If you’ve step outside almost anywhere on Earth this year, you feel it. Europe just logged its hottest July on record. Ocean temperatures hit new highs. Wildfires are burning bigger and longer across Canada, the American West, and southern Europe. Scientists now put strong odds on 2026 landing among the hottest years ever measured.
And yet, in Washington, the response has been to point fingers at our Canadian neighbors and then pay energy companies not to build the clean power we need.
Record Heat Is Here. So Is the Denial. Are We the Frogs?
That gap between what’s happening and how leaders in America are responding is exactly the pattern this blog is named for.
The Frog That Didn’t Jump
We all know the metaphor. Drop a frog into boiling water and it jumps out immediately. Raise the temperature slowly enough, though, and the frog stays put, never quite noticing the increasing danger until it’s too late. (Biologically, real frogs are smarter than that. Politically, we may not be.)
This year gave us a textbook example. As wildfire smoke from Canada drifted into American cities this summer, the president blamed Canadian “willful negligence” in forest management and floated adding the cost of the pollution to tariffs on Canadian goods. Forest management is a real issue. But climate scientists working the story were blunt: hotter, drier conditions and not sloppy Canadian brush-clearing, are why wildfire seasons in Canada, the American West, and Europe keep getting longer and larger. The U.S. itself has fires burning 31% more land than its ten-year average, this year alone.
Blaming our northern neighbors for the smoke is easier than addressing why the water got too hot in the first place.
If the smoke blame-game were an isolated moment, it might be forgivable political theater. It isn’t. This year, the federal government has paid offshore wind developers roughly $2.6 billion to not build clean power, but to walk away from permitted projects and shift that money into gas and other fossil-fuel infrastructure instead. One deal alone sent nearly $1 billion to a French energy company to cancel two wind farms that would have powered over a million homes.
Paying Companies Not to Build Wind Power
At the same time, the administration has pushed to expand coal production and loosen restrictions on fossil fuel development, even as the country faces a looming electricity shortage driven by data centers and vehicle electrification.
Read that again: paying companies not to build the power supply we’re short on. That’s not energy policy. That’s water temperature rising in the pot, one degree at a time, while the people in charge insist it’s still comfortable.
“But What About China and India?”
Every time U.S. climate policy comes up, someone points out that China emits more CO₂ today than the United States does, or asks why India isn’t doing more. Both are legitimate national conversations for those countries to have. But raised as a reason for the U.S. to do less, the argument falls apart on the numbers.
Since 1850, the United States has produced roughly a quarter of all cumulative fossil CO₂ emissions on Earth, more than any other nation. Carbon dioxide doesn’t disappear once it’s emitted; it accumulates in the atmosphere for centuries. The climate conditions fueling this year’s fires and heat waves were built by more than a century of industrial emissions, disproportionately American. Pointing at this year’s Chinese smokestacks doesn’t erase that historic ledger, and it doesn’t get a single American wind turbine built, a single grid upgraded, or a single home cooled more efficiently. Finger-pointing abroad is a way to avoid doing the one thing actually within U.S. control: U.S. energy and climate policy.
What Actually Needs to Happen
None of this is a mystery. The tools exist and mostly just need political will:
- Stop paying to cancel clean power. Redirect the billions spent unbuilding wind farms into finishing them — the country needs the capacity now, not in a decade.
- Modernize the grid. A huge share of clean energy sits stuck waiting for transmission lines and interconnection approval. Fixing that bottleneck matters as much as building new generation.
- Price carbon honestly or regulate it directly. Markets respond to signals; right now the signal says fossil fuels are still the safe bet.
- Invest in resilience now, not after the next fire season or heat wave: better building codes, water infrastructure, and cooling centers save lives regardless of how the political fights go.
- Hold leaders accountable at the ballot box and in the media for policy, not just rhetoric. Blaming a neighbor for smoke plays well in a press release; it doesn’t cool us one single degree.
Tipping Points: Why Waiting Is the Riskiest Option
Climate scientists talk about tipping points, thresholds where a system shifts into a new, self-reinforcing state that’s very hard to reverse. Melted Arctic sea ice no longer reflects sunlight. Amazon rainforest so dry that it can’t sustain itself as rainforest. Ocean currents slowing enough to reorganize weather patterns across entire continents.
The unsettling part of a tipping point is that you often can’t tell you’ve crossed it until well after the fact. The frog doesn’t feel one degree of temperature increase turn into an emergency; it just stops being able to get out. That’s the real danger in a policy of delay: it’s not that nothing happens while we wait. It’s that the water keeps heating whether or not we’re paying attention, and some of what’s heating doesn’t cool back down on human timescales.
The Water Temperature Is Rising. The Choice Is Still Ours.
Record heat, worsening fires, and a government paying to slow down clean energy aren’t separate news stories. They’re the same story, told three ways. The frog metaphor is a warning built on a simple truth: the longer we mistake gradual change for no change, the fewer good options we have left.
We’re not stuck in the boiling water yet. But it’s getting warmer, and pretending otherwise is its own kind of choice.
Great way to explain a difficult situation our world is in. Thanks for your insights, as always.