Rising summer heat should spur us to action

Many Americans are experiencing more extremely hot days, especially in the South and Midwest. Map shows change in number of over-90F days since 1995.

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Summer has long been known for its spirit of adventure and reprieve, found in fire hydrants and backyard sprinklers, campsites and lemonade stands. It was the time of year when the outdoors could be most fearlessly embraced.

Now summer has a new set of fixtures: face masks, air purifiers and public health alerts. Children stay home from camp on smoke days, a gleeless version of winter’s snow days. People who work outside have turned to salt packets and cooling vests. The notion of enduring the summer rather than embracing it has spread far beyond the Sun Belt.

As Americans mourn this change, we hope it will motivate them to take action. The country needs to act both to better live with the new reality of summer and to prevent it from worsening. To do so requires escaping the binary of doom and apathy that too often defines climate conversations.

Heat is the most widespread change. Summer 2026 is on track to be both the hottest and most humid in the contiguous United States since records began in 1895. Even as the end of summer approaches, much of the country is experiencing waves of heat and humidity. Over the past two weeks, temperatures have climbed 15 to 20 degrees above historical averages in parts of California, the Midwest and the South, leading to school closings and early dismissals.

In many parts of the country, extreme heat affects much more of the year than it once did. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Fulton County, Georgia, which includes Atlanta, spent about 47 days a year with a heat index (a measure that combines temperature and humidity to estimate how hot it feels) exceeding 90 degrees. In recent years, Fulton County’s residents have typically endured 79 such days, an increase of a month.

Even historically temperate regions have become much hotter. St. Mary’s County, on the coast of Maryland, once spent less than two weeks a year in heat over 90 degrees. Now it experiences nearly five weeks. In Napa County, California, the number of days over 90 degrees has doubled, reshaping the region’s wine industry.

The confluence of weather crises is another alarming development. One condition can worsen another: Heat and drought increase the risk of wildfire. Wildfire razes vegetation and makes soil less absorbent, which in turn worsens flooding. The human body also suffers from overlapping weather events. A heat wave causes people to breathe faster, which can lead them to ingest more pollutants when the air is smoky.

In the Northeast in July, a spate of modern plagues seemed to arrive together: intense heat, wildfire smoke and thunderstorms. Or consider Washington state, where in August a wildfire leaped over a lake 2 miles wide because of extreme heat, drought and high winds. The coming year may be even more tumultuous, thanks to an intense El Nino system building in the Pacific Ocean.

These miseries are the result of the rate at which humans have continued to burn fossil fuels in recent decades, priming the atmosphere for extreme weather. Yet just as the consequences arrive in force, our leaders are talking about them far less.

President Donald Trump asks the nation to ignore the weather around us and treats climate change as a hoax. He has paid companies to cancel clean energy projects while forcing aging coal plants to stay open, including units in Indiana and Colorado whose executives requested permission to shut them down.

The administration has also made it harder for citizens to adapt. Shortly after Trump took office in January 2025, his administration stopped collecting data that helped the government prepare for natural disasters. It withheld funds to renovate hurricane-prone homes in North Carolina and cooling centers in Florida. Trump is hastening a future with hotter, smokier and stormier summers, and leaving citizens with fewer defenses.

Democrats have rightly decried these policies while making the politically reasonable decision not to put climate change at the center of their midterm campaigns. Polls make clear that most voters are more concerned about the cost of living than the weather. Many people worry that a politician who focuses on the environment will not focus on lowering their energy bills. Nonetheless, Democrats — and Republicans looking for a productive post-Trump agenda — should be working behind the scenes to design the climate policies that the nation needs. Every 2028 presidential candidate should have a clean energy plan, not least because it is a matter of global influence: China has outpaced the United States in clean energy technology, giving it a strategic advantage.

Large investments in clean energy under President Joe Biden accelerated the shift toward solar and wind power, and future administrations will not need to focus as much on deploying those technologies. They can instead prioritize research and development of other technologies, including geothermal, hydroelectricity, nuclear power and batteries. These options have the advantage of offering more consistent energy than solar and wind, helping industries to adopt them.

More immediately, Congress can make it easier to build clean energy capacity. Lawmakers should update America’s onerous permitting system, which has prevented the country from sufficiently upgrading its electric grid. The House has passed a bipartisan bill that represents a good start, but the effort has been stuck in the Senate. The Senate should act.

Even without federal support, state and local officials have important roles. They should focus on helping communities adapt to climate hazards. Iowa’s flood alert system offers a model. States should do more to create early warning systems, prevent wildfires, help farmers adapt to new conditions and protect vulnerable people from extreme heat.

In July and August, it can feel too hot to think, too hot to move, too hot to act. Now that the heat is starting to break, Americans should remember that progress is still possible, and that future summers will be more scorching if we do not act.