“What’s in the Air” is a column by Dominique Browning, Moms Clean Air Force Co-Founder and Director, in which she explores life today through the lens of air quality and public health. She writes this as news continues to pour in about the devastation and loss of life from weekend flash flooding in the Texas Hill Country.
There is always a terrible debate after any large tragedy that touches on political issues—a mass shooting, a deadly wildfire. The debate involves those of us who are desperately trying to help people connect the dots between climate pollution and chaotic weather—and those of us who feel it is “too soon” to link pain and policy, that thoughts and prayers are the only appropriate response. Like so many things, there does not need to be a choice, and I reject it. At Moms, we are filled with thoughts and prayers and tears and nightmares for all the mothers, all the families, torn apart by the brutal drowning of their children in the Texas Hill Country.
And we are also furious. Furious because the kinds of weather catastrophes we are seeing with increasing frequency are directly linked to climate pollution. And that’s something we can do something about. It isn’t actually all that difficult! It’s the greed and politics that make it insanely tough.
Tell Congress: Protect Our Ability to Prepare for and Recover From Severe Weather Threats
Climate pollution is something that Texas has been weirdly conflicted about. Texas leads the nation in generating wind energy: in 2023 Texas generated 28% of the nation’s wind-powered electricity. For this, we are eternally grateful. But Texas is also the leading state in oil and gas production. This industry is responsible for a significant amount of the climate pollution the U.S. is generating. And it has resisted action on reining in carbon and methane pollution—and actively spread falsehoods about global warming, leading to mass confusion about what we must and can do about it.
That the Hill Country flooding is happening even as lawmakers in Washington, DC, are tearing apart the mechanisms that we fought so hard to put in place to help fight pollution is particularly heartbreaking. They’re also tearing apart the agencies that forecast and research weather related to climate; they’re gutting systems that would help us adapt.
And that’s why it is not a moment too soon to be connecting the dots, the fatal dots.
The planet is warming. The earth’s atmosphere is akin to the skin of an apple in relative size to our Earth. Very thin indeed. All that excess human-released carbon, all that human-created methane, all those greenhouse gases are acting in the same way as your car does when it sits in a hot parking lot with windows rolled up. Heat is trapped, it can’t escape, it builds up.
We tend to look up at the blue beyond and think, hey, how can we possibly fill up that vast space? That’s how we think of the ocean too. But in fact, our pollution has changed the chemistry of the ocean, rendering it more acidic and killing off creatures whose shells can no longer form properly, among other things. The ocean, a “carbon sink,” is filling up so quickly that it can’t help absorb carbon pollution much longer. And the ocean is heating up. Off the coasts of Louisiana and Texas, the Gulf is “unnaturally” warm—a condition increasingly natural, in fact. It stays warm for much longer than it once did, and air wafting over it is washing over land. Warmer air holds more moisture. Perversely, there’s been less rainfall in the Hill Country, drying out the hardpan.
There will be many more devastating storms. For some odd reason, perhaps because it is a slower violence, the heat waves in Arizona last year, which killed more than 600 people, didn’t get the headlines. But longer and more intense heat waves are also characteristic of the responses of our earth’s weather to a warmer climate.
Everything is connected! To get to the idea of what is and isn’t natural anymore: These are all natural weather events—a natural response to the mix of ingredients in the air. But they are not normal, not normal for the small envelope of conditions in which human beings thrive. There is not going to be a New Normal. There is only going to be increasing chaos.
Meanwhile, parents across the country have to make choices about how to keep their children safe, especially in summer—if they have the privilege of making choices. And that’s if there is predictability about what is going to keep unfolding around us. Which—increasingly—there won’t be.
So yes: thoughts, prayers, tears. We will turn to more of those in the coming years. We will face our children, as they grow up and understand that we did not do enough in the face of the danger ahead, not enough by a long shot. And that makes me angry enough to keep fighting, no matter how offensive it might be to an industry that wants us only to focus on prayers.
Tell Congress: Protect Our Ability to Prepare for and Recover From Severe Weather Threats