Have you ever been to a beautiful forest and thought, ‘Gosh, I wish this place had big, loud trucks rumbling through it!’ That’s ridiculous, right? Personally, I feel more relaxed after I trade the volume of the city and endless digital alerts for the quieter sounds of nature. That was especially true a few weeks ago when my partner and I had the privilege of escaping to the wilderness of northern Washington. The loudest sounds were usually others’ footsteps on the trail. Toward the end of our trip, we hiked through a thick evergreen forest alongside a lake in the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest. The sun competed with clouds and rain, revealing different colors through weather’s tug-of-war. We noticed ferns and flowers and insects we’d never seen. To say it was magical would be an understatement!

That forest in Washington is just a slice of the ~190 million acres of land managed by the U.S. Forest Service. About a fourth of that land, 45 million acres, is currently protected by The Roadless Rule. The 25 year-old rule prevents road construction, reconstruction, and timber harvesting through those forests, but the Trump administration wants to change that. And I don’t think they’re being honest about why they want to repeal it.

“Across the country, we’ve watched preventable conditions turn healthy landscapes into tinderboxes,” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins wrote in a press release. She’s right — we need to do a better job of protecting and restoring our forests! That’s why I recently highlighted a solution to the increase in high-severity fires which are killing millions of acres of America’s forests every year.

Secretary Rollins claims building roads through forests will “improve forest health and reduce wildfire risk.” Fewer wildfires sounds good, right? But get this — Rollins’s own agency found the exact opposite! U.S. Forest Service research from March shows that two-thirds of all fires in Southern California national forests started alongside roads. Another USFS report from Washington and Oregon found a similar thing — more roads = more fires. Their environmental impact statement also found that building these roads could cost up to $2 million dollars per mile. Those are your tax dollars. Across 45 million acres, millions could easily become billions, so what’s the Trump administration’s real motivation here? Because roads make forests more vulnerable to fire, not less.

“This is cause for not only concern but alarm,” California’s Secretary of Natural Resources Wade Crowfoot told me last summer when this issue first resurfaced. I interviewed him for NBC News while at the Sun Valley Forum in the Sawgrass National Forest. “Historically, those roadless areas of our national forests are those areas that are so sensitive we need to protect them.” Crowfoot emphasized that national forests in California also have cultural significance to tribes. “These are lands that people love.”

This attempt to bulldoze forests isn’t new. In 2004, President George W. Bush tried the same thing but backed out because of public backlash. That’s the lesson for this moment too. Environmental activist Pamela Wellner wrote about Bush’s reversal in the San Francisco Chronicle. “What made the difference was people speaking out,” Pamela told me, remembering how quickly President Bush retreated when members of his own party reacted negatively. “If you love nature, it doesn’t matter if you’re a Republican or a Democrat.”

This is one of those rare issues where both parties actually agree — and where you can speak-up. Pew polling found 71% of Republicans and 80% of Democrats and independents support conservation of national forests. That’s 77% of the United States!

The good news is: we still have time to protect our forests. You can submit public comment directly to the USDA before midnight on September 21st. This is the direct link to that page. And you don’t have to be an expert to submit comment. Introduce yourself, share a personal story, or explain the impact. If you’re really passionate, you should also contact your members of Congress.

I hope you’ll take 5 minutes to help protect 45 million acres of trees — trees which give us shade, comfort, beauty, and the clean air we breathe every day.

First, let’s zoom out: The U.S. continues to suffer a billion dollar disaster every two weeks. That’s up from only 3 or 4 every year in the 1980s. The latest analysis from Climate Central counted 12 major disasters through June, causing $32 billion dollars in damage, and largely clustered in the Midwest. The majority of that extreme weather shows the fingerprints of global warming, because oil and gas pollution supercharges storms. It increases everything from how fast rain falls to how strong winds are. Climate change also creates conditions for wildfires to burn hotter and spread more easily. Through late July, fires have scorched more than 2.6 million acres in the U.S. with more than 1,000 fires currently burning across North America.

There’s another trend that might be seen as separate, but it’s not. There are insane amounts of money flowing to and through the fossil fuel industry right now. Oxfam projects that the biggest oil and gas companies are on-track to profit $147 billion this year! *Not that this is apples to apples, but I think this helps contextualize how much money that really is: Assuming it costs about $16,000 to provide one American with healthcare for a year, that’s enough money to give 9.2 million Americans healthcare!

Meanwhile, The New York Times reported that oil and gas insiders have cashed-in more than $400 million dollars in stock since the start of the war in Iran. That’s not illegal, but consider those enormous corporate and individual profits are delivered by polluting our air and our oceans. The science is clear that oil and gas is the primary driver of climate change and the sharp increase in unnatural disasters. And don’t forget the politicians benefitting from the extra cash. In Heated, Emily Atkin highlighted several Republicans who’ve received sizable donations from fossil fuel while spreading disinformation about the wildfires burning in Canada.

