France is experiencing the third most intense heat wave on record since 1947. At least Judith was finally able to get on a flight back to the Holy Land, which Google tells me is now a balmy 83 degrees with a low chance of ballistic missiles.1 I continue to languish in my top-floor garret in Paris, which, I may have mentioned, like most buildings in Paris, has a zinc roof.
It’s very picturesque. Zinc roofs were the ne plus ultra in the chilly 19th century, because zinc is cheap, light, non-toxic, inflammable, resistant to corrosion, and it lasts forever. But it has one unfortunate property: high thermal conductivity. There’s no insulation between me and that roof, which reached about 194 degrees to the touch today. The heat wave is supposed to continue all week, too, with no relief at night. (“Bear up. No whinging,” said my father when I called to check up on him.)
Zinc roofs. They look so picturesque, don’t they. Iconic! Protected by UNESCO! Only problem is the people on the top floors are right now being cooked like turtles. (That isn’t my building, but my setup is similar. don’t have a balcony, thought, and my windows look out over a courtyard, not the street.)
Twenty-odd years ago, the winters here got cold enough that I needed to bundle up in a big sheepskin coat. This year, I didn’t take my winter coat out of the closet even once.
Parisians are worried about what the future holds as the temperatures keep rising. The city isn’t built for heat. If it gets even hotter, summers here will be apocalyptic. The electrical grid won’t be able to handle it. The emergency rooms will be overrun. There won’t be enough water. We’ll have wildfires in the Bois de Vincennes. People will flee the city.
All of this is made considerably more aggravating because I can no longer open my windows. Yes, in the middle of the third-worst heatwave ever recorded in Paris—on the top floor, under a zinc roof—I can’t open a window.
To understand why, you need to grasp that Feline High-Rise Syndrome is a major killer of urban cats. It’s just not true that cats always land on their feet, although it’s sometimes true, as I discovered in Istanbul when my cat Suleyman managed (I think) to chew a hole in the protective mesh on my balcony, squeeze himself through it, and fall six flights to the rooftop of the neighboring building. He gave me a proper scare, but he was absolutely fine. He seemed a little confused, but none the worse for it. (Rescuing him from that roof required the entire neighborhood, though, in a dramatic scene merging Mission Impossible with MacGyver.)
You can’t count on them being okay, though. Almost every time I’ve visited one of my convalescing cats at the vet’s, I’ve seen a pathetically injured kitty in a nearby cage recovering from a window episode. The poor things are miserable. Their injuries are terrible. And I’ve only seen the ones who survived: My vet told me that many don’t. The story is always the same: Saw a bird. Went sailing. And as any vet will tell you, young cats are the most likely to go for a sail, and summer is the worst season.
This is why the rescue group from whom I adopted the Fab Four requires adopters to sign a contract explicitly promising to cat-proof their windows. I needed no urging, and besides, mine were already cat proof. After I moved into this apartment, having come back to Paris from Istanbul with seven cats, I bought a kit to secure the windows. I’d forgotten that I was back in France, where your neighbors live to denounce you for committing some stupid infraction of some stupid building rule. No sooner did I start hammering in the nails than the guardienne pitched up at my doorstep. You can’t do that, she told me. This is a protected building.
I sighed, knowing from experience that arguing would be futile. Yes, the building is really old, so probably, yes, there really was such a rule—it would be somewhere in the rental contract, which of course I’d signed without carefully reading all 284 supplementary clauses. There would be no way to cat-proof the windows. They would have to stay closed, no matter the weather.
Happily, though, I could cat-proof—and thus open—my south-facing window, because my neighbors can’t see it from the courtyard, so they can’t rat me out. I secured it with sturdy wire mesh, and it was totally safe for cats. Or so I thought, having cared for those seven cats in this apartment until the end of their natural lifespans, without losing any to the window.
