Red Hot Mad

Progressive politicians say "climate" challenge

I said I wouldn’t write to you this week! But then came the heat wave, and I have some big feelings.

More than 180 million people across the Plains, Midwest, and Southeast were under “major” or “extreme” heat warnings as of Tuesday morning. Temperatures are expected to peak above 100 degrees on the East Coast over the holiday weekend as a high pressure “heat dome” traps hot, humid air in place. The heat index…predicted to hit as high as 115 degrees in some places.

Heatwaves are the most deadly form of extreme weather. A new study estimates that the heatwave at the end of June may have resulted in a shocking number, between 17,000 and 25,000 excess deaths across Europe, from heart attacks to homicides. That’s a projection, based on what happened in the last major heat wave. As Jeff Goodell, author of The Heat Will Kill You First, told Mary Harris on her podcast: “heat’s not like a gunshot. It doesn’t leave a mark on you.”

It’s not just the the youth drowning, the grandma who will get an earlier heart attack, the people on opiates, which dangerously reduced thirst or motivation to seek shelter, the elevated murders and suicides. It’s the construction workers and farm workers who get kidney disease down the line from chronic dehydration, and the babies who will be born prematurely.

What’s happening right now for me, thinking about all this, is grief, dread and despair. I also have hope, because we can save lives and adapt with better infrastructure and planning, and even public health information.

What I didn’t expect was a sense of betrayal and anger at the media, and a sense of moral injury and confusion at the leaders right in my home town who are not naming what is happening even though they’re supposed to be the progressive vanguard.

Ok, with the media I kind of expected it. Kate Aronoff for the New Republic wrote that in covering the European heat wave, NBC, CBS, and ABC news reports all “failed to mention climate change even in passing.”

The Mayor has a plan but it doesn’t mention climate

But with my political leaders, this hurts. This has been a remarkably hopeful, joyful season in New York, and a lot of people are crediting Mayor Mamdani (along with the Knicks!). Three candidates he endorsed, two of them Democratic Socialists, won their House primaries last month.

These folks are supposed to be the progressive future of the Democratic party. But they’ve barely said boo about climate change. Mamdani had an anemic, undersized climate platform. He adopted an idea I’ve campaigned for, retrofitting 500 school buildings, but I haven’t seen much action toward that goal. He also endorsed Gov Kathy Hochul for re-election early, knocking out a potential challenger, and stood by as she gutted the state’s climate law. This was a blatant giveaway to billionaires that makes lives worse and less affordable for ordinary people, which is the entire thing that Mamdani’s political brand is against.

Of the three primary candidates he endorsed, Darializa Avila Chevalier and Brad Lander don’t name climate at all on their campaign web sites. Claire Valdez does, and I wonder if that’s due to the influence of state assembly member Emily Gallagher, another DSA member in her district who I know personally to be a passionate climate advocate.

Now that there’s a heat wave, the mayor has been out front and proactive using his excellent communication skills and the resources of his office to try to address the public health emergency. He’s opening cooling centers and keeping the public pools open later. And good for him on all that.

But his web site and press releases don’t mention the cause of this disruption. Nor is there much talk of solutions that would help both immediately and in the long run, like increasing energy efficiency in buildings or reducing dependence on cars (Gas burning cars make the city measurably hotter, especially in dense areas—in a heat wave it would make total sense to put emergency restrictions on private driving).

Or what about targeting shutdowns of electricity to luxury leisure destinations, like the Metropolitan Opera House, say, not to Con Ed customers in the Bronx?

Climate mitigation and climate adaptation are two different things, but in terms of leadership they are intimately connected. I would compare it to war vs. diplomacy. The heat wave is like the period of time when we are being physically attacked by an enemy and the goal is to save lives. We also need to be engaged in the equivalent of diplomacy; being clear about the root causes of the danger to human life and pursuing long-term solutions that will save lives in the future.

The culprits for this heat wave are simple. They are billionaires and their MAGA and corporate Dem enablers. These are Mamdani’s optimal foils. I find it dispiriting that he and other progressives are declining to make this point, and even more important, articulate a truly ambitous plan to address it. If we can’t talk about the weather, I mean have a real, honest conversation, what can we talk about?