HEATED

The fossil fuel money behind the GOP’s wildfire blame game

If you, like me, felt angry, sad, and helpless as explosive Canadian wildfires blanketed parts of the United States in smoke this past weekend, it may be heartening to know that most Americans accept the reality of …

Read more

a month ago · 238 likes · 12 comments · Emily Atkin

The most troubling thing for me is this— We know burning oil and gas is the primary driver of global warming and more frequent and extreme disasters. Those disasters are killing our neighbors and erasing our homes. So why are our tax dollars subsidizing that industry to make destruction even more profitable? It’s tough to pin down an exactly how much fossil fuel gets in subsidies from American taxpayers, but the estimates range from $35 billion to $760 billion dollars. When you factor-in all of the consequences, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) seems to think it’s more like $2 trillion dollars! That’s our money — or at least it was.

Share Chase Cain

“Climate change is already reducing Americans’ wealth and income,” Sen. Whitehouse said during his 304th Time to Wake Up speech earlier this year, and that wasn’t even referencing the subsidies from taxpayers. Whitehouse has been highlighting these problems for nearly 15 years, so I don’t imagine what I’m writing here will do more than what he’s done. But he’s right. Congress has become “a tomb of silence” on the destruction caused by burning oil and gas. But it doesn’t have to be that way. In barely 90 days, we get to choose who goes to Washington. Our votes will also decide whether our money keeps paying for destruction — or if we use it to start building the world we want to live in.

I can’t be sure when it changed, but I used to look forward to summer. Didn’t you? Especially as a kid, summer brought a break from school, trips to the beach, and being outside as much as possible. Even as an adult, there was something magical about summer until… there wasn’t. Now, summer brings mixed emotions, and I just don’t feel the same enthusiasm anymore. The best analogy for me is how getting out of shape can sneak up on you. One day, I’m going to the gym regularly and eating well. And then, suddenly, I’m wondering why I’m out of breath walking up a flight of stairs. When did the healthy habits fall apart? When did summer stop being such a happy time?

Leave a comment

Statistically, disasters are most likely from June through August, according to Climate Central’s ongoing analysis of what NOAA started tracking in 1980. And on top of that, those months serve-up suffocating heat waves. I separated the two, because in the U.S., heat waves aren’t counted as a disaster — even if they kill hundreds of people. And they often do. Heat kills more Americans than hurricanes, wildfires, tornadoes, and floods combined. Deaths from heat are also grossly undercounted according to multiple studies, likely killing more than 10,000 Americans every year. And all of this is only getting worse because of global warming. In the 1980s, the U.S. experienced an average of three major disasters every year. Now, billion dollar disasters happen every two weeks! Again, that’s without counting extreme heat and the toll it takes on our bodies.

Behind the numbers, statistics, and direct physical impacts, there’s also how heat makes us feel. “Heat dread” appears to be a relatively new term. The first mentions I found are from 2024, and it’s not a coincidence that’s the currently hottest year on-record. It’s also important context that 10 of the last 11 years have been the hottest years on-record. That’s clear evidence climate change is not a future problem nor up for debate. We’re living inside a bubble getting pumped full of more and more oil and gas pollution, and that’s causing our planet to overheat. “These days, as spring winds toward summer, for many of us the carefree season has become a time of dread,” Lydia Millet wrote in Time in April 2024. A few months later, the term “heat dread” spread to social media where Reddit users defined it as “that inherent dread when it’s too hot to do anything” — except be thankful if you can stay inside with air conditioning.

Psychologists classify heat dread as a form of “anticipatory anxiety.” Doctors and therapists report that heat dread can trigger everything from panic attacks to claustrophobia. Similar to the pandemic, some feel socially isolated after cancelling plans to stay inside and avoid the oven outside, and it’s even possible that chronic heat stress can lead to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). And there’s a very real physiological explanation for all of this, and that’s something I didn’t realize until I started researching this essay.

Think of a heat wave like a tug-of-war in your brain. Cortisol, the stress hormone, spikes along with the temperature. Meanwhile your body throws everything it has at survival — flooding the skin with blood, triggering sweat, fighting to shed heat — and that “all-hands on-deck emergency” comes at a cost. The systems that keep your mood steady, serotonin chief among them, get shortchanged while the body is busy trying to cool you down. That’s why a heat wave doesn’t just tax your body; it destabilizes the brain chemistry that keeps you calm, making you more irritable and quicker to anger. Any police officer or EMT will tell you that crime goes up when it gets really hot, and the research shows it — even in places like Tucson where it’s hot all summer! So what do we do about it?

Mental health experts recommend staying hydrated, eating well, and socializing as important steps to limit heat dread and other mental health challenges. Of course, staying physically cool is critical, and most communities open cooling centers on the hottest days. Libraries can also give your body a break from heat stress.

