According to the recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in the coming decades human activities risk making the planet uninhabitable for hundreds of millions of people. Short of drastic collective action over the next few years, average global temperatures will rise to catastrophic levels — threatening wild swings in weather patterns, extreme heat waves, droughts, and floods, the destabilizing effects of which are probably too horrific to calculate.

Our predicament, in other words, could not be starker, the stakes any greater, or the need for political urgency more obvious. But outside a small number of progressive figures in Congress, you’d be hard pressed to find any of this reflected in the tones or the policy prescriptions of Washington’s major lawmakers or power brokers. Indeed, dire warnings of the impending climate disaster have become a recurring theme of politics over the last decade, and they’ve generally been met with sweeping rhetoric unmatched or directly contravened at the level of action from those in power.

This pattern was a hallmark of the Obama administration, which went to great lengths to show off its belief in the science of climate change only to enforce perilously conservative targets at international summits. Ahead of 2009’s Copenhagen conference, Obama’s climate enjoy Todd Stern insisted “there is no time to lose,” before pushing for metrics some African and Pacific delegations would later call “genocidal” in their implications. For his part, the former president just last week expressed pride in the Paris Accords, only to boast about bringing oil and gas production to record levels a few breaths later. In remarkably similar fashion, Justin Trudeau’s government in Canada has made the existential fight against climate change an essential part of its branding — all while aggressively pushing for the construction of new pipelines and trading in the evasive soundbite that “the environment and the economy go hand in hand.”