The climate crisis is here, it’s accelerating, and it demands action
For 24 days in early 2025, the Eaton wildfire swiftly consumed neighborhoods in Los Angeles, moving with devastating precision from street to street, leaving a nasty, toxic environment in its wake. Sam Strgacich had eight minutes to evacuate his home and has been displaced ever since. His ordeal has put his family’s long-term economic security at risk. It doesn’t have to be this way.
Meanwhile, two thousand miles west, Illinois recorded 12 separate weather events in 2024 that each caused over a billion dollars in damage to Illinois and surrounding states, taking 129 lives. Flooding, extreme heat and storms that used to come once a generation now come every season.
These are not two separate stories. They are but one story, told in two different places.
Climate change does not respect state lines or elevation. It is destroying and altering communities across this country right now, and the federal government is responding with total denial. The Trump administration is systematically rolling back the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to control climate pollution, dismantling the financial oversight tools that would help us understand how exposed our banks and communities are, and letting real estate platforms remove climate risk data from home listings. Hiding that information doesn’t make climate risk disappear. It just means more families get blindsided, the way Sam was.
After the fire, Sam and his wife Rosanna thought they were the lucky ones — their house was still standing. Their insurance company scoffed at testing, so they paid for it themselves. Then the tests came back. The fire had saturated the property with toxic levels of lead, arsenic and nickel, rendering it uninhabitable. Eighteen months after being forced out of their poisoned home, they are being crushed by the cost of two properties. They had no choice but to buy another place just to put a roof over their heads. With their insurer refusing to pay what it owes, they cannot hold on much longer.
That has to change. Every American who purchases or rents a home should have the guaranteed right to clear, standardized, plain-language information about that property’s exposure to flood, wildfire, extreme heat, and storm surge. Not buried in fine print. Not optional. Not subject to removal by a real estate platform responding to industry pressure. Millions of families buying homes in flood plains, fire corridors and coastal zones threatened by sea level rise don’t have it either. A federal disclosure standard, or a Climate Bill of Rights for Homebuyers, would cost nothing to implement. But it could save countless families from financial devastation when a record-breaking wildfire engulfs an entire community.
But disclosure alone is not enough. Congress must also require the Federal Reserve to stress-test large financial institutions and insurance companies against climate risk, so we understand, before the next disaster, not after, how exposed our financial system truly is. And the EPA must retain its foundational legal authority to address climate pollution that is driving these disasters in the first place. These are not fringe proposals. They are the minimum we owe to every family living in the path of what is coming.
Strgacich has spent the time since Eaton thinking about what it means to rebuild. A handful of artifacts from his home were recently on display at the Museum of Unnatural Disasters, a temporary exhibit in Washington, D.C., that brought the destruction from climate change to life. Their home is almost back to normal, but the ordeal has changed everything. He’s still battling his insurer, but he’s also joined the fight for action so that other families don’t live the same nightmare. He wants Washington to pay attention.
We are two people from very different places who arrived at the same conclusion. The climate crisis is not a future threat. It is here, is accelerating, and demands federal action — now.
Sean Casten represents Illinois’s 6th District in Congress. Sam Strgacich is a climate advocate and resident of Los Angeles.
By: Rep. Sean Casten and Sam Strgacich