no national borders. Deadly floods in Spain, Hawaii’s fires and east Africa’s devastating drought show that nowhere is safe from its effects. Countries must work toward the global common interest and beyond their narrow national interests. The scale of the climate emergency is such that there is a case to view all crises through a green lens.
Instead Trump’s denialism works to foment distrust about the science. He is not just aiming to delay the onset of truth. He wants to demolish it.
It is a familiar playbook: The fossil fuel industry knows the reality of the climate emergency, but chooses profit over responsibility, effectively deceiving the public while the planet burns.
The perils of weaponizing doubt should be painfully clear in the week when scientists said last year was the first to pass the symbolic 1.5°C warming threshold, as well as the world’s hottest on record.
Trump’s politicization of climate denial has supercharged it, turning skepticism into a badge of identity.
When denial becomes ideological, facts turn irrelevant. That makes concerted climate action much harder to achieve.
Trump’s return to power will not halt the US’ path to decarbonization, but it will slow it disastrously. An analysis by Carbon Brief in August last year estimated that his return could add 4 billion tonnes of US carbon emissions by 2030 compared with Democrat plans — inflicting US$900 billion in global climate damage.
To grasp its scale, the emissions surge would equal the combined annual output of the EU and Japan, or the emissions of the world’s 140 lowest-emitting countries.
Confronting the climate emergency demands more than facts; it requires dismantling the political machinery that breeds denialism. The link between the current model of economic growth and the depth of environmental collapse is undeniable. Yet in the face of the overwhelming evidence, too many on the political right cling to denial or place blind faith in the free market.
This is an age of “hyper agency” — where billionaires, rogue states and corporations wield almost unchecked power, fueling climate chaos and global instability. The mechanisms meant to hold power to account are being dismantled with ruinous consequences. Without urgent action, the next disaster will not be a warning. It will be irreversible.
While not much can be expected from Trump, the European “green deal” is too small to plug this year’s projected shortfall in private investment, let alone meet EU commitments under the Paris climate agreement. Climate denialism ought to be confronted with bold policies; business must be held accountable for its role in this crisis; and voters need to see through the rightwing populist parties who prioritize profit over the planet.
The next catastrophe is not a distant threat, it is already in motion. Only immediate and determined action can stop global heating from becoming humanity’s undoing.
The image was oddly quiet. No speeches, no flags, no dramatic announcements — just a Chinese cargo ship cutting through arctic ice and arriving in Britain in October. The Istanbul Bridge completed a journey that once existed only in theory, shaving weeks off traditional shipping routes. On paper, it was a story about efficiency. In strategic terms, it was about timing. Much like politics, arriving early matters. Especially when the route, the rules and the traffic are still undefined. For years, global politics has trained us to watch the loud moments: warships in the Taiwan Strait, sanctions announced at news conferences, leaders trading
The saga of Sarah Dzafce, the disgraced former Miss Finland, is far more significant than a mere beauty pageant controversy. It serves as a potent and painful contemporary lesson in global cultural ethics and the absolute necessity of racial respect. Her public career was instantly pulverized not by a lapse in judgement, but by a deliberate act of racial hostility, the flames of which swiftly encircled the globe. The offensive action was simple, yet profoundly provocative: a 15-second video in which Dzafce performed the infamous “slanted eyes” gesture — a crude, historically loaded caricature of East Asian features used in Western
Is a new foreign partner for Taiwan emerging in the Middle East? Last week, Taiwanese media reported that Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Francois Wu (吳志中) secretly visited Israel, a country with whom Taiwan has long shared unofficial relations but which has approached those relations cautiously. In the wake of China’s implicit but clear support for Hamas and Iran in the wake of the October 2023 assault on Israel, Jerusalem’s calculus may be changing. Both small countries facing literal existential threats, Israel and Taiwan have much to gain from closer ties. In his recent op-ed for the Washington Post, President William
A stabbing attack inside and near two busy Taipei MRT stations on Friday evening shocked the nation and made headlines in many foreign and local news media, as such indiscriminate attacks are rare in Taiwan. Four people died, including the 27-year-old suspect, and 11 people sustained injuries. At Taipei Main Station, the suspect threw smoke grenades near two exits and fatally stabbed one person who tried to stop him. He later made his way to Eslite Spectrum Nanxi department store near Zhongshan MRT Station, where he threw more smoke grenades and fatally stabbed a person on a scooter by the roadside.
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