As the United States endures another summer of dangerous heat, drought and flooding, more and more working people are recognising what they’re experiencing isn’t just bad luck. According to new polling by Data for Progress, 61% of likely voters believe extreme weather events have become more frequent over the past five years. That includes 72% of Democrats, 63% of Independents, and even 46% of Republicans.
This comes despite years of attempts by Donald Trump and sections of the capitalist class to dismiss climate change as a “hoax” or a “con job”. Reality has a way of cutting through propaganda. When your workplace feels like an oven, your crops fail from drought, or your neighbourhood floods for the third time in a few years, it becomes increasingly difficult to pretend nothing is changing.
The polling found that majorities of Americans believe climate change is making wildfires worse (64%), droughts worse (63%), flooding and flash flooding worse (62%), hurricanes worse (59%), and severe thunderstorms and hailstorms worse (59%). Heatwaves topped the list, with 67% saying climate change is making them worse.
The reason isn’t difficult to understand. Extreme heat is becoming impossible to ignore. As one researcher noted, almost everyone in the United States has experienced unusually hot days or weeks in recent years. High temperatures already kill more people in the US every year than hurricanes, tornadoes and floods combined.
The scientific question of what’s driving global warming isn’t particularly mysterious. Capitalism has built an economic system around endless accumulation, relentless competition and the pursuit of profit. Every capitalist enterprise is under pressure to expand production, cut costs and externalise whatever burdens it can. The atmosphere becomes another dumping ground because the costs are borne by society while the profits remain private.
This isn’t simply a matter of individual corporations making bad decisions. It’s the normal functioning of capitalism itself. A system built around competition compels capitalists to prioritise profit over long-term human need, while fossil fuel giants and their political representatives spend billions delaying action that threatens their investments.
At the same time, imperialism has concentrated both wealth and emissions in the developed capitalist world. The richest countries became wealthy through centuries of industrialisation, colonial plunder and fossil fuel consumption, while many poorer nations now suffer some of the harshest consequences despite contributing comparatively little to the historic build-up of greenhouse gases.
The poll also revealed something equally important. Many Americans may still misunderstand why the climate is changing. Yale researchers noted that 27% of people continue to believe global warming is mostly the result of natural cycles rather than human activity. Decades of disinformation funded by powerful economic interests have left their mark.
But even where there is disagreement about the causes, there is remarkable agreement about protecting workers.
A striking 88% of likely voters support requiring employers to provide basic heat protections such as drinking water, shade, rest breaks and air conditioning. Just 7% oppose such measures.
That shouldn’t surprise anyone familiar with the realities of wage labour. Construction workers, farm workers, roofers, warehouse workers, manufacturing workers and kitchen staff can’t simply walk away when temperatures become dangerous. They sell their labour power to survive, often under employers determined to squeeze every possible minute of productivity from each shift.
Extreme heat has become a leading cause of workplace injuries and deaths, yet progress on establishing meaningful federal protections has stalled. Under the Trump administration, efforts to strengthen workplace heat protections have been weakened, even as temperatures continue to climb.
Capital constantly presents workers with the same choice: risk your health or lose your income. That’s not an unfortunate side effect of the system. It’s how exploitation works. Every additional break, every safety measure and every air-conditioned workspace costs money, reducing profits unless workers organise and force employers or the state to concede.
The overwhelming public support for workplace heat protections shows something important. Working people don’t need convincing that they deserve safe conditions. What stands in the way isn’t public opinion. It’s the political power of capital, which has consistently resisted regulations that place even modest limits on its ability to extract profit.
Climate change isn’t simply an environmental issue. It’s a class issue. The capitalist class has profited enormously from an economic model that treats both workers and nature as resources to be consumed. Meanwhile, it is the working class that breathes polluted air, labours through deadly heat, loses homes to floods and pays the price for a crisis it did the least to create.
The fight against climate change and the fight for workers’ power are inseparable. So long as production remains organised around private profit rather than social need, capital will continue sacrificing both people and the planet whenever doing so protects the bottom line.