Big picture: we need to stop burning oil and gas. Period. As Bill McKibben often notes, enough solar energy falls on Earth in a single day to power our planet for years! The sun will never send us a bill for that energy, so that means we could make it cheap or free for our neighbors to stay cool and stay safe. In fact, Australia has embraced green energy so widely that millions of people get three free hours of power every day!

Extreme heat doesn’t have to be nearly as stressful or as deadly as it is. We can quickly address global warming by electing leaders who care about our health and our planet. Energy scarcity is manufactured by greedy companies who want to profit off oil and gas — which also pollute our air and water. Nature is abundant. The sun and the wind want us to have endless free energy, so they give it to us every day. Trees too! They clean our air while also keeping us cool. So maybe taking a few moments underneath a wise old tree might give you more than the comfort of shade. It might just give you a new perspective.

Before I continue, I want you to know this is not a “disaster porn” essay. Disaster porn is what some journalists call the attention-grabbing and heart-wrenching accounts of hurricanes, floods, and wildfires. In fact, I want to start with a promise, but it’s not a promise that the news about our planet will get better — at least not right away. The promise I want to make is that this will be a place where we can face tough realities, allow space to consider them, and hopefully, walk away feeling more empowered and connected. My friend Renee Lertzman, a social scientist, is an expert in this. This week, she brilliantly wrote, “The problem has never been that people do not know. It’s never been that people don’t care. It is that knowing, on its own, often has nowhere to go.”

My career of more than 20 years has been about reporting troubling news, covering weather disasters, and explaining the science driving global warming. In other words, I built a career on the belief that looking directly at hard things is important. And it is. But I’ve since realized that misses the most important part. What do you do after you face the upsetting truth? You watch the news. You’re “informed,” but then what? The news has raced through two or three more awful stories while you’re still trying to process that story from minutes ago. Social media is the largely the same. And maybe you’re simultaneously worried about your family, how much more expensive everything is, or if you might lose your job to AI? Yikes. No wonder we’re all so stressed, anxious, depressed, and disconnected. It’s … too much.

Even as a veteran reporter and meteorologist, this week of extreme weather and unnatural disasters pushed me past my limit. Flooding in Texas turned deadly almost exactly one year after the tragedy at Camp Mystic. Salt Lake City and Billings hit their hottest temperatures ever recorded! 109° and 111° respectively. And there’s all that smoke. On Thursday, Chicago, Detroit, and Minneapolis had the most polluted air on the planet! So as my friends put on their shoes to go outside, my mind started racing. ‘Should I use the walk to make a video to explain the danger of the smoke? Should I even be outside breathing that air? Do I want to see a sunset that might make it feel like we’re on Venus instead of Earth? Uhhmm…’ So I shoved it down for a moment and told the group I was going to stay in and relax. But relaxing felt far from reach.

So what did I do as they strolled away? I started breathing — intentionally and inside, away from the polluted air outside. Breathwork is one of my most reliable tools to calm intense emotions. If you’re unfamiliar, it’s basically directed breathing as a form of meditation. I struggle with traditional meditation, but breathwork quiets my mind in the way few things can. So lied down on the bed, and I spent half an hour counting my inhales and exhales with some chill music. It usually only takes a couple minutes, but in that moment, I felt particularly amped-up. If you’re curious about breathwork, my friend George Ramsay is an excellent breathwork teacher. If this doesn’t sound like a thing for you, Britt Wray and Leslie Davenport have other expert resources.

While I hope this exact thing hasn’t happened to you, it’s possible some version of it has. 68% of Americans report feeling some level of anxiety or grief about all the awful things happening to nature, the weather, and our planet. It’s even higher among Millennials and Gen Z. I share that so you know that you’re not alone. In April, Potential Energy found that 70% of Americans have felt the impacts of extreme weather in just the last 12 months.

If you’re still reading this, I hope that means this resonates with you in some way. If you know me or have been following my journey, you may also be wondering what this means for my work? I’m an Emmy Award winning meteorologist and environmental journalist, and I recently launched a YouTube channel “Chase What Matters.” It’s early and still evolving, but this Substack will be a complement to what I’m doing there. My belief is that many of our world’s problems stem from the disconnection between people and nature. We aren’t above or separate from nature. The truth is that we’re intimately intertwined with every living thing on the planet. Humans have known this throughout history — until only the last few centuries. My goal is to start remembering that deep, true connection and then slowly helping rebuild it.

Subscribe now

So if you have the means, I would appreciate your financial support by subscribing to this Substack. If not, you can still help by sharing this with your networks! First, your support will allow me to continue and elevate my storytelling. Then, I want to expand our collective impact by donating directly to nonprofits working to restore and protect nature. Your support will make both possible.

Share

To say it as simply as possible, we still get to decide what comes next. Is global warming awful? Absolutely. But it’s not too late. And we don’t have to accept the pull toward dystopia. Our ideas, our dreams, and our imagination can shape a healthier, happier, and more equitable world. Thank you for joining me on the path toward the future we want!