But the night before last, at three in the morning, I woke up to the sound of a God-awful crash. I bolted awake and staggered out to the kitchen to figure out what the cats had destroyed. First thing I see is my windowsill herb garden—on the kitchen floor, smashed in a million pieces. Plants, soil, pottery, everywhere. The second thing I see is Linus’s butt. The rest of him was already three-quarters of the way out the window. Somehow, he’d found a way to loosen that wire mesh. He was only a split second away from wriggling right under it and falling to his doom.
I grabbed him by the tail, pulled him back in, shut the window tightly, and went on a hunt for his siblings. My fear was that they’d preceded him out that window. Linus is the most timid of the litter, and it would have been completely in character for him to have let the others go first. But they’d have slipped, immediately, on the sloped roof and tumbled right off into the unknown. (I don’t know even what’s down there—another courtyard?— because the sloped roof obstructs the view.)
I do know, for sure, that a cat who made it out of that window wouldslip down the roof. There’s no ledge, the angle is steep, the metal is slick, and there’s not a thing to grab to stop the fall. Probably, Linus would have hurt himself very badly, because it’s about three stories to the ground, which is the most dangerous height. (They do much better if, like Suleyman, they fall from a taller building, because that gives them time to arch their backs, make their bodies into a parachute, and land feet-first.)
Thankfully, to my great relief, I found the rest of the crew hiding under the bed, pretending they’d had nothing to do with it. “Wasn’t me, Claire!Itold him, ‘Don’t you be messing with that window, Linus!’”
I don’t know how he knocked over the flower pots. He isn’t talking. But what good fortune that he did, right? He was just on the verge of discovering the hard way why cats shouldn’t jump out of windows, and I would have slept right through the whole thing if he hadn’t been such a klutz.
Anyway, now I have to keep the one window I was able to leave open shut tightly until I figure out how to make it truly cat-proof. So not only is it now airless in my apartment, my cats are sad. They loved that open window. They loved to watch birds during the day and bats at night, catching some fresh air. They feel like I would if you turned off my Internet. They keep waiting for me to open the window again—looking at me hopefully and rushing to the window every time I get up—and I just feel bad for them. Linus screwed things up for everyone.
I’m awfully glad he’s okay. I still can’t believe he did that. On further examination, I found that he’d somehow managed to pull out one of the metal hooks to which the mesh was tied. The hooks are screwed into the walls pretty deeply, so he must have been worrying it and working on that project all night. It’s not easy to loosen a hook that’s been screwed into the wall when you don’t have opposable thumbs. For all I know, he and his confrères hatched this escape plan weeks ago and have been loosening that hook, bit by bit, every night. Foiled by the flower pots! Just when we were on the verge of freedom!
It’s so hot that I haven’t even been able to bring myself to sweep up the remains of my herb garden.
The point of this story (apart from “I felt like telling it”) is this. I’m not usually inclined to climate hysteria. We face a lot of urgent and deadly threats, like nuclear war and unaligned AI, and I’ve always figured climate change is one of the more manageable of them. We’re an adaptable species, and so long as we avoid the most catastrophic scenarios, we’ll probably figure out how to reduce our carbon emissions (without destroying the entire modern world) and sooner or later, we’ll figure out a way to remove the carbon from the atmosphere. Meanwhile, we’ll just have to adapt to being hot. I’ve never had any patience for the demand that we return to pre-industrial squalor. First, it just isn’t going to happen, so why even consider it. Second, Greta Thunberg is insufferable, and whatever she wants, I want the opposite.2
But it’s one thing for me to say, “Greta Thunberg is insufferable, and whatever she wants, I want the opposite.” It’s another thing for the entire United States to predicate its economy, energy policy, and national security on that proposition. And as far as I can tell, that’s exactly what we’re doing. We propose to sabotage our own industries, kill a million jobs, lose a trillion dollars, set our economy back by years, kick our manufacturing off a cliff, kneecap our competitiveness, be unable to meet the rising demand in power for AI, pay billions more in energy costs, cede the global market for clean tech to China, let Beijing to become the world’s undisputed energy hegemon, despoil our environment, and needlesslypump a massive and completely unnecessary amount of carbon in the air because—Greta Thunberg is insufferable?
