It’s another summer of climate dread. Earlier this month, Lytton, British Columbia hit 121 degrees Fahrenheit — the hottest temperature ever recorded in Canada. In Oregon, the Bootleg “megafire” — one of eighty fires currently raging in the West — is still only 30 percent contained after two weeks. The size of Los Angeles, it is “hot enough to create [its] own weather, [including] tornado-like winds that can tear trees apart and dismantle power lines.” Those in the Eastern US are experiencing the effects: hazy skies, air quality warnings, and unnerving red sunsets (more akin to a galaxy far, far away). Outside North America, unprecedented floods have killed hundreds in Europe and thirty-three in China.

Climate dread isn’t just a cascade of bad weather — it’s the familiar feeling of seeing droughts, fires, heatwaves, and storms grow worse year after year as the political class sits on its hands. While Joe Biden talks the talk on climate, his aspirational infrastructure “American jobs plan” falls far short of the investment needed to meet his ambitious targets. Administration officials John Kerry and Janet Yellen act as if it’s the 1990s by claiming “markets not government” and “private capital” are the keys to addressing the crisis.

For many, the answer to this cognitive dissonance — escalating crisis amid obstinate inaction — is to assert that climate change is not a future problem, but here, in the dystopic present. Surely, as the floods and droughts grow more severe, action will follow.