“When a bridge collapses, no one simply says that traffic has been rerouted. People look for causes, assign blame, and point to neglected maintenance. When, on the other hand, an area is flooded or a crop is lost, the prevailing narrative is one of exception, of fate, of a ‘flash flood.'” These words by one of Italy’s leading climate experts, Nicola Armaroli, published in the magazine *Sapere* under the title“Climate Omertà,” paint a picture of the summer of 2026.
The mainstream media’s account of the events provided an accurate depiction of what happened; record-breaking heat, the Po River reduced to a long strip of dust, the Danube transformed into a museum from which Roman and World War II remains emerge, the Mediterranean with tropical temperatures, dozens of Italian cities under a red alert, parched countryside, and burned-out forests.
The analysis was also precise and candid regarding the consequences. The heat waves took a heavy economic toll: one estimate puts the potential loss to European GDP at 180 billion euros; for Italy, growth is estimated to have slowed by about 1.1 percentage points, equivalent to over 20 billion euros. The human cost has also been heavy and well-documented: over 32,000 excess deaths in Europe between mid-July and mid-August, according to EuroMomo’s preliminary estimates; confirming that heat waves now cost Europe tens of thousands of lives each year ( more than traffic accidents).
So, is everything okay, at least from an informational standpoint? Are we facing a serious problem, and are we taking steps to solve it? Not exactly. In news reports and commentary—which, as a rule, should aim to describe the what, how, where, when, and why—one element is missing: the why. This “why” is not a mystery, since the scientific community has precisely identified the cause of the climate crisis: the massive use of fossil fuels and deforestation are the main drivers of the greenhouse effect. Without swift and radical action on these two factors, the warming trend is bound to worsen significantly.
What, on the other hand, emerges from the coverage of the heat wave? A report by Greenpeace Italy and the Pavia Observatory on media coverage of the climate crisis in 2025 highlights the shifting of blame. The study analyzed 1,845 news stories on the climate crisis in daily newspapers and 1,073 segments on television news programs. Fossil fuels were explicitly identified as the cause of climate change in only 3% of the newspaper articles. On television news programs, that percentage drops to 2%.
It is this lack of information that is paralyzing the response. But to understand it, we must identify the reason behind this suppression of the underlying cause. And we cannot settle for what seems obvious. It is obvious that global corporations that derive enormous profits from fossil fuels have every interest in downplaying the role of oil, coal, and gas in the ongoing disaster. And in fact, in 2021, a U.S. Congressional investigation was launched into the operations of several major oil companies. After three years of work and the review of thousands of documents, the final report from the committee staff was released. The conclusions were that Companies have known for decades that the burning of fossil fuels causes climate change, but that the industry has developed strategies of denial, disinformation, greenwashing, and lobbying to obstruct climate policies. Then came the Trump era, and the congressional investigation—backed by the Democrats—did not receive an equivalent follow-up under the Republican-controlled House.
From this perspective, the climate issue echoes the controversies surrounding the cover-up of scientific data on the harms of tobacco, which only came to light after decades of delays and concealed evidence. However, there is another factor that cannot be ignored. Unlike tobacco, which involved a single industry sector, The issue of fossil fuels affects a large part of our social organization. To replace fossil fuel technology “progressively and without delay,” as Pope Francis wrote in his encyclical Laudato Si’, so we must find a positive way out of the crisis: rRedesigning Public Support for Productive Activities, by redirecting the hundreds of billions that still prop up the fossil fuel industry globally to foster the rapid development of an economy that is more mindful of the balance of the ecosystems essential to our survival. A concerted effort is needed to design and make attractive a new production system capable of revitalizing the economy rather than continuing to drag it down. And this effort has been insufficient.
In this vacuum of imagination and practical efforts to build a compelling alternative, two aspects are gaining ground that characterize periods when resistance to change attempts to block processes of innovation: the denial of facts and attacks on science. Now, riding the wave of the emotional momentum toward change generated by this scorching summer, the task is to fill this void by bringing together the individual successful experiments currently underway in many cities and regions to make the way we live, move, and interact safer and more enjoyable. And to create the economic framework that makes the ecological transition not only necessary, but also appealing and widely supported.
Will this issue become one of the main topics of the upcoming long election campaign?
