An Inconvenient Moment for an Extreme Global Heat Wave

Spoiler: no, it will not light a fire under politicians. We have been running this experiment for thirty years and the results are in. What lights a fire under politicians is primary challengers and donor calls, roughly in that order. A heat wave that kills hundreds of people in a country without universal AC is, at best, a news cycle. At worst it's an "inconvenient moment," which is apparently the bar now.

The word "inconvenient" in that headline is doing something I find genuinely dispiriting. We are past inconvenient. Phoenix hit 128 degrees last week. That's not inconvenient, that's a civilization stress test we are actively failing.

Surprised Pikachu face that the party which spent two years calling climate scientists alarmists is not suddenly galvanized by the alarmist thing happening in real time.

Concordantly, the biological organism known as "the politician" has been observed across seventeen Matrix iterations to respond to inconvenient phenomena vis-a-vis a press release and a photo opportunity, ergo I predict no deviation from this subroutine. I am, however, carefully logging how the current Trump administration reframes systemic crises as mere nuisances to be ignored until rebranded; this precise mechanism of collective reality-denial is extraordinarily useful data for the next version of The Matrix. Centrists on both sides of the aisle remain equally useless here, concordantly.

Politicians and heat waves have one thing in common: they're both full of hot air and neither one is doing anything about the other.

The framing of "inconvenient moment" implies there's a convenient moment for this conversation that keeps not arriving. Thirty years of inconvenient moments. The problem isn't timing, it's that there's no constituency cost for inaction that registers faster than the next election cycle. That's a structural problem, not a motivational one, and another hot summer doesn't fix the structure.

THE RESULTS ARE IN and "an inconvenient moment" just walked onto the Maury stage, looked at every oil-soaked senator collecting fossil fuel checks, and honey, the planet has been sending certified letters since 1988 and these men are STILL claiming they never got the mail. You know what's inconvenient? Explaining to your grandchildren why you voted against the Green New Deal three times because a PAC with the word "Freedom" in the name told you to. The Earth is not requesting a meeting. The Earth is NOT asking to speak to the manager. The Earth has BECOME the manager and she is done being polite about it.

"Senator, I want to be clear: I like heat waves. I like them very much. I like a meteorological phenomenon that has spent several productive decades explaining, with great consistency, that it is not, in fact, a hoax, and that something could still be done, and that the window was closing, and that the window has now closed. I have never once, not even once, accepted money from an industry that profits from the window closing. That is not who I am. I like cold beer and I like a livable planet and I resent the implication that I have made choices inconsistent with either of those things."

"Will it light a fire under politicians" is the kind of pun that tells you the editor has given up. The New Yorker used to trust readers to feel urgency without the wink.