This story is part of Record High, a Grist series examining extreme heat and its impact on how — and where — we live.
More than 61,000 people died because of record-breaking heat in Europe last year, according to a new study published Monday in the journal Nature Medicine. The summer of 2022 was the hottest period ever recorded on the continent.
Researchers looked at heat-related deaths during the summer of 2022 and found that women in Europe made up more than 60 percent of deaths and that adults over the age of 79 made up over half of all deaths. Study authors said that this is a jump of more than 25,000 heat-related deaths from the period spanning 2015 to 2021.
Italy, Spain, and Portugal had the highest mortality rates linked to the heat, emphasizing the vulnerability of Mediterranean countries to heat-related mortality.
“Our study highlights the accelerated warming observed over the last decade, and emphasizes the urgent need to reevaluate and substantially strengthen prevention plans,” said Marcos Quijal, a co-author of the paper. “These trends also suggest that without effective adaptive responses, Europe could face a significant increase in premature deaths each summer, reaching more than 68,000 by 2030 and over 94,000 by 2040.”
Average surface temperatures have been rising for years due to climate change, but this summer’s extreme heat has been rapidly breaking records. In addition to average hotter temperatures, the reemergence of the weather phenomenon known as El Niño is poised to drive up temperatures even more.
The human body is not meant to survive long periods of extreme heat, mostly because it already produces heat from daily activities like circulating blood and digesting food. Sweating can be an essential tool to cool down and prevent overheating, but when humidity levels are also high the body can’t produce the adequate amount of sweat needed to manage its temperature.
While temperatures throughout Europe were sky-high during the summer of 2022, the average daily temperature in southwestern Europe that year was the highest recorded since 1950, according to the European State of the Climate report for 2022.
Older people can be more vulnerable to heat stress because of cultural differences — they may not hail from a warm region and might not know how to adjust — and biological ones, as aging can impact the body’s ability to regulate temperature.
Justin S. Mankin, a researcher at Dartmouth University who was not involved with the study, said that heat waves like the one in Europe last summer are part of a trend that has been worsening for years. As the planet continues to warm, extreme heat will only get worse.
“You could throw a dart at the map and probably find a heat wave somewhere,” said Mankin.
Though the conditions of last summer’s European heat wave and 2021’s heat wave in the U.S. Pacific Northwest were extreme, Mankin says there is a lot of science to support the fact that temperatures won’t rise in a straightforward fashion.
“We have a really good understanding of why the likelihood of extremely rare heat events should increase nonlinearly with warming,” said Mankin.
The study authors noted that last year’s heat wave bears a striking resemblance to the 2003 heat wave in Europe that killed 70,000 people, which in France led to the resignation of the nation’s health chief and spurred the country to redesign their approach to heat.
Mankin also noted that despite the astounding figures, there is a lot that researchers can’t account for –– including a completely accurate total death count.
“In all likelihood, these death counts are probably an undercounting to some extent,” said Mankin.
This story is part of Record High, a Grist series examining extreme heat and its impact on how — and where — we live.
In late June 2021, a high-pressure atmospheric system settled over Seattle to create an inescapable heat dome. Jean-Paul Yafali, a resident of nearby Kent, Washington, thanked his good luck for the two secondhand air-conditioning units that a friend had given him back in 2019. He wasn’t used to this kind of stifling heat — not in Seattle, and not even in Kinshasa, Congo, where he grew up.
“I’m from a country where it’s really hot,” Yafali told Grist. But during Seattle’s heat dome, “it was impossible for me to last a couple minutes” outside.
By Monday the 28th, the temperature in Seattle would climb to a record-breaking 108 degrees Fahrenheit, nearly 40 degrees above normal for that time of year. National Weather Service officials warned that the pavement could reach 170 degrees in some places. Yafali and his family found respite in their AC, but they were fortunate outliers; Seattle, known for its cool, wet winters and mild summers, is one of the least air-conditioned big cities in the country. To avoid overheating, people boarded up windows with cardboard boxes. They soaked their feet in buckets of cold water and bought squirt bottles. They took refuge in shady parks or in community cooling centers.
The blistering weather had many people wondering: Is this climate change?
People rest at the Oregon Convention Center cooling station in Portland on June 28, 2021, as a heat wave moved over much of the United States. Kathryn Elsesser / AFP via Getty Images
The short answer is yes. Although the event was exceedingly abnormal — a 1-in-1,000-year event in today’s climate, according to some estimates — researchers say that without global warming it would have been at least 150 times rarer and several degrees cooler.
Indeed, heat waves around the world are happening more frequently and reaching higher temperatures because of climate change. We know this thanks to the rapidly growing field of attribution science, which allows scientists to examine the link between rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide and extreme weather events. When a heat wave strikes — or another disaster, for that matter, be it a hurricane, drought, or very heavy rain — attribution scientists can determine the role that climate change played in its intensification.
With extreme heat in particular, the answer is often tens or even hundreds of times more likely, thanks to a complicated mix of factors like abnormally dry soils and hotter-than-usual air. In fact, scientists are now comfortable assuming that all heat waves are being made more severe or likely because of climate change.
