In recent years, faced with weather-related disasters such as wildfires in California or hurricanes in Florida, Texas and the Gulf Coast, it has been easy for people in certain parts of the country to believe that those places will bear the brunt of global warming. But the ominous summer of 2023 made it clear that there is no hiding from climate change. Not in New York. Not in Milwaukee. Not in Ontario. Nowhere.
That’s not to say that regions that have already seen the worst aren’t coming under renewed pressure. Florida sea temperatures are 97 degrees, bleaching coral populations and boiling marine life like a vicious pot. God knows what these boiler room water temperatures will mean for the upcoming Atlantic hurricane season. A number of Texas cities set record-breaking temperatures last month as a brutal heatwave swept the state. A heat dome is now parked over the Southwest, giving Phoenix — the fifth largest city in the United States — a seemingly endless, 13-day streak of highs of at least 110 degrees that threatens to get worse this weekend.
But those of us in other parts of the country who were used to watching the chaos have suddenly become unwilling participants. First, the Canadian wildfire season started weeks early. Uncontrolled wildfires sent huge waves of smoke south to the United States, blanketing East Coast and mid-Atlantic cities in a suffocating haze, blotting out the sun and sending anyone with respiratory problems indoors for days. Then, a few weeks later, it was the Midwest’s turn as the smoke invaded the Great Lakes region, turning the days into endless twilight. Breathing in the air felt like sipping ashes from a backyard fire pit and washing them down with mezcal. Ominously, wildfire season had only just begun in Canada and Smokeworld was promising encores throughout the summer
People kayak up and down the flooded waters of Elm Street on July 11 in Montpelier, Vermont. Kylie Cooper/Getty Images
On Wednesday evening, a massive tornado nearly destroyed Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. Earlier this week, a slow-moving storm system dropped biblical amounts of rain over parts of the Northeast, particularly upstate New York, New Hampshire and Vermont. Rivers swelled as some areas received 9 inches of rain in a single day — about the average rainfall for an entire summer. Widespread flooding caused devastating damage from New York’s Hudson Valley to Vermont, where much of the capital Montpelier was flooded and more rain was forecast for this weekend. Several dams were claimed near their breaking point. Only the heroism of dedicated rescue teams prevented numerous deaths from life-threatening flash floods.
It means living in a warmer, wetter and more unpredictable world. People who have lived most of their lives without routine disasters must contend with the uncomfortable reality of a rapidly warming planet. One-off weather events become routine. Millennial floods will occur every ten years. The abnormal becomes the depressing new normal. While the Northeast and Midwest are still much better positioned to weather climate catastrophes in the coming decades (we promise to welcome all snowbirds with open arms), the notion that nothing will change here is an illusion.
That’s one of the reasons why it’s so annoying that for years the babbling classes in Washington have mocked the Green New Deal and treated it like some kind of imaginative childish musing, rather than acknowledging it as an essential part of any plan to halt ongoing climate change regard. Even this week, gullible reporters desperate to do shorthand for the fossil-fuel industry viewed a temporary glut of electric vehicles in the US as something of a snare for environmentalists. The lack of official urgency on these issues is fueling public complacency — according to Pew, 75 percent of US adults still rank “strengthening the economy” as their top priority, while just 37 percent prioritize fighting climate change .
I have bad news for people who think these two issues are unrelated: You can’t grow the economy when it’s under water or when everyone’s stuck in their homes for weeks or months with nothing but the buzz the air has conditioners to break the sweaty silence. Over the coming decades, parts of the American South and Southwest will become nearly uninhabitable and will be plagued by countless heat waves, tornadoes, wildfires, hurricanes, and floods. But all will be adversely affected by a changing environment unless we start making bigger investments in a green future.
The Deloitte Economics Institute estimates that “weather, climate and water hazards” will cause $14.5 trillion in damage to the United States alone over the next 50 years if we don’t move quickly to decarbonization. It’s not just that you can’t strengthen the economy without addressing climate change. Deloitte says tackling climate change will boost the economy by $3 trillion over the same period.
Perhaps this summer’s series of unfortunate events will finally shatter the sense of invincibility that far too many Americans still feel and force our calcified leadership to take dramatic action. If not, we could look back on the summer of 2023 as an idyll.
David Faris is an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It’s Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. His writing has appeared in The Week, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Washington Monthly, and others. You can find him on Twitter @davidmfaris.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own.
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