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America's Midsummer Malaise
Why the heat—and almost everything else—feels so oppressivehttps://newsletters.theatlantic.com/wait-what/62d9839cda4cea0020f0d79e/us-summer-heatwave-covid-monkeypox/
https://archive.ph/LKS6X
By Molly Jong-Fast
Serial complainer Alan Dershowitz isn’t the only one having a bad summer. The year 2021 was filled with predictions that the waning of the coronavirus pandemic would lead to another Roaring Twenties. Instead, America is stuck in yet another summer of suck. Americans are (still) filled with worry: about the ever-mutating coronavirus, the arrival of monkeypox, inflation, the possibility of a recession, a potential second Trump presidency, and, of course, climate change.
About that: Last week Joe Manchin said he would kill President Joe Biden’s climate agenda. It was not the first time the senator from West Virginia has delighted in disappointing those of us who don’t want to die in a heat dome, but it might be the worst possible time for him to have yanked yet another legislative football from out in front of Biden.
(According to an op-ed in The New York Times, Manchin also “delayed crucial regulations that would cut carbon pollution. Wary of upsetting the delicate negotiations, the Biden administration has held back on using the full force of its executive authority on climate over the past 18 months, likely in hopes of securing legislation first.” Who would have thought that the person to derail the Biden climate agenda would be the guy whom then-Exxon lobbyist Keith McCoy called a “kingmaker”?)
This summer, a brutal heat wave has killed people in Spain and Portugal and aggravated forest fires in the French countryside. Here at home, fires are burning in Alaska, New Mexico, Texas, and Arizona, among other places. Intense heat is sometimes associated with an increase in crime and seems to breed hostility toward our fellow man. Heat is not the only by-product of climate change. Lake Mead, just outside Las Vegas, recently hit its lowest level since the 1930s (it’s down about 200 feet from a peak in 1983), and the pictures of the reservoir are grim.
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