There’s simply no other reason that I can discern for the provisions of the Big Stupid Bill that will destroy our clean tech and nuclear industries beyond, “This will really annoy Greta Thunberg.” (And perhaps also because Donald Trump believes windmills make the whales go crazy.)
… Not only does China already dominate global manufacturing of solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, E.V.s and many other clean energy industries, but with each passing month it is widening its technological lead.
China’s biggest automaker, its biggest battery maker and its biggest electronics company have each introduced systems that can recharge electric cars in just five minutes, all but erasing one of the most annoying hassles of E.V.s, the long charging times. China has nearly 700,000 clean energy patents, more than half of the world’s total. Beijing’s rise as a clean power behemoth is altering economies and shifting alliances in emerging countries as far afield as Pakistan and Brazil.
The country is also taking steps that could make it hard for other countries, particularly the United States, to catch up. In April, Beijing restricted the export of powerful “rare earth” magnets, a business China dominates, unless they’re already inside fully assembled products like electric vehicles or wind turbines. While China recently started issuing some export licenses for the magnets, the moves signal that the world may face a choice: Buy China’s green energy technology, or do without.
China has also begun to dominate nuclear power, a highly technical field once indisputably led by the United States. China not only has 31 reactors under construction, nearly as many as the rest of the world combined, but has announced advances in next-generation nuclear technologies and also in fusion, the long-promised source of all-but-limitless clean energy that has bedeviled science for years.
Meanwhile, we plan to drill on federal land and waters and pressure the world to buy our fuel in exchange for tariff relief. Wow. What a terrific long-term plan for maintaining our competitiveness and our global influence.
By now, the only people in the world who don’t think climate change is a serious problem are the GOP lawmakers who are hard at work passing the world’s stupidest legislation in Washington. Another decade of rising temperatures and Chinese advances in cheap renewables and there will be exactly zero countries willing to buy that oil and coal from us, no matter how we put the screws on them. Even the Saudis are diversifying away from fossil fuels. But we’re betting the whole farm on them?
On its own, the US can’t do all that much to slow climate change. China and India will determine the world’s fate. But we can sure be bankrupted by it. William Nordhaus won the 2018 Nobel Prize for his work building a Dynamic Integrated Climate-Economy model. The economic damage we’re suffering from climate change has already vastly exceeded his predictions.
Bloomberg just published a report examining the impact of climate disasters on financial markets and corporations. By their calculations, climate change cost Americans nearly a trillion dollars last year, mainly in skyrocketing insurance premiums, power outages, and cleanup after two massive hurricanes and the LA fires.3 This is more than 3 percent of our GDP. As they put it, this amounts to “a stealth tariff on consumer spending.”
Disaster spending, they write, is
crowding out consumer discretionary spending elsewhere in the economy and putting pressure on local governments to prioritize disaster repair over other infrastructure projects. … The US accounted for 41 percent of this century’s $6.7 trillion in climate-related insured and uninsured property damages, in line with industry estimates, according to our tracking of fire, flood and storm costs in 50 countries.
… The tracker’s results, highlighted in Figure 4, show that total US climate-related costs from insurance premiums, power outages, disaster recovery and uninsured damages increased by US$7.7 trillion this century relative to a 1999 baseline.
As seen in Figure 5, this represented 36 percent of US GDP growth (US$20.3 trillion) in the period, using a 12-month moving average and excluding costs tied to auto insurance, health, and wages that are more difficult to measure.
According to the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, the impact of wildfire smoke days on wages alone could reach US$150 billion a year (in 2025 dollars), putting losses-to-trend GDP growth this century closer to 50 percent.
They also make the interesting point—this hadn’t occurred to me—that insurance has become the hidden driver of inflation:
… Shelter is the largest component of the US Consumer Price Index, a measure of changes in prices paid by urban consumers, representing 35.5 percent of the total weight. The Bureau of Labor Statistics includes tenant insurance, yet home insurance—an 11 times bigger outlay (US$2,109 vs. US$185)—isn’t included in the calculation, since it’s considered “out of scope.”
