Trump and the Republican Senate are sacrificing rural Americans to the heat so they can keep cutting corporate taxes.
Another heat dome is rolling east across the northern Plains, the Midwest, the Northeast. Chicago at 97 degrees, New York at 100, Washington at 102 by Wednesday. The air is bad. The humidity is worse. The people who will die in these temperatures are already in the housing they will die in.
We have been through this loop twice already this summer. The first big dome of the season put millions of Americans under extreme-heat warnings. The July 4 heatwave killed at least 44 people across the United States. Every one of those deaths was foreseeable. Every one was a failure of the public institutions that are supposed to be in place on the other side of the forecast.
A mechanic with his door open on a Wednesday afternoon knows what a hundred degrees means. In a third-floor walkup without air conditioning, it means the same thing it means in a rural county where the nearest cooling center is twenty miles away and the senior center closed last year because the county could not afford to keep it running.
The heat does not kill by politics. It kills by infrastructure. And the infrastructure has been permitted to fail.
The heatwave coverage will call this a weather story. A strong area of high pressure building eastward. A dome of hot and humid air. Record temperatures broken in Montana and Utah. A cold front bringing thunderstorms by the weekend. That is all true at the level of the forecast map. It is not true at the level of the county.
What is happening in these heatwaves is a failure of preparation. Cooling centers where they exist and not where they do not. Utility shutoff moratoriums where the state has them and not where it does not. Air-quality monitoring in the cities and none in the counties where the air is bad and nobody is checking. Building-weatherization programs that helped people survive summer after summer and winter after winter, cut or unfunded because the people who needed them do not have lobbyists and do not write checks to campaigns.
The pattern is consistent. The pattern is deliberate. It is the same choice being made over and over: the tax cut before the heat response, the shareholder return before the rural hospital’s air-conditioning repair, the dividend before the cooling center. And the people who die in these events are disproportionately the old, the poor, the people on the third floor, the people in the counties that have already lost their hospital, their grocery store, their senior center, their bus line. The people whose communities were deemed insufficiently profitable to keep intact.
The scientists quoted in the heatwave coverage tell us plainly that heatwaves have become more frequent, more intense, and longer-lasting because of human-induced climate change. The world has warmed about 1.1 degrees Celsius since the industrial era began and will keep warming unless steep cuts in emissions are made. That sentence is treated as background context. It is the headline.
We have built nothing in response. We have permitted the infrastructure that could cushion the blow to decay. We have elected leadership that treats adaptation spending as a budget line to cut rather than a survival requirement. And now we are running the same heatwave cycle — record temperatures, deaths, cooling advisory, new record temperatures, more deaths — with the same silence from Washington.
Leopold wrote that one of the penalties of an ecological education is that you live alone in a world of wounds. What I have found is that living in a county the leadership has decided is expendable gives you the same condition. You see the damage and you know nothing will change because of the report, because nothing changed after the last one.
The cold front will push through by the weekend. The thunderstorms will develop across the East. The temperatures will drop a little and stay above the seasonal norm and we will run this script again in August. The only question is whether anyone in Washington will acknowledge that the heatwave is not a weather story. It is a policy story. It is a budget story. It is a story about who this country has decided is worth keeping alive and who it has decided can go.