One benefit of having watched the climate story from the start is that I tend not to panic when “climate” is temporarily eclipsed as an issue, almost always thanks to the hard work of Big Oil. It happened at the end of the 1980s after the initial furor over the newly public “greenhouse effect,” and again after the Kyoto climate talks; when Al Gore made global warming a central issue in the oughts, the collapse of the Copenhagen talks put it on the back burner. Many of us built the movement that pushed it back to the front again in the oughts, culminating in the Paris accords; when momentum wavered Greta Thunberg and her colleagues emerged, building the consensus that took us through the Inflation Reduction Act.

At the moment, of course, a resurgent fossil-funded right wing has killed off that landmark legislation, and done all it can to destroy clean energy in the US; America is out of the global climate talks; around the world various strongmen have made protest far more difficult. The new authoritarians have managed to intimidate many of the centrist pols in much of the world who are no longer willing to talk much about “climate;” indeed, there’s a closet industry of pundits and consultants advising them not to.

But it’s never occurred to me that this state of affairs would last very long—physics is running this show, and it won’t be long denied. And now I think we can see the next of these cycles firing off—and this one, I think, will be climactic. We have a chance to insure that civilization comes out of this one focused on the physical world.

The politics of climate begins with… climate. Perhaps you’ve heard that Europe spent the past week suffering through a truly remarkable heatwave, with France reaching a new all-time record temperature, the UK recording its hottest day ever, Spain smashing all its old marks. It’s truly brutal—and it recalls, for Europeans, the heatwave of 2003, which ended up killing 70,000 people. Even today, the continent is ill-prepared for extreme heat—in France, for instance, Angelique Chrisafis reports that:

The impact of the heatwave has been made considerably worse by the high proportion of French buildings and infrastructure not designed to cope with high temperatures. Paris, one of Europe’s most densely populated cities, known for its poorly insulated housing stock, has for years been considered to have the highest heatwave mortality risk of any capital on the continent. The French government has been criticised for a lack of preparation and for cutting funding for projects designed to adapt infrastructure to the climate crisis.Half of all French homes have insufficient protection from high temperatures, leaving inhabitants dangerously overheated, a report for the NGO Fondation pour le Logement (Foundation for Housing) found this month. About 66% of French people struggle to tolerate the heat in their homes.Maïder Olivier, the head of climate advocacy at the NGO, said France had a “massive and worsening problem of heat-trap housing.” She said climate inequality in France was growing, with low-income, suburban housing estates suffering the worst from heatwaves.

Apparently English homes, especially modern ones, aren’t much better. And the heat has caused a surge in British hospital admissions, even as it’s damaged hospital equipment. Andrew Gregory writes:

Several NHS trusts in England have declared critical incidents as a direct result of the extreme heat. One hospital had done so after its machines failed in multiple areas, a doctor said. Labs used for testing were also affected and two linear accelerator machines, used to treat cancer patients, had stopped working amid the high temperatures.The doctor said that although they were working in a relatively new care setting, it was “tacked on to an old Victorian hospital,” creating severe infrastructure challenges. “It’s hopeless, really,” they said.The doctor also said their NHS trust had faced “major issues” with IT servers overheating on Wednesday. “We thought we were going to lose everything, so we were all asked to turn off non-essential computers and electrical equipment, including lights.”

But it’s not just dialysis machines going down—in France, nuclear reactors had to be taken offline because the river water used for cooling was getting too warm. Also, save some tears for the poor American tourists complaining to The Wall Street Journal that European restaurants offer too few ice cubes in their drinks.

Look, there’s no doubt why these records are being smashed—as Bob Henson writes at Eye on the Storm:

Extreme heat is among the most-studied consequences of human-caused climate change, and the connections between a warming planet and amplified, localized extreme heat are not only intuitive but well documented.

In this case the jet stream—powered by the temperature differential between the poles and the equator, and unsettled by the melt up north—has gone kaflooey, producing what’s called an “omega block” for its distinctive shape. The sun beating down on this heat dome is relentless. As Lauren Dalban reports for Inside Climate News:

“There’s a sad inevitability to all of this, with scientists like me trotting out the same quotes year after year,” Friederike Otto, a professor of climate science at the Imperial College London who leads the World Weather Attribution, a group that works to link weather events to climate change, said in an email. “Simply put, we remain on a one-way trip towards a more dangerous future, and it’s time we hit the brakes.”

I could of course go on and on about the heat; it’s wretched. (And remember that we’re paying attention in part because there’s lots of media, some of it English-speaking, in Europe; similar hideous heatwaves have been plaguing much of Asia this spring). But what I really want to talk about is its political meaning—I think this heatwave is one of those events that will help bring “climate” back into fashion in our discourse.

Britain will be an interesting test case. Its politics have been roiled for the last two years by the odd static incompetence of Keir Starmer’s Labour government, now about to be replaced by the Andy Burnham government. A key question for that new administration will be the role of Ed Milliband, who has been serving as the energy secretary, and may be in line for a job as chancellor. He’s been (almost uniquely) effective in his role, moving fast to boost clean and cheap renewable energy in the UK.

But that’s roiled the fossil fuel industry, which is........

© Common Dreams