Where There’s Smoke, Heat, and Drought…

Blistering heat, withering drought, and the smoke of continental wildfires has turned much of the country into a midsummer hellscape. 

In response to the smoke from Canadian wildfires, President Trump threatened Canada with more tariffs, an absurd escalation given all that this administration has done to make our air smoggier and sootier. While Trump’s EPA claims it’s “futile” to curb carbon pollution from vehicles, scientists say a warming world is driving wildfires to greater scale and fury. The gulf between the Trump administration’s fossil fuel handouts and the climate action that 6 in 10 Americans want is widening every day, wreaking havoc on millions of lives.  

Temperature records were smashed—115 degrees Fahrenheit in Miles City, Montana—as another major heat wave of the year swept the country, with autumn still two months away. 

Some 180 million Americans were threatened last week by dangerous heat and hazardous air fouled by smoke from wildfires. 

Millions of people were forced to breathe some of the world’s most dangerous air last week in Chicago, Detroit, New York City, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and even Richmond, Virginia—which issued its first-ever Code Purple air alert. It came from U.S. and Canadian wildfires breaking out by the hundreds in bone-dry forests. Together, they have torched enough land this year alone to cover half the state of South Carolina.   

Nearly half the continental United States is suffering moderate to severe drought, including much of the Great Plains bread basket as well as Carolina and Virginia farmlands, prompting references to Dust Bowl 2.0.  

“The hay crop is basically toast,” said a Virginia cattleman, with area farmers forced to import feed, downsize herds, or both. Colorado wheat farmers are reporting their worst year in six decades; in Nebraska, it’s the worst in more than a century.  

Extreme heat waves, severe droughts, and torrential rains, along with worsening hurricanes, are more clearly than ever tied to the fossil fuel pollution and greenhouse gases that are driving climate change, the nation’s most authoritative scientific body reported last week. 

“[I]ncreases in extreme heat and heavy rainfall events across much of the globe can be more confidently and precisely attributed to increasing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere,” the report from the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (NAS) states. The new report builds on the group’s finding last September that those connections are “beyond scientific dispute.” 

Making climate science denial its official policy, the Trump administration earlier this year rescinded a landmark 2009 finding by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that carbon pollution from vehicles, the largest source of greenhouse gases, endangers public health and welfare. 

The National Academies also looked at the flimsy “scientific” basis the Trump administration relied upon to try and justify that repeal. The Academies’ conclusion: The science is even stronger now that Americans are at risk from climate change.   

“EPA’s 2009 finding that the human-caused emissions of greenhouse gases threaten human health and welfare was accurate, has stood the test of time, and is now reinforced by even stronger evidence,” the NAS report concluded. 

Congress founded the National Academies during the Civil War to function as an independent body that would gather, scrutinize, and consolidate the best science available so that the nation and its policymakers would know the bedrock truth about what’s happening in our world.  

Now Trump is echoing oil industry talking points to accuse the National Academies of left-wing bias, when our nation’s top scientists are just doing the job that Congress tasked them to do. 

The Trump administration is working deliberately to make the climate crisis worse, taking at least 97 actions or proposals that weaken or eliminate curbs on carbon pollution or undercut the nation’s ability to cope with its consequences. It is taking another 54 steps to undermine the shift to renewable energy and 81 more to help bolster profits for the fossil fuel billionaires that helped bankroll Trump’s 2024 campaign. 

Since taking office last year, the administration has gutted clean car and truck standards that were on track to save drivers some $23 billion at the pump on new vehicles. The administration’s move will increase U.S. oil use by more than two million barrels per dayabout 10 percent. It is now set to repeal curbs on carbon pollution from power plants that burn coal and natural gas. And that’s just the start: It is repealing restrictions on the climate super pollutants used in refrigeration and giving oil and gas drillers a break so they don’t need to check for methane leaks. The common theme: This administration keeps siding with the worst actors in industry over the needs and demands of all Americans.   

The administration and the majority in Congress repealed successful clean energy incentives, throwing sand in the gears of an American manufacturing renaissance that was supporting investment, innovation, and jobs.   

With demand for electricity soaring and utility bills going through the roof, the administration has paid energy companies some $2.7 billion in taxpayer funds to cancel wind projects that would have powered well above three million homes. This will mean less of the new clean power we need, now more than ever, and higher utility bills for consumers.  

This administration is failing the nation—and failing it badly—with a backward-looking energy policy that is driving up costs, shortchanging factory workers, and fueling climate catastrophe. In communities across the country, we’re all paying the price.