When I picked a brilliant red cherry tomato off my backyard vine and enjoyed the burst of sweet flavor, I knew it was a guilty pleasure. That’s because it was Nov. 20, and I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The tomato I tasted is a cherry bomb of climate change.
The internet is peppered with reports from places like Milwaukee, Chicago and Detroit of peppers and tomatoes still growing on the cusp of Thanksgiving.
I’m not the only one feeling this. The internet is peppered with reports from places like Milwaukee, Chicago and Detroit of peppers and tomatoes still growing on the cusp of Thanksgiving. A radio personality in New Jersey posted pictures of bell peppers he picked Nov. 18, a late-season harvest that he said “rings alarm bells.”
New England’s November Garden of Eden has alarmed me for some time. In December 2001, I wrote a column in The Boston Globe about my Thanksgiving Day backyard harvest of cilantro, jalapeño peppers and eggplant. I gave it a tongue-in-cheek dateline of “Atlanta, Mass.,” as Massachusetts was projected to have the climate of Richmond, Virginia, or Atlanta by 2090. I doubted back then that anyone would be freaked out by the freakish harvest “when most of us like it warm.”
It was also the first of Republican President George W. Bush’s eight years in office. By then, his administration had already rejected the Kyoto climate treaty. It would eventually censor the Environmental Protection Agency from directly tying warming to human activities and from warning the public how fast the planet was heating up. The oil man turned president kept the nation out of the global fight against climate change with the claim that he first needed to see “sound science.”
The years since have been a yo-yo. President Barack Obama signed the Paris climate accords, only for President Donald Trump to withdraw from them. President Joe Biden rejoined the treaty, but Trump getting elected again all but assures another withdrawal from the global stage, even though the United States is, by far, the world’s largest emitter per-capita of the carbon dioxide emissions fueling global warming.
And regardless of whether we do or don’t sign international climate treaties, our commitment to the global fight against climate change falls insultingly short of the need.
At the just-concluded COP29 in Azerbaijan, the world’s richest nations, cowed by the smothering smog of nearly 1,800 oil and gas lobbyists, offered a paltry $300 billion a year in climate finance to help developing nations withstand the damage, death and impoverishment from climate change. What Biden hailed as “a historic commitment” looks more like a continuing betrayal. The Independent High-Level Expert Group on Climate Finance said in 2022 that the contribution should be $1 trillion a year.
All the while, the cherry tomato bombs keep going off.
Last year was Earth’s warmest year on record, and this year is on track to be hotter still, according to the World Meteorological Organization. And this month in the Northeast, a historic drought set us up for a record number of November wildfires and/or record numbers of wildfire red flag warnings.
In Massachusetts, wildfires were burning from the Blue Hills recreational lands south of Boston all the way out to Great Barrington in the Berkshires. On Nov. 9 in New York City, I smelled smoke in the Bronx and Manhattan. There were brushfires in local city parks, including Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, and fires across the Hudson River in New Jersey.
Referring to the bad smell, Desi Yvette, a 36-year-old Brooklyn resident, told The New York Times, “I thought maybe there was a fire nearby, but I didn’t hear any sirens.”
You won’t hear any sirens from the federal level when Trump returns to the Oval Office. Trump’s pick to run the Energy Department, fracking executive Chris Wright, says, “There is no climate crisis” and that claims there’s been “no increase in the frequency or intensity of hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts or floods despite endless fear mongering of the media, politicians and activists.”
Trump’s pick to run the Energy Department, fracking executive Chris Wright, says, “There is no climate crisis.” To the contrary, last year’s Fifth National Climate Assessment, assembled by scientists across the government, said extreme events are “becoming more frequent and severe.” Though the average number of tornadoes has remained stable, evidence is mounting that they’re increasing in power and becoming more common in the eastern United States. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. last year had a record 28 weather and climate disasters that cost at least $1 billion. This year is already in second place, at 24. In the 1980s, the nation averaged 3.3 such events a year, in adjusted dollars. In announcing North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum to run the Interior Department, Trump boasted in an email that regulatory actions on public lands will be driven by a “‘DRILL BABY DRILL’ approach.” In picking former Rep. Lee Zeldin of New York to run the EPA, Trump said Zeldin will make “swift deregulatory decisions” that will “unleash the power of American businesses.” Trump certainly took the leash off oil, gas and chemical companies in his first term, rolling back more than 100 environmental regulations. He packed the Supreme Court with justices who continued to defang the EPA tooth by tooth even after he was booted from office in 2020. The high court, with Justice Samuel Alito leading the charge, dramatically limited the authority of the agency from regulating carbon emissions from power plants, blocked a “good neighbor” rule meant to stem the spewing of fossil fuel emissions across state borders and ended the “Chevron” deference to government agencies and their scientists and career analysts in disputes where the law is ambiguous. The mentality behind the rulings is summed up by a speech Alito gave to the Claremont Institute in 2017. “Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant,” Alito said. “Carbon dioxide is not harmful to ordinary things, to human beings, or to animals, or to plants. It’s actually needed for plant growth.” That gets back to my tomatoes. According to the EPA, the carbon dioxide in our atmosphere has helped lengthen growing days in the contiguous 48 states by more than two weeks since the beginning of the 20th century, with most of the rise beginning in the 1970s. Like the serpent in the Garden of Eden, Alito would say take a bite and be happy. Never mind that the heavenly taste is due to the hell of global warming stripping the Earth naked.
Derrick Z. Jackson
Derrick Z. Jackson is a Union of Concerned Scientists fellow in climate and energy at the Center for Science and Democracy. A former columnist for The Boston Globe, he’s the co-author of “Project Puffin: The Improbable Quest to Bring a Beloved Seabird Back to Egg Rock.” 
