As I write, a massive Category 4 hurricane is barreling directly toward my hometown of Sarasota, Florida. I’m feeling very tense, because while it’s a beautiful day here in New Orleans, my parents still live in Sarasota and can’t evacuate. Hurricane Milton is terrifying. It looks like it will be the worst storm to hit Tampa Bay in over 100 years. Milton intensified with stunning rapidity, going from a tropical storm to a Category 5 hurricane in 24 hours. It is “now the 4th strongest hurricane ever recorded by pressure on this side of the world” and “nearing the mathematical limit of what Earth's atmosphere over this ocean water can produce.” Because it’s coming on the heels of an already-devastating Hurricane Helene, there’s still debris all over the Gulf Coast that could turn into deadly projectiles. It’s so bad that the local Tampa meteorologist nearly had an emotional breakdown on air, and the city’s mayor has told people who stay in evacuation zones that “you are going to die.” (I don’t actually think that’s a helpful thing for a local leader to say. The risk to people’s lives is high, and it’s important to convey that, but part of the job of an official is to not spread panic.) 

Hurricanes have occurred throughout living memory, and every hurricane season is going to have deadly storms, but warming oceans make the storms worse, causing “higher wind speeds, heavier rainfall, and more severe storm surge.” The warming itself is, of course, caused mostly by the burning of fossil fuels. This really is not complicated. We have to stop using fossil fuels as rapidly as possible, because they’re causing a massive global calamity that is not just bringing us worse storms but drawing us closer to irreversible tipping points that will escalate the speed of changes and cause human suffering on an unprecedented level. Scientists who study planetary “vital signs” say that we are imperiling “the very fabric of life on our planet” and are causing an “abrupt climate upheaval, which jeopardizes the life on Earth like nothing humans have ever seen.” “We are potentially headed towards 3C of global warming by 2100, if we carry on with the policies we have at the moment,” the UN's climate chief has just warned. 

What’s completely maddening is that all of this was totally unnecessary. The problem was well understood in the 1980s. But the fossil fuel industry, which depends for its profits on continuing the destruction, sowed lies and tried to manipulate people into doubting the basic facts of the science. The media didn’t help; even the New York Times has utterly failed in its responsibility to convey the basic facts of what is going on and why, as I have documented here before. (They have even taken money from the fossil fuel industry to produce ads for them!) 

When I interviewed climate scientist Peter Kalmus about the problem, he was unequivocal and very, very candid about the causes and consequences:

The thing that I hammer on over and over again because it’s the bedrock for this whole thing, is that the fossil fuel industry is the primary cause. [...] Any solution or basket of solutions that are proposed as a pathway out of this that doesn’t center the ending of the fossil fuel industry as quickly as we can is bullshit, and it’s probably worse than bullshit… The laws of physics guarantee that it will get much too fucking hot if we keep burning fossil fuels. So, pardon my language, but I don’t know what it’s going to take. I’m really disappointed because I thought that at this level of heating, of obviousness, of disaster, that everyone would wake up and realize that none of our hopes and dreams will come to fruition if we don’t have a habitable planet.

You would think, then, that because of the very serious harm being done, and the fact that we have known methods for mitigating that harm, our political leaders would be treating the situation as an emergency and acting accordingly. Not so. In fact, there is an astonishing amount of denial, and it’s bipartisan. On the right, Republicans just outright deny climate science (which J.D. Vance calls “weird science” and Donald Trump thinks is a Chinese hoax). Even Florida politicians like Marco Rubio downplay the problem despite its immense harmful impacts on the state. Rubio has expressed alarm about the impending hurricane while consistently treating climate change as a virtual non-issue. The state’s governor, Ron DeSantis, has stripped mentions of climate change from state laws, perhaps in the hope that by pretending the problem doesn’t exist, we can make it go away. (I am yet again reminded of the movie Don’t Look Up, in which the Right responded to an approaching deadly asteroid by telling people just to, well, not look up.) The right’s denialism is atrocious. They seem to want to march us straight into the abyss.

But let’s be honest: Democrats haven’t been much better. The New York Times tells us that Democrats have shifted in the way they discuss climate change, and instead of emphasizing the seriousness of the problem and the need to pivot away from fossil fuels, they are boasting about the production of record levels of oil and gas. The issue is awkward for Democrats, and just recently “the White House was seeking to avoid the fact that President Biden, who has called for a transition away from fossil fuels, has in fact overseen the biggest oil and gas boom in United States history.” But now, instead of avoiding mentioning this major hypocrisy, Democrats are actually championing oil and gas, with Tim Walz explicitly boasting at the Vice Presidential debate that “We are producing more natural gas and oil than any time we ever had.” The Wall Street Journal, in a remarkable recent report, says that Big Oil is actually currently trying to make sure Donald Trump doesn’t gut the Democrats’ signature “climate law,” the Inflation Reduction Act. That’s not because fossil fuel companies want to save the planet, but because the law actually contains huge handouts to them! (This magazine pointed out at the time the law was passed how strange it was that a law called a “boon for the fossil fuel sector” could also be touted as a solution to climate change.)

The failure by our political class to deal with this completely solvable issue is staggering and shameful. Many of them have children and grandchildren. Presumably they would like their descendants to inherit a world worth living in. And they could make that happen. Unfortunately, it would require challenging the power and profits of some of America’s most influential corporations. Those corporations will see their assets reduced to being worthless, and so it’s actually their duty to shareholders to fight against serious climate action. They do this in part by having their lobbyists crawl all over U.N. climate summits to make sure any global action is watered down to the point of uselessness—which they do with the support and collaboration of Democrats who supposedly care about the crisis and think it’s real! 

Right now, I am scared for my parents and for everyone else in Southwest Florida. They don’t deserve this (no one ever does). It looks like many people are going to suffer. And while it’s true that a big hurricane could always hit that vulnerable part of the country (I grew up living through hurricane seasons, and there were many scary storms), it’s unconscionable to actively make the problem worse. Yet that’s what our political leaders are committed to doing. They’re marching us toward the tipping points, and they’re totally indifferent to the human consequences. Unfortunately, as all of this unfolds, many people won’t understand what is happening to them. In a chaotic information environment filled with endless falsehoods, they’ll conclude that the president is manipulating the weather, or FEMA is trying to kill people. The real story, however, is straightforward: we have a political class that is vastly more committed to sending weapons to war criminals than funding emergency management, and which will not acknowledge the basic facts of the problem (and the known solutions) because some large economic actors benefit in the short run from the destruction of the planet. Truly, it’s revolting. What an absolute disgrace our failure to deal with climate change is. How shameful and short-sighted it will look to any future historians, should they exist. 

But it is not too late to change course. We need many climate activists right now who will educate the public on the problem and the solutions and will push us in the right direction. We need leaders who are capable of speaking plainly and telling the American people the truth. We cannot trust our existing leaders to do anything as the catastrophes multiply without massive popular pressure. We must direct people away from conspiracizing and toward meaningful participation in a movement to solve one of the greatest challenges of our time.