(Photo Illustration - MetroCreativeConnection - Mid-Ohio Valley Climate Corner)

In my previous Climate Corner column, I discussed “Earth’s Greatest Enemy,” the explosive new documentary from journalist Abby Martin, which details the U.S. military’s role as the single worst institutional polluter on our planet. The film had its Columbus and Cleveland premieres last weekend, both of which I’d planned to attend. Keen-eyed observers may have noticed, however, that we’ve spent the better part of the past week buried under ice and snow, which had the unfortunate impact of hampering my travel plans.

Never one to miss a chance to unleash his special brand of psychosis onto the world, our esteemed president took to social media to remark upon this extreme winter weather:

“Record Cold Wave expected to hit 40 States. Rarely seen anything like it before. Could the Environmental Insurrectionists please explain — WHATEVER HAPPENED TO GLOBAL WARMING???”

I’m not going to waste space here explaining the difference between climate and weather, or the ways in which the heating of our planet might actually be making winter storm systems worse. If you’re reading this column you’ve probably heard it all a thousand times before, and at this point you either accept factual reality or you don’t.

What I want to highlight, instead, is how Trump’s own insane foreign policy goals are at direct odds with his longstanding and outspoken denial of the climate crisis.

Author Jason Pargin put it succinctly in a recent social media post: “Do you get that Greenland is strategically important specifically because they believe in climate change? The melting ice is opening up new shipping lanes, that’s why it’s suddenly a big deal. Everyone involved is explicitly agreeing ‘Global warming will make this area crucial.'”

For all their bluster about how the climate crisis is just some elaborate Chinese hoax, Trump and his braying acolytes have fully tipped their hand with this frothing imperial bloodlust for Greenland and its resources. It’s now abundantly clear that Trump, along with the entire U.S. national security apparatus, is fully aware of the effects that human-produced greenhouse gas emissions are having on the planet – and on our future.

There’s an extremely timely segment in “Earth’s Greatest Enemy,” which helps set the stage for Trump’s seemingly arbitrary interest in the conquest of Greenland. At one point, Abby Martin attends a panel called “Guarding the Northern Tier: Domain Awareness and Air Superiority in the Arctic,” held at an Air and Space Forces Association conference.

Like all of her interactions with military brass in the film, Martin’s questioning here proves to be incredibly revealing. Not only does our military believe that it has the self-appointed right to dominate the melting arctic landscape (including its mineral wealth, plus more of the oil and gas resources responsible for this calamity in the first place), but indeed they view the apocalyptic boiling of our planet as an “opportunity” for the further enrichment of billionaires and corporations. At one point an officer infuriatingly refers to a rapidly melting Alaska as “a place to come and experiment.”

The film deftly lays out the case that the primary function of our military has been the violent theft and extraction of resources since its inception, rather than serving any kind of legitimate purposes of self-defense. One need only look at our recent barbaric actions in Venezuela as evidence of this claim.

While this isn’t a topic examined directly in “Earth’s Greatest Enemy,” Abby Martin has done extensive reporting on Venezuela. For an easily digestible yet equal parts staggering breakdown of the propaganda we’ve been subjected to regarding our assault on their country for oil, I highly recommend the video “Leftist Debunks John Oliver’s Venezuela Episode” from Martin’s husband and producer Mike Prysner, which can be found on YouTube.

Trump’s kidnapping of President Nicolas Maduro, along with the slaughter of approximately one hundred Venezuelans in the process, is one of the most brazen acts of energy imperialism I’ve seen in my adult life. Though make no mistake, efforts to swindle Venezuela out of its gargantuan oil reserves have been a bipartisan affair many years in the making.

On Oct. 10 of last year, Barack Obama praised Nobel Peace Prize laureate and opposition leader Maria Corina Machado for her “courageous struggle to bring democracy to Venezuela.” This, despite anti-war organization Code Pink referring to Machado as “the smiling face of Washington’s regime-change machine,” having backed multiple coup attempts against democratically elected leaders. Machado has since gone on to gift her Nobel Prize directly to Donald Trump as thanks for kidnapping the nation’s president and murdering a hundred of her countrymen.

The media response to Washington’s coup has been no less abhorrent. It’s been reported that both the Washington Post and the New York Times received the leaked plans to capture Maduro before the raid took place, but declined to publish the information in advance – cementing both publications’ legacies as little more than faithful stenographers for the Pentagon, as well as accomplices to mass murder.

Shortly following the raid, a slackjawed Piers Morgan took to Twitter to marvel, “Incredible operation. Maduro was protected by massive security. How Delta Force got him out will be the stuff of movies.”

Though Hollywood, it seems, is already ten steps ahead of him, as television writer Annie Jacobsen couldn’t help but brag about her role in “predicting” Maduro’s capture in season two of “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan,” an Amazon series in which Jim from “The Office” smirks at the camera while committing war crimes for the CIA.

“The Venezuela plot we wrote into S2 seems prophetic because CIA operators have been thinking about (+ possibly rehearsing) an assault on Venezuelan presidential complex since Hugo Chavez began destroying the country decades ago,” Jacobsen wrote.

“A lot of what happens next can be seen in the Jack Ryan Season 2 assault on the VZ complex. Nothing [CIA operator Billy Waugh] told me — or any of the ‘former military folks’ I had zoom into the Jack Ryan writers’ room — was classified because the assault never happened. Billy taught it as a power point at Ft. Bragg.”

It’s been extensively documented by this point that the CIA and the Pentagon inject massive amounts of propaganda into the film and television industry (see Roger Stahl’s 2022 documentary “Theaters of War”), but it’s nevertheless stunning to witness an imperialist footsoldier so proudly and nakedly admit to their role in brainwashing the American public with predictive programming disguised as entertainment.

When I began my modest role providing animation for “Earth’s Greatest Enemy” back in 2023, it was with a keen awareness that this ambitious project set out to do something that no other film had ever done before. Our entire media and political landscape has been captured and corrupted by elite megalomania and corporate greed, its shadowy agents almost entirely successful in preventing the public from understanding the truth about both the climate crisis as well as the scourge of Western imperialism — to say nothing of the myriad ways in which the two issues converge and feed off one another.

Barely a month into the new year, it now feels like something of a miracle that such a film as “Earth’s Greatest Enemy” exists at all. This is a piece of work whose warnings could not be more prescient, and whose message only grows more urgent with each new omnicidal gambit of a flailing U.S. empire.

It is incumbent upon each and every one of us living in the imperial core to resist these deadly machinations, to take back power from our deranged institutions and demand a just, equitable future for every human being with whom we share this beautiful, life-sustaining planet.

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Aaron Dunbar is a member of Mid-Ohio Valley Climate Action.