A quick story:

In summer 1986, as a heat wave roasted Georgia, an elderly man living "alone in a small apartment in a rundown part of town" said this to a NYT reporter:

''I'm 72 years old, soon to be 73, and I've never seen it this hot in my life. It's really, really bad.''

A 53-year-old widow took to washing dishes nearby just to cool down: ''It's got to where I can't breathe. It gets so hot that I go over to a restaurant near here and wash dishes for them, just to be where it's cool.''

The heat wave killed dozens. Most were poor and Black.

A link to that Times story is here: https://www.nytimes.com/1986/08/03/us/georgia-heat-usually-unbearable-is-now-deadly-in-drought.html

Around the same time, some 700 miles north, Joe Biden, then a senator from Delaware, was reaming out a top Reagan administration official for dithering on South African apartheid.

These disparate historical incidents had little to do with one another until now.

Between 1980 and 2015, the average temperature in Atlanta has risen nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit.

Now it looks like voters there not just gave Biden the White House but control of the Senate.

It's widely understood that, with Mitch McConnell in control, any serious legislation to decarbonize the U.S., help countries suffering the worst effects of climate change, and adapt to the warming we're already seeing would wither on the vine, or come with hard compromises.

Last year, the U.N. warned that we were already at risk of seeing "climate apartheid," as the chaos of a warming world encouraged relatively safe countries to make themselves fortresses and leave millions, possibly billions, to suffer and die in a Hell not even of their making.

Here's that warning: https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/06/1041261

There's ample reason to be skeptical about how much a 50-50 Democratic Senate will do, and what compromises Biden will make.

Joe Manchin, who is trending now, infamously ran an ad in 2010 in which he fired bullets into the last major climate bill Congress considered.

But, without being pollyannaish, the results in Georgia significantly raise the likelihood that we just might be able to change the trajectory of "climate apartheid." If not because of what this Congress will do, then because it shows the organizing is working.

And that matters.