BI finds that including the cost of home insurance at parity with tenant insurance (at a 0.41 percent overall weight) since 2017 would have doubled the weight of home insurance in the CPI to 4.6 percent in 2024 from 2.3 percent in 2017. That would lift the overall weight for shelter above 40 percent of the total, as shown in Figure 6.
I just don’t get what Trump and the GOP have against a climate policy that helps our economy. It’s so unbelievably shortsighted and irresponsible. In the past twenty years, federal and state governments have spent nearly US$1.3 trillion on disaster recovery aid, with a third of this coming from FEMA. Elon Musk illegally froze FEMA outlays and fired its administrators. Kirsti Noem said the White House plans to “eliminate FEMA.” Trump agrees. He fired the acting head of FEMA for saying, in a meeting, that he didn’t think this would be in the best interests of the American people. Like every other part of the government, the agency is now in absolute turmoil, and it’s largely stopped providing disaster assistance and grant money. FEMA grants funded disaster risk-mitigation programs aimed at hardening infrastructure against climate change. Lack of access to those grants will result in considerably higher costs when disasters strike.
FEMA’s National Flood Insurance Program stabilizes private-insurance markets in the coastal regions of the US. Without FEMA, the cost of insurance will soar. Commercial insurance premiums will have to price in the risk of extended disruptions to business and ever-more degraded infrastructure. The soaring premiums will degrade the value of assets like industrial and commercial buildings. Bloomberg doesn’t offer a numerical estimate of the damage this will do to the economy, but it clearly won’t be trivial. Coupled with the rise in the cost of health insurance owing to heat- and smoke-related morbidity and mortality, this is really going to hurt us. This isn’t theoretical; it’s happening already.
It’s not in our interest, economic or otherwise, for this to happen. It was one thing when there were few good alternatives. But why, in 2025, would we organize our economy around the principle that we can only use energy sources that upset Greta Thunberg?
It’s impossible to understand these policies in terms of the American national interest. The Princeton Energy Lab reckons the stupid bill that’s about to pass will
increase US greenhouse gas emissions by roughly 0.5 billion metric tons per year in 2030 and more than 1 billion metric tons per year in 2035;
raise US household and business energy expenditures by 25 billion USD annually in 2030 and over 50 billion USD in 2035;
increase average US household energy costs by roughly 100 to 160 dollars per household per year in 2030 and roughly 270 to 415 dollars per household per year in 2035;
reduce cumulative capital investment in US electricity and clean fuels production by 1 trillion dollars from 2025-2035;
imperil a total of 522 billion dollars in announced but pending investments in US clean energy supply and manufacturing;
reduce annual sales of electric vehicles by roughly 40 percent in 2030 and end America’s battery manufacturing boom;
substantially slow electricity capacity additions, raising national average retail electricity rates and monthly household electricity bills by about 9 percent in 2030 and as much as 17 percent in some states (including TX, OK and PA);
kill off the nascent clean hydrogen, CO2 management, and nuclear power sectors.
The bill kills the prospects for nuclear power, too. They want only the dirtiest and most polluting sources of energy. Why? What’s in this for Americans? It’s just perverse.
The Trump EPA has decreed that power plants, oil refineries, cement factories, and other large industrial facilities are no longer obliged to report their greenhouse gas emissions. Without that data, there will be no way to know, over time, which sectors of the economy are heavy polluters. NOAA staffers have been told to review every grant for the terms “climate science,” “climate crisis,” “clean energy,” “environmental quality” and “pollution.” Those grants, obviously, will be cancelled. The EPA also cut US$4 million in federal funding for climate research at Princeton on the grounds that such research increases “climate anxiety” among the young. (I seem to have been incorrect in assuming that our clever and resourceful scientists would figure out a way to remove the carbon from the atmosphere. How was I to know we’d destroy our scientific establishment?)
