For generations, Michigan families have headed “Up North” each summer, in search of rest in our forests and lakes. This year, we’re finding something else: some of the dirtiest, most dangerous air in the world. 

From the Upper Peninsula down to Southwest Detroit, the air at times is thick with smoke, the soot of tiny particles that lodge deep in your lungs and even enter your blood. This bad air triggers asthma attacks, hurts people with heart disease and can even harm unborn babies. 

The soot is part of a witch’s brew of dangerous particles and chemicals in smoke drifting across the region from Canada — where wildfires that have torched enough land this year alone to cover the state of Vermont – and from Minnesota, one of more than a dozen U.S. states battling fires that have burned enough land this year to cover the state of Connecticut. 

The fires and extreme heat are adding to the misery of a summer that has left half the country baking under moderate to severe drought, devastating farmers across much of the Great Plains. 

The raging fires, blistering heat and withering drought are all part, the science makes clear, of the cascading extreme weather disasters made worse by a warming planet. 

Instead of confronting the rising dangers and mounting costs of the widening climate crisis, the Trump administration is working overtime to upend the progress we’ve made, as a nation, and promote the fossil fuels that are causing the problem. 

Since taking office last year, the administration has rolled back commonsense safeguards to curb fossil fuel pollution from our cars, trucks and power plants. It has doled out billions of dollars in taxpayer funds to bolster the profits of the oil and gas billionaires who helped bankroll Trump’s 2024 campaign. It has combined with the GOP majority in Congress to end successful incentives that were helping to spur an American manufacturing renaissance by driving hundreds of billions of dollars in clean energy investment nationwide.  

And it’s repealed the long-standing scientific finding that climate-wrecking carbon emissions are a pollutant that endangers public health — the legal basis for curbing this pollution — as if climate change inflicted no toll at all. Tell that to the farmers and other landowners watching their property go up in flames and their croplands baking to dust. Tell it to those of us choking down this fouled air.  

The administration’s policies hurt Michigan auto workers. Our workforce is ready to build next-generation vehicles and the high-tech components to power them. Killing clean energy incentives shortchanges our factories and leaves our workers behind. 

In Detroit, we have a unique opportunity to help confront the climate crisis. We can seize a historic chance to build the advanced vehicles of the future with American workers. At the same time, we can power our communities with new energy that is cheaper and faster to build than any other power from the wind and sun. 

The darkening skies and sickening air that swallowed Detroit earlier this month are more than a nuisance: they’re a five-alarm warning of what’s to come if we continue to fail to act.

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