July was the hottest month ever recorded in the United States. Not hottest in a sweaty on the subway platform and a bad mood kind of way. Hottest in a this is becoming impossible to pretend is normal kind of way.
Three separate heat domes rolled across the country back to back, each one holding scorching temperatures in place over huge swaths of the population for days at a time. And as we’re sure you’ve felt it over the years, this isn’t a one-summer anomaly. Since 2001, the number of heat wave days across Western forests has nearly doubled, and the amount of forested land burned by wildfire each year has climbed two and a half times over.
The outcomes can be deadly. In the first days of July, New Jersey confirmed 29 heat-related deaths as temperatures hit 108 degrees. Nationwide, a Washington Post analysis found at least 69 people died in that same stretch of heat, putting it on par with some of the deadliest weather events of this century.
Even if you’re fortunate enough to have avoided this month’s extreme heat or the wildfires it fuels, we’re feeling the devastation in other ways. Wildfire suppression in Oregon has already cost the state more than $260 million this year with more than 2 million acres burned and counting. Across the country, wildfires cause an estimated $394 to $893 billion in damages every year, or up to 4 percent of U.S. GDP.
And then there’s the electricity bill sitting in your mailbox. The national average electricity bill hit an all-time high of $217 in July, driven in part by the data center boom that’s putting new strain on the grid in the Mid-Atlantic and elsewhere.
From there, the costs ripple through nearly every part of daily life. Crops fail after repeated heat waves, livestock die, and construction workers, street vendors, and farmers lose income when dangerous temperatures cut their hours or make outdoor work impossible. Families pay more for water, food, electricity, and health care, even as they may be bringing home less money. Pregnant women face greater risks of miscarriage and preterm birth. Kids miss school when classrooms and child care centers become too dangerous to operate, leaving parents to miss work, too. And governments take a hit as lower production and spending shrink tax revenue while heat-damaged roads and infrastructure become more expensive to repair. Everyone pays for extreme heat. But, as usual, the people with the least money to spare get hit the hardest.
You might think all of this would make protecting people from extreme heat a priority in Washington. Instead, Trump is moving to gut Biden-era rules that would guarantee outdoor workers breaks, water, and shade in extreme heat. Meanwhile, a House committee just advanced a party-line bill that would permanently block the Department of Labor from putting federal heat protections in place. People are dying from extreme heat, and the Republican response is to make sure workers can still be told to suck it up and go back outside.
That might have worked when extreme heat felt like an occasional inconvenience. But it is a much harder sell when nine out of ten Americans say extreme heat has affected their lives in the past year, up from 83% just two years ago. About half say they have felt the impact directly on their electricity bills, and two-thirds of voters say gas and fuel prices will influence how they vote this November. What once might have felt like a seasonal nuisance is now something voters can see, feel, and pay for.
The frustration of sweating through yet another heat wave or choking on another plume of wildfire smoke is turning into a demand for leaders who will actually address the problem. NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani signed an executive order protecting the city’s 1.4 million outdoor workers from extreme heat, saying no one should have to choose between their paycheck and their health. New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill won in New Jersey after promising to freeze electricity rates and take on utility monopolies. In Virginia, Abigail Spanberger became the state’s first woman governor pledging to make data centers, some of the biggest drivers of rising electricity demand, help pay for grid upgrades. In Georgia, voters flipped two utility board seats after six straight rate hikes tied to costly fossil fuel and nuclear projects.
The message in every one of these victories? People want leaders willing to name who’s raising their bills and putting their lives at risk, and to hold them accountable for it. And that’s a warning in both directions.
To the fossil fuel industry, the era of nobody connecting the dots between your profits and our bills, our workplaces, and our lives, is over. People are increasingly asking why they should keep paying the price for a crisis that has made your industry richer. To Democrats, tiptoeing around climate because you think it isn’t a winning issue isn’t going to cut it anymore. Climate isn’t some political liability voters are waiting to punish you for, but ignoring the root cause of the heat, the fires, and the bills that come with them can be. Voters want leaders to name the problem plainly, connect it to the costs people are already feeling, and offer a real plan to make polluters pay for the damage instead of leaving families to foot the bill for a mess they didn’t cause.
There’s a pretty clear place to start, and voters already seem to know what it is. Polling shows voters already believe solar and wind are the cheapest forms of energy, and the evidence increasingly backs them up. States with a higher share of renewables on the grid tend to have lower electricity prices, while regions still dependent on volatile fossil fuels experience some of the biggest price spikes.
So maybe the question isn’t whether Americans can afford to act on climate. Maybe it’s how much longer we can afford not to. Because this summer isn’t just hot. It’s expensive, deadly ,and voters are increasingly seeing those costs not as an unavoidable fact of life, but as the consequence of political choices.
Nobody voted for this summer. But people are going to vote on what happens next.