In all the chaos and conflicting accounts that have emerged in the week since President Trump tested positive for Covid-19, it can be easy to lose track of just how many other crises the country is facing all at once. As Trump, fresh out of Walter Reed, compared Covid to the flu, coronavirus cases were rising in states across the country. On Wednesday morning, Hurricane Delta—we are now on a second round of alphabet names because that’s how many hurricanes the season has already produced—hit the Mexican coast near Cancun. Delta is likely to reach Louisiana by Friday, again raising the question of how to safely deal with evacuation plans in the middle of a pandemic.
 
And Big Oil appears to be up to its usual shenanigans. On Monday, Bloomberg reported that ExxonMobil, according to leaked documents, has been planning (despite recent messaging about green intentions) to double earnings by 2025 in a way that will increase its carbon dioxide emissions by 17 percent. As The New Republic’s Kate Aronoff pointed out, “That 17 percent projection only accounts for the company’s operations, not the emissions generated when customers burn the fuel it sells, known as ‘Scope 3’ emissions.”
 
But as Kate also observed, no one should really be surprised by this doublespeak. “Improbable as it might seem, there’s nothing uniquely craven about the world’s top fossil fuel executives. They’re just doing their jobs.” It’s the government’s fault for letting them:

What might seem like reckless sociopathy is in fact a business model enabled by trillions of dollars’ worth of government support and a whole body of domestic and international law protecting fossil fuel companies’ right to profit off the substances fueling a deadly crisis. It isn’t just Donald Trump and his revanchist appointees helping them do it, either. In more than a third of all countries on earth, treaties allow fossil fuel companies to sue sovereign governments that threaten to infringe on their profits. Though the G20 nations have talked a big game about ending fossil fuel subsidies, they haven’tyet. And through the Obama-era State Department’s Global Shale Gas Initiative, Hillary Clinton was arguably more effective and aggressive at promoting fossil fuels as a Cabinet member than former ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson.

The through line in all of these issues—the current coronavirus crisis and the shocking array of wildfires, hurricanes, and soaring temperatures this year—is, to put the matter charitably, inadequate political interest in stopping them. They’re the product of a system that delivers these outcomes over and over. At this point, none of these emergencies—including a rampaging virus in a country without a functioning health care system for vast swaths of the population—can truly be considered a surprise.
 
“Perhaps the scariest thing about the climate crisis,” Mary Annaïse Heglar wrote at Rolling Stone recently, “is that as it accelerates, it is raging out of the neat little silo it’s been placed in and running smack into every other crisis—new and old, fast and slow—and wreaking even more havoc. It’s claiming its mantle as the ‘threat multiplier’ it was ordained as.” Or, as she put it later in the piece: “We live today in the age of crisis conglomeration. It is no longer useful or honest or even smart to look at any of them through a single lens.”
 
I thought of Heglar’s words when reading, shortly afterward, this report by The New York Times. The coronavirus crisis has led many to worry about the widening gap in U.S. education between rich and poor, white and nonwhite. It turns out the climate crisis is having that effect, as well, reducing low-income, Black, and Latino students’ test scores because their schools simply lack proper ventilation on hot days.
 
It’s hard to untangle crises anymore.