The Trump Administration truly seems to be searching for pointless opportunities to despoil the environment, too, as if it were on a mission to ensure that every endangered species on American territory perishes and every protected forest, grassland, or river becomes a suppurating toxic wasteland. In 2009, President Bush established the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument, which is about 750 miles west of Hawaii. It’s a beautiful chain of islands and atolls and a treasure trove of marine biodiversity. Its ecosystems are exceedingly fragile. Trump issued an executive order opening it to industrial fishing, which will destroy it.
Why? The Pacific Islanders don’t want this. They’ve been begging for the region to be more protected, not less. The fishing industry shouldn’t want it: Large protected areas actually help them by giving the fish a safe place to accumulate and spawn. So why is he doing this? Can you think of any reason beyond a desire to destroy?
Trump ordered the Justice Department to begin harassing states that try to protect their environments or reduce emissions. He signed an executive order demanding it block “burdensome and ideologically motivated ‘climate change’ or energy policies that threaten American energy dominance and our economic and national security.” States will not to be permitted, for example, to limit the amount of methane that oil producers may emit, like Colorado does. But how is this the federal government’s business?
“These State laws and policies are fundamentally irreconcilable with my Administration’s objective to unleash American energy,” the order said. “They should not stand.” Trump signed another executive order opening federal lands for coal mining. Coal mining, for God’s sake. He told the Energy Department it should use emergency powers to prevent unprofitable coal plants from shutting down. (Is Arthur Scargill running our economy now?)
The administration cut funding for the National Climate Assessment, even though it’s mandated by Congress. State and city governments need that assessment to prepare. (He did so, apparently, right after the Daily Wire published an article about the assessment titled, “Meet the government consultants raking in millions to spread climate doom.”)
Trump plans to relax limits on pollution from tailpipes and smokestacks. He said car pollution doesn’t “mean a damn bit of difference to the environment.” But that’s categorically untrue. It significantly shortens human lifespans. You can utterly reject the suggestion that car pollution has any effect on the climate and still grasp that it turns cities into Stygian hellholes, gives children asthma and bronchitis, gives adults heart attacks and lung cancer, reduces IQ, and sharply raises all-cause mortality. Exposure to it is a massive risk factor: more global deaths are attributed to air pollution than smoking.
Trump wants to end restrictions on mercury emissions. Mercury is a severe neurotoxin. There is no safe level of exposure. Again, I just don’t get it. Is there such a thing as an American who wants more neurotoxins in the air? Good thing we’re allowed to use the word “retard” again, because otherwise we’d lack the right word to describe American kids once this policy change takes effect.
I could go on, but you get my point. I don’t understand this bill. I don’t understand why Trump is pushing it. In every respect, it seems guaranteed to be unpopular—and if you’re going to be a populist, why not give the people what they want?
Fahrenheit. I’ve spent the better part of my adult life in countries that use the metric system, and I can convert from one to the other in my head, but I still find that temperatures measured in celsius are devoid of emotional resonance. It’s 41 degrees celsius? I guess that will be quite hot. It’s 106 degrees Fahrenheit? I’m gonna die. (Or spend the day languishing in the bathtub.)
As Judith pointed out to me, Thunberg declaring she’d been “kidnapped”by the IDF is chutzpah for the ages. It must not have occurred to her how this would sound to Israelis, whose kidnapped citizens are still languishing in Hamas’s dungeons.
As everyone knows, it’s impossible firmly to attribute any single event to climate change. Hurricanes and fires have always been with us. Insurance and re-insurance firms, however, don’t have the luxury of declaring climate change a hoax on this basis. Probability is their bread and butter.
The entire neighbourhood being involved in rescuing a cat that has fallen several floors and it trapped somewhere inside a building is the most Istanbul thing ever, if nothing else.
And to think, just last week I complained about having to pay FEMA such a large amount for my flood insurance. Yikes.
The entire neighbourhood being involved in rescuing a cat that has fallen several floors and it trapped somewhere inside a building is the most Istanbul thing ever, if nothing else.