It’s been harder than usual for me to write these past few days, and that’s because the glacier collapse and subsequent calamity along the Tibet-Nepal border hit very hard. As it happens, I’ve stood in that border crossing where you’ve watched the giant wave obliterate… everything in a split second. I’d spent weeks in the high, dry, cold of Buddhist Tibet, and then crossed into the lush humid chaos of Hindu Nepal, and so I can summon up some sense of what it must have been like, and of the people who died almost before panic could grip them.

More, I knew it was coming. Not on that day, of course, but I’d been in Tibet 20 years ago partly to report on what we already knew was an enormous threat: the fallout from the rapid melt on what is sometimes called Earth’s Third Pole. The danger of these collapses, and the blocked lakes they can create, were well-known to scientists; they happen often, but usually in unpopulated valleys. I’m not going to concentrate on these reports—there’s been much good coverage in the last few days. Jonathan Watts, for instance, does the important service of laying out the exact link between the climate crisis and the collapse:

Two days before the collapse, the ground temperature hit its highest point in the last two years, according to Dr. Hamish Pritchard, a glaciologist with the British Antarctic Survey, whose team had sensors 6 miles (10 kilometers) away from the site.“These high temperatures would have weakened the snowpack, filled crevasses with water, and thawed the bonds between ice and rock that hold these glaciers in place,” he told the Science Media Centre.

Jeff Berardelli tracks the ongoing increase in temperature in the region (it’s been about twice the global average, up 5°F since 1940). And Jonathan Mingle provides a very fine account of his own travels in the region, and of the similar smaller incidents that have happened across the years.

I want simply to ask you to focus on the image at the top of this newsletter, taken by a Chinese mountaineer named Zhia Yitie, that shows the collapse—that’s the stream in the center of the picture that looks like a waterfall. And what I want you to notice is how much ice is still there—to the naked eye it looks like 99% of the glacier remains. And this is just one glacier of perhaps 50,000 across the Himalayas and Hindu Kush. My point is: There is infinitely more damage to be done, or to put it another way there is infinitely more damage we might still be able to forestall. And that’s what should concern us.

In short: In a world beginning to turn away from oil, the United States has become the biggest force trying to insure we keep pouring carbon into the atmosphere. If the rest of that ice is going to fall off that Nepali glacier, this will be why.

Just to do the math for a minute: On average, Nepalis produce about four-tenths of a ton of carbon emissions annually, compared with about 14 tons for an American. More than 99% of the country’s electricity comes from hydropower (though much of that capacity was wiped out in last week’s floods). They are not causing the crisis that is killing them: We are.

Indeed, even as the mud was settling over the ruins of Himalayan villages we took the next steps to insure these catastrophes would continue, announcing an “agreement” with the Venezuela that we control to dramatically increase its oil production. As Al Jazeera put it:

Shortly before the deal was announced, energy analyst Gregory Brew likened reports of the impending agreement to oil concessions sought by the British Empire in the early 20th century.“Such a thing is without precedent,” Brew wrote on social media. “The closest thing would be BP [British Petroleum] (back when it was majority owned by the UK govt) claiming ownership of Iraqi and Iranian oil reserves pre-WWII.”Trump himself has embraced the colonial-era slogan “Manifest Destiny”, as part of his plan for a “growing nation” that “increases our wealth” and “expands our territory."

This is literal colonialism, in the service of President Donald Trump’s Big Oil donors—it’s pretty much precisely what we did to Iran’s Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953, triggering a set of bloody events that continue to this day.

And it comes, of course, as we continue to sabotage renewable energy—this week’s installment, thanks to great investigative reporting from Evan Halper, finds the White House paying a European firm to cancel yet more wind leases, on the condition that the money be “reinvested” with a big Trump donor building export facilities for liquefied natural gas on the Louisiana coast.

In short: In a world beginning to turn away from oil, the United States has become the biggest force trying to insure we keep pouring carbon into the atmosphere. If the rest of that ice is going to fall off that Nepali glacier, this will be why.

Which means that the question I promised to raise in last week’s newsletter is more important than ever: How do we translate these horrors (of which there will be far far more as the growing El Niño envelops the world in record temperatures) into political change here?

To be clear: I don’t mean before November’s midterms. The issues on which that will be fought—democracy, data centers, dementia—are baked in by this point. Gas prices will play a crucial role too, which means that anyone challenging the GOP should be pointing out the absurdity of our energy policy: The polling is clear that Americans hate Trump’s attacks on wind and solar. I’ll be spending the rest of the fall out on the trail with the Third Act and Gray Pac, mobilizing voters in key races; for the moment the goal is........

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