2020 is starting to feel like the year of perpetual crisis. As of Sunday, the Apple Fire in Southern California had burned over 20,000 acres, forcing 7,800 evacuations amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Earlier this week, Hurricane (and Tropical Storm) Isaias lashed much of the East Coast, causing severe flooding, widespread blackouts, and even deadly tornadoes. And that pales before the suffering in Bangladesh, where downpours have left a quarter of the country underwater.
 
These overlapping crises may feel like an unlucky break—like the gods got drunk and stumbled their way into a cosmic bowling game, competing to see who can most effectively hurl disasters at the ten pins of humanity. But as The New York Times observed Tuesday, this is probably the new normal as climate change makes natural disasters more frequent and more severe. “Climate change is tough for people to grasp, but attribution studies continue to find its DNA in today’s tropical systems, heat waves, droughts and rainstorms,” Marshall Shepherd, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Georgia told the Times. “Climate change shifts us into an era of sustained elevated risk from extreme weather and climate events.”

The New Republic’s Kate Aronoff has written extensively about how the United States is unprepared for this new era. Inequality and outdated infrastructure, she argued in May, make communities more vulnerable and emergency response harder. Local offices of emergency management are inconsistently structured, understaffed, and underfunded. And, as she writes in a new piece this morning, Americans can’t even count on basic services: Utility companies are unwilling or unable to keep essential services powered during a crisis, and in some cases, such as the deadly Camp Fire in 2018, they’re actually causing these crises.
 
The U.S. needs to get serious about fighting climate change. It also needs to get serious about dealing with the disasters that are already happening due to global warming—though it’s hard to imagine that happening under an administration that sees blue state deaths as political points.
 
—Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor