From the fires in Lahaina and Los Angeles to the recent flood in Asheville, N.C., America's record-setting weather disasters have several things in common. Communities are not prepared for them, people insist on living in risky places, and cities let them do so in order to gain property tax revenues.

However, the most dangerous denominator is global climate change. It brings killer heat, more intense rains, drier droughts, longer wildfire seasons and warmer oceans that impart their energy to storms. Severe weather is not unusual, but many of today's events are more extreme than any in memory or recorded history.

There is an even deeper commonality in these events. Their newly destructive power results from our use of fossil fuels. The fuels’ pollution includes greenhouse gases that collect in the atmosphere and insulate the Earth, so its surface gets warmer. That changes the weather.

The fossil fuel industries and government leaders who shape national energy policy have known this for at least 50 years. There are no cost-effective technical fixes across the fuels' value chain. The only fail-safe solution is to shift the U.S. and other nations to energy resources that don't pollute.

It would not be the first time we have accomplished a major energy transition. Otherwise, our cars would run on whale oil or wood.

Fossil fuels have dominated the world economy for nearly 150 years. They still provide more than 80 percent of U.S. and global energy, even though scientists proved the causal link between fossil fuels and climate change generations ago. Current science shows catastrophic weather will get much worse — even become irreversible — if we don’t stop using these fuels. Yet many elected leaders are proud that the U.S. produces more oil and gas than any other nation,........

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