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Flooding in Pakistan is the latest in a long line of climate disasters. Now the 150,000 residents of Jackson, Mississippi were ordered to evacuate as flooding hit the city. This weekend, temperatures in California are projected to hit 115°F.

If ordinary people can overcome powerful companies to protect their water in a poor country like El Salvador, imagine what their counterparts can do here.

Texas brought this crisis on themselves by insisting on operating their own power grid that doesn’t connect with others; by failing to do anything to make the grid more resilient; by creating a political system that is controlled by power and money.

Fire in the Anthropocene has become the physical equivalent of endless nuclear war. A new, profoundly sinister nature is rapidly emerging from our fire rubble at the expense of landscapes we once considered sacred.

The coronavirus may not, in retrospect, prove to be the tipping point that upends human civilization as we know it, but it should serve as a warning that we will experience ever more such events in the future as the world heats up.

Devastation from Hurricane Dorian provokes calls for reporters to acknowledge the climate emergency's connection to extreme weather

Because the number of extreme events and their destructive power keeps increasing at an accelerating rate. If we can expect to take a $1 trillion hit over just the next decade, the costs by the end of the century are hardly fathomable.

We are clearly in a new normal in terms of extreme precipitation and that raises questions about the new normal of flood risks.

"The chaos created by extreme weather has been compounded by the chaos of deregulated energy markets and profit-driven corporations who care little about workers and the interests of the public." - D. Michael Langford, president of the Utility Workers Union of America