At any given time, extreme heat is now affecting about one-tenth of the Earth’s land area, and scientists have observed an eightfold increase in record-breaking hot months over the past decade, compared to what would be expected in a world without climate change. Already, the U.S. is experiencing periods of abnormally hot weather at least three times more often than it did in the 1960s. Researchers estimate that another 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees F) of warming could turn something like the Pacific Northwest’s freak heat dome into a once-in-a-decade affair.
A cooling weather pattern called La Niña has suppressed global temperatures since 2020, but scientists announced this spring that a new, hotter pattern — El Niño — is emerging to replace it. Although experts say its full effects won’t be felt until next summer, it may already be contributing to some of this summer’s heat extremes.
El Niño, climate change, and extreme heat
El Niño is a natural weather phenomenon that fuels above-average global heat and more intense natural disasters in parts of the world. It is characterized by warmer-than-normal sea surface temperatures in the eastern Pacific Ocean. The hottest years on record tend to happen during El Niño.
The planet’s weather over the past three years has been dominated by El Niño’s opposite extreme, La Niña, which has had a cooling effect on the globe. Even so, the past eight years were the hottest in recorded history, the result of the warming effects of climate change.
Now, in conjunction with accelerating climate change, El Niño means a wide array of exacerbated hazardsmay be coming down the pike. El Niño’s impacts differ by region but can range from extreme rainfall to severe drought and increased wildfire risk.
Earlier this month, Earth logged its seven hottest days ever. And in June, a punishing heat dome brought triple-digit temperatures to more than 55 million people across the Southern U.S., straining emergency services and causing more than a dozen deaths. The heat was exacerbated in states like Louisiana, where high humidity combined with searing temperatures to create a heat index of up to 125 degrees F, meaning what the body feels, not just what the thermometer says.
Heat, one of the best-understood extreme weather events tied to climate change, doesn’t tend to draw the same attention as other disasters like hurricanes and wildfires. But that may be starting to change. In the U.S., scorching temperatures cause more deaths than any other weather-related disaster, claiming nearly 170 lives every year. And as climate change drives global temperatures even higher, heat waves will only become more lethal, disrupting the lives of billions of people across the planet.
Unlike other extreme weather events, heat waves are highly context-dependent. That is, they’re defined by their deviation from what’s considered a normal temperature for a given place. When the mercury hits 95 degrees F in San Francisco, for example, that might be considered a heat wave — but not so in Phoenix, where summertime temperatures routinely exceed 100 degrees F.
Most heat waves do share a common origin story, though. Broadly speaking, they form when a high-pressure air system parks itself over land, forcing air to sink to the ground. This air heats up as it compresses and becomes trapped, unable to dissipate into the upper atmosphere. Such a system also makes cloud formation less likely. (Cold air forces water out relatively quickly compared to hot air, and this water becomes clouds.) This allows more sunlight to reach the ground and exacerbate warming.
A 2020 California heat wave brought temperatures of 116 to the Los Angeles area.
Al Seib / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Radley Horton, a scientist who studies ocean and climate physics at Columbia University, said there are a few additional “ingredients” that can converge to create a heat wave. Drier conditions, for example, mean more of the sun’s energy can go toward heating the air rather than evaporating water from plants and the soil. The time of year can also play a role: At latitudes farther from the equator, the Earth’s tilt can lead to summer days with 15 hours or more of sunlight — a long time for heat to build up.
All these factors in combination are “a recipe for a lot of sunlight and warming, stagnant air,” Horton said.
Huge atmospheric wind patterns called jet streams also play a role in forming heat waves. These jet streams — like the subtropical jet stream that affects the U.S. — are driven by temperature gradients between the warm tropics and the colder poles. They carry air from west to east across the globe, but also wobble from north to south. When the subtropical jet stream bulges north, it can invite warm air from the south and trap it in place, leading to what scientists call atmospheric blocking.
“When the jet stream meanders, it creates a heat dome, a pool of very warm air under this displaced jet stream,” said Noboru Nakamura, an expert on atmospheric and environmental fluid dynamics at the University of Chicago. “It’s almost like a warm blanket.”
This is what happened to an extreme degree in the Pacific Northwest in June 2021. A particularly strong blocking pattern called an omega block — so named for its resemblance to the Greek letter of the alphabet — anchored itself above Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia for several days, combining with other favorable factors like dry air and proximity to the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. The result: “unheard of” surface temperatures, as Nakamura put it, that reached as high as 121 degrees F in Canada. A similar phenomenon was behind last month’s heat dome in the South, where temperatures climbed to 119 degrees F in parts of Texas.
In a way, it seems intuitive that extreme heat would be getting worse in the face of climate change. Global warming, after all, involves warming. But scientists have a way to more rigorously test that intuition: They use computer models to reconstruct the global climate with and without human-added greenhouse gas emissions, and then compare the likelihood of a heat wave in either scenario.
There are a few ways to go about these analyses. The most common, known as probabilistic analysis, is used to produce statistics about a heat wave’s increased likelihood and intensity under climate change. First, scientists identify an extreme heat event and chart it against other observed extremes going back 50 or more years (the longer the better, depending on the data available). Then they use climate models to simulate how anomalous the event would be in today’s climate versus the climate of the preindustrial 1800s, before global warming.
Consider the “1-in-400-years” heat wave that hit Spain, Portugal, Morocco, and Algeria this April. Over the course of a few days, “superheated air” from the