The coronavirus hit America just as I started writing Fire and Flood, a decade-by-decade history of climate change. While writing, I realized that the difficulty in stopping the virus had disturbing parallels with the difficulty in stopping climate change. Once an issue becomes politicized, facts and information no longer matter—only the messenger does.
Deniers of both the coronavirus and of climate change skew overwhelmingly Republican. A recent Gallup poll found that only 18 percent of Republicans thought that climate change would affect them in their lifetime, while 67 percent of Democrats did. With coronavirus, the partisan divide is similarly extreme. A Pew Research Center poll from January found that 65 percent of Republicans believed that the pandemic had been made into a bigger deal than it really was, while only 16 percent of Democrats thought so.
