America sleepwalks through a climate crisis. Will this smoke alarm wake us up?

“It’s déjà vu for me,” Mann told me Wednesday. “I could see and smell the wildfire smoke from my front door — Sydney had the worst air quantity in the world at that time,” almost identical to what he saw here in Pennsylvania. But while eastern North America may be copying the “Black Summer” storyline so far, it’s much less certain whether our continent’s latest brush with disaster will have the same hopeful ending.

Down under, the spate of bushfires blamed for at least 33 human deaths and the loss of countless animals has triggered major changes. Australia’s then-prime minister, Scott Morrison, was widely lambasted for his response to the crisis and lost his job in 2022’s elections, with the more liberal Labour Party — along with a surge of Green Party environmentalists — taking control. In April, new prime minister Anthony Albanese pushed through that nation’s toughest climate law, which aims to steeply reduce carbon emissions by 43% by 2030.

Here in the United States, California, of course, has had its own devastating wildfires, while other parts of the nation have suffered multiple “once-in-a-hundred-years” floods or endured hurricanes like 2022’s Ian that strengthened over the overheated seas.

But can the stunning events and unforgettable images of the last couple of days — especially in New York, home to America’s “deciders” of big business, finance, and the media — become similar to what Mann and others now see as “a tipping point” in Australia? June 7, 2023, was the worst air-quality day in New York City’s history, a day when the World Trade Center disappeared into the blinding, orange apocalypse. But will historians also look back on Wednesday as the day everything changed for the climate — much as Jan. 6, 2021, has become for U.S. democracy?

I want to feel hopeful, but — maybe it’s the toxic particles I inhaled Wednesday on an ill-advised trip to the dog park — I keep coughing up cynicism.

In Washington, D.C., staffers at the National Zoo rushed a 2-week-old baby gorilla inside to avoid the hazardous air, but government officials are still racing ahead with a deal to reward Senate swing vote Joe Manchin with approval of a $6.6 billion Mountain Valley Pipeline that even the most conservative estimates concede would add between six million and 16 million tons of planet-warming carbon emissions to the atmosphere every year.

As smoke closed in on the statehouses of the East Coast, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin picked Wednesday — of all days in the history of the planet — to take Virginia out of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), the pact of Northeastern states working together to curb emissions that warm the planet and lead to more frequent, worse wildfires. In Harrisburg, Republican state senators — in a party-line vote on hopefully doomed legislation — voted to change the name of a key state agency from the Department of Environmental Protection to the Department of Environmental Services, because heaven forbid anyone thinks that Pennsylvania wants to protect its environment.

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Some of the worst haze shrouded Bedminster in central New Jersey — the golf course where an otherwise besieged Donald Trump hopes to celebrate the looming partnership between the Trump-friendly LIV Golf — backed by billions of petrodollars from the journalist-bone-sawing, human-rights-abusing Saudi Arabian regime — and the PGA Tour. I don’t think it’s a stretch to see the lung-paralyzing smoke as a metaphor for this deal that shows how our addiction to the endless pile of dirty money soiled by fossil fuels is poisoning our very humanity.

So far, the only fog that’s lifted this week is the cloud of industry-funded denial that has suffocated our politics for decades. It used to be easy for your Fox News and AM talk radio types to claim that climate change was just a symptom of liberals’ “woke mind virus.” It’s impossible to deny global warming when you can’t see to the end of your block.

On Thursday, some 92 wildfires continued to burn out of control in Quebec, the epicenter of hundreds of fires that have been raging across Canada. So far, 2023 has been much hotter than normal for our northern neighbors, particularly in eastern Canada, which posted its driest April on record. The more than nine million acres that have burned there this year is close to an all-time high, even though the wildfire season doesn’t end until September.

Mann told me that both the Canadian wildfires and the southward path of the smoke are linked to “unusual jet stream patterns.” He told me that eastern North America is one location where we expect the greatest increase in combined heat and drought from human-caused warming. “Put that all together, and it’s a toxic climate change brew,” the Penn climate scientist said. “This is a sign of far worse things to come if we don’t reign in fossil fuel burning and carbon emissions.”

Yet that’s not the vibe among our nation’s leadership — not yet, anyway. The contradictions start at the very top. President Joe Biden — to his credit — won passage in his recent Inflation Reduction Act of some $369 million for programs like clean energy and electric cars, a big win for the planet. Yet, Biden also greenlit the Manchin-backed pipeline, expanded oil and gas leases in the Gulf of Mexico, and fist-bumped the Saudi oil dictator.

Just imagine if Winston Churchill, facing the existential threat of World War II, had declared that “we shall fight on the beaches” before announcing business deals with Germany’s Volkswagen and IG Farben because he wanted to hold down costs for the British middle class. In a perfect world, Biden would have donned an N-95 mask Wednesday and spoken in front of the orange blur of the Statue of Liberty to declare unconditional war on fossil fuels.

Will nature’s smoke alarm serve as an American wake-up call, or will we hit snooze one more time?

We talk on and on in American politics about freedom, but is there any liberty greater than the right to inhale clean air? It’s no wonder “I can’t breathe!” — the last words of Eric Garner — became the rallying cry of the fight for civil rights in the 21st century. This week, nearly 100 million Americans got a whiff of the struggle for this basic right. Will we remember when the wind shifts — and finally do something?