A weekly reckoning with life in a warming world—and the fight to save it

With two weeks still to go before the official start of summer, some 22 million people in the American Southwest are forecast to face extreme heat later this week. The Coachella Valley could see record-high temperatures of up to 115 degrees, according to the Desert Sun. Las Vegas could reach 110. As municipalities rush to open cooling centers to limit heat exhaustion and heat stroke, firefighters will also need to prepare. On Monday, a new wildfire broke out in Hesperia, California, which will also be under excessive heat watch beginning tomorrow. Just yesterday, sparks from a car reportedly “dragging chains” on Interstate 15 started a new wildfire in Juab County, Utah. That’s to say nothing of the deadly whack-a-mole game officials are playing with wildfires in Arizona and New Mexico: “By the time Biden visits” New Mexico later this week, the Las Cruces Sun News recently reported, “the Black Fire will likely be the second largest in state’s history.”

Meanwhile, the Great Salt Lake is turning into a death trap. As Utah’s best-known water feature continues to dry up, Christopher Flavelle reports this week for The New York Times, not only will wildlife die, local ski resorts start to fail, and “lucrative” mineral extraction decline, but “the air surrounding Salt Lake City would occasionally turn poisonous. The lake bed contains high levels of arsenic and as more of it becomes exposed, wind storms carry that arsenic into the lungs of nearby residents, who make up three-quarters of Utah’s population.”

Each time I read apocalyptic news like this, I think of something former TNR staff writer Nick Martin pointed out: Many of the areas in the United States facing the worst, most fatal signs of climate change right now are represented by politicians doing their utmost to block emissions-reducing policies.

“The American West currently faces interlocking drought and wildfire threats of unprecedented scale. And Republicans in the West are caught in a disturbing cognitive dissonance,” Nick wrote. “Of the seven Western Republican senators (not including the two from Alaska), [Utah Senator Mitt] Romney is the closest to acknowledging the urgency of climate change: The others range from casual apathy to outright denial of human-induced global warming.”

Nick reviewed the positions of Wyoming Senators John Barrasso and Cynthia Lummis, Utah Senator Mike Lee, Idaho Senators Mike Crapo and Jim Risch, and Montana Senator Steve Daines, who infamously said that “to suggest that [climate change is] human-caused is not a sound scientific conclusion.”

Some of Risch’s comments, Nick noted, were particularly nonsensical:

[In 2019], at a foreign policy speech given at Boise State University, … Risch was asked by a student in the crowd why it was that he never brought up the climate crisis. Risch couched his (fairly incoherent) statement in hypotheticals—“If it is as bad as the people that are on the edge of it say it is, I don’t know that there’s anything anybody can do about it,” he said. The United States, he continued, does more than its fair share, while impoverished people across the globe who have to burn their dinner over a rubber tire “don’t care about global warming.” Risch closed his answer by essentially shrugging his shoulders and telling the students, “I hope you’ll have the answer by the time we get there.”

This morning, after I read The New York Times’ feature on the Great Salt Lake turning into an arsenic bomb, I returned again to Nick’s piece. When I checked the date, I was surprised to realize that he wrote these words almost exactly a year ago. It’s remarkable how little has changed, politically, while the environmental conditions worsen.

With that in mind, stay tuned for a piece from Liza Featherstone later this week on how some candidates this election cycle (mostly challengers) are featuring local climate conditions in their campaigns as never before. It feels particularly timely amid this week’s weather news.

—Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor