CEDAR RAPIDS, IOWA—It was a soft evening in a park above the Cedar River, which was for the moment tamed and back within its banks. In March, right around St. Patrick's Day, the river peaked at flood stage at 18 feet. Cedar Rapids was luckier than a lot of places in Iowa, and a lot luckier than a lot of places throughout the midwest. The source of its flooding was the same: huge chunks of ice propelled down river by flood-stage water. (In Nebraska, the massive ice blocks with the force of the water behind them were enough to crush steel buildings.) But, for now, anyway, the river was flowing placidly and it was alive with the laughter of boaters and the roar of JetSkis. On the bluff above, in Ellis Park, Governor Jay Inslee was holding a campaign event in the kind of canopied pavilion common to every state park in every state in the union.

In any other year, in any other time, Inslee would be a formidable candidate. He is the governor of a relatively prosperous state in Washington. His record on most of the primary issues in any Democratic primary is more than solid. From The Atlantic:

On his watch, the state has boosted health care, increased access to early-childhood education and college, raised the minimum wage, expanded paid family leave, invested in infrastructure, and established in-state net neutrality, all while leading the country in job growth, overall personal-income growth, and GDP. As other states shed residents, people are moving to Washington. It’s hard to drive through the parts of Seattle where Amazon has sprouted neighborhoods of coffee shops and artisanal seafood kitchens and argue that the lefty policies Inslee’s been pushing have had the kind of economic downside that their opponents always warn they will.

But what makes Inslee's candidacy different is that he launched it with one specific goal: to alert and mobilize the country against the existential threat that is the climate crisis, and to do so before it's too late. "When you have a threat to the very survival of the nation, and when the ability to surmount that threat requires massive new technology, significant changes in virtually everything we do, to expect the public to be able to distinguish between candidates based on 60 second answers is just ludicrous," he says.

Inslee is the leader in the clubhouse on the issue of the climate crisis. Bloomberg Getty Images

To that end, Inslee currently is agitating the Democratic National Committee for a 90-minute debate between the candidates specifically on the climate crisis. So far, the DNC's response has been utterly pathetic. From The Hill:

"It’s just not practical,” Perez told the activists after delivering remarks at the Florida Democratic Party’s Leadership Blue gala, according to The Tampa Bay Times. “And as someone who worked for Barack Obama, the most remarkable thing about him was his tenacity to multitask, and a president must be able to multitask.”

Jesus H. Christ on a McCormick reaper, could Perez have found a worse answer? This isn't about one issue among many. This is about the one great issue of our time, and one of our political parties is pretending it's not happening, and the other major political party is pretending that it's just another topic for a 30-second spot.

It is the only issue because it touches so many others. Its impact on the issue of infrastructure is obvious: the spring floods are estimated to have cost Iowa $5 million in infrastructure damage. Its impact on the economy is equally profound: the hit to Iowa's farmers pushed the state's damage total over $2 billion. From the Des Moines Register:

The Iowa Farm Bureau Federation says the losses to farmers along the flooded Missouri River — and potentially the Mississippi River this spring — will ripple throughout the economy, driving the state's projected $1.6 billion in damages higher. "When we look at the crop losses, the lost economic activity, it quickly climbs above $2 billion," said Sam Funk, Farm Bureau's senior economist. Funk estimates that Iowa farmers will struggle to plant as much as 145,000 flooded acres along the Missouri River. In 2011, about 127,000 acres were flooded.

The U.S. Corps of Engineers said Wednesday the March runoff from the Missouri River Basin above Sioux City set a record at 11 million acre feet. The previous high was 7.3 million acre feet set in 1952.

"This flood isn’t just bigger; the effects will last longer,” he said. "Long after waters recede, the sand and debris left behind must be cleaned up before planting. But the equipment to remove that debris is not always available quickly and fields may not be ready in time for farmers to get a crop in at all this year,” Funk said. And farmers say about 30 grain bins filled with corn and soybeans were damaged from flooding. None of that grain can be used, and insurance doesn't cover it.

It doesn't matter what kind of healthcare plan you pass if people can't live on the land, and if the land can't produce food. Note to Tom Perez: every debate you schedule is about the climate crisis. You might as well schedule one for it.

The flooding in Iowa has been catastrophic. National Geographic Getty Images

"You think about the questions we're going to get," Inslee said. "'Candidate A, we all understand that this is a threat to civilization as we know it, and will require a massive $100 billion investments in restructuring the entire American economy and mobilizing the American people. Tell me what you're going to do in 60 seconds.' What are they going to get? You can't get a grasp on this in such a short period of time. You'd get not only the procedural differences between the candidates, but you'll also be able to figure out who's committed to do this. It's easy to hide in 60 seconds."

"It's easy to hide in 60 seconds." —Jay Inslee

Which brings up an even more serious question: is the way Americans now do politics, and are the institutions of American democracy, which have become fragile things in the best of circumstances, even capable of confronting an existential threat to civilization that is already under way and doing horrific damage? We know that the current president* and his party are incapable—and, more spectacularly, unwilling—to do so.

"I think that, not unless we have a president that has the level of commitment that I do," Inslee said. "And I've made this point—you appreciate the difficulty of this that it can only be surmounted with an enormous investment of political capital. If this is going to happen, it's going to take a full-time president with a full-time commitment. You have to get rid of the filibuster because, with the filibuster, I don't see it happening here. Mitch McConnell is is bed with the oil and gas and coal industries.

Every issue intersects with the crisis. Bloomberg Getty Images

"Under those circumstances, you're right. It's very difficult to see anything close to the meaningful progress that you need. If you get to the tipping point that I believe we're at, then these profound changes are possible. And I do believe in the theory that tipping points—it's happened on marriage equality, it's happened on marijuana. There are moments where you get a tectonic shift and I believe we're close to that. There's the wave of urgency and the wave of promise. Both are spiking at the same time.

"The objective evidence [is] there's been a 12-point rise in Americans who say we have to do something about it. That's significant. It's the number-one issue among Iowa primary voters now. Americans are coming to grasp it, and it's because of the visual imagery that they're seeing. They've seen it now on TV and in their neighborhood. It's happening because people are seeing it."

The cool breeze carried more happy shouts up from the now-tamed river. Meanwhile, the temperature at the Arctic Circle in Finland topped 87 degrees on Friday. Every debate is about the climate crisis now. It is becoming unavoidable.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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