The United States is bracing for another heat wave. More than 180 million people across the Plains, Midwest, and Southeast were under “major” or “extreme” heat warnings as of Tuesday morning. Temperatures are expected to peak above 100 degrees on the East Coast over the holiday weekend as a high pressure “heat dome” traps hot, humid air in place. The heat index, which takes humidity into account, is predicted to hit as high as 115 degrees in some places.
The elephant in the room here—the force making record-breaking heat a more common occurrence—is climate change. Last week’s deadly European heat wave would have been “virtually impossible” without the greenhouse effect of fossil fuel emissions, concluded a group of researchers from Europe and the U.S. But coverage of that heat wave in U.S. media barely mentioned climate change, referring only vaguely to the fact that the European continent is “warming faster than any other,” per CBS’s evening broadcast. The media watchdog FAIR noted that NBC, CBS, and ABC news reports all “failed to mention climate change even in passing.”
This is not just a media failure. Fearing backlash from swing voters and Republicans, Democrats have largely stopped mentioning climate change too. A recent analysis by the nonprofit newsroom Inside Climate News found that mentions of climate change in congressional Democrats’ press releases started to taper off in 2022, following the by now received wisdom among party pollsters and pundits that talking about rising temperatures is a political death wish certain to turn off would-be Democratic voters. As I’ve written before, this approach is somewhat baffling considering that Democrats talked a lot about climate change in an election they won, in 2020, then lost an election four years later where they mostly avoided the subject.
Climate-fueled heat waves, storms, fires, droughts, and floods are becoming an unavoidable reality for tens of millions across the United States. Refusing to talk about climate change in that context means refusing to engage with the world as it is. If left-of-center politicians and ostensibly fact-based news organizations aren’t willing to accurately interpret our climate-changed reality, however, the right will be more than happy to do it for them.
Over the last few years, GOP politicians have chalked up deadly wildfires to Democratic mismanagement and Jewish space lasers. After flash flooding in Valencia, Spain, killed 229 people in 2024, the far-right party Vox capitalized on widespread frustration with the “political class” to pin the disaster on the country’s center-left governing coalition in Madrid. Much of the blame, meanwhile, lay with Valencia’s regional government, where Vox had just recently served as part of a governing coalition that undermined disaster response and emergency planning. During the recent European heat wave, when an estimated 1,300 people died from heat-related causes, right-wingers rushed—without evidence—to blame “degrowth” and climate concerns for the continent’s lack of air conditioning. Degrowth is, notably, not the law of the land in Europe, where air conditioning is not illegal and where the European Commission has recently dismantled several of its modest climate policy commitments.
People are baking to death in Europe for the same reason that whole towns are being zapped off the map by wildfires in California, and that home insurance is becoming a luxury in places now being regularly inundated by floods that should only happen every thousand years: Our societies are navigating a climate-changed world with last century’s infrastructure. That’s not the result of some surplus of climate policies but of a profound lack of them. A few years ago, it wasn’t impossible to imagine a more climate-conscious European Union embarking on a bloc-wide mobilization to create millions of jobs installing reversible air-to-air heat pumps, which cool homes efficiently too; readying the grid to meet increased summer electricity demand with as little imported oil and gas as possible; and retrofitting old housing stock built primarily to retain heat in the winter. That never happened because European politicians, like their counterparts in the U.S., decided that preparing for and mitigating the climate crisis just wasn’t worth the the hassle.
Widespread air conditioning will thankfully help the U.S. withstand this week’s brutal temperatures. But our country is no closer than Europe to having a plan for how to live with the climate crisis. Blasting the A.C. won’t keep roads and tarmacs from melting, droughts from lowering crop yields, coastal Louisiana from becoming uninhabitable, or Malibu from burning. Because the right has no intention of protecting most people from climate-fueled destruction, it’ll blame these things—like all things—on Democrats and leftist conspiracies. As they did during last week’s European heat wave, right-wingers will even go so far as to blame climate policy itself for climate-induced deaths.
There’s good evidence to suggest that mentioning climate change won’t kneecap Democrats politically. And as warming continues to destabilize our world, it certainly isn’t in anyone’s interest to let Republicans control the narrative. That way lies more inaction, and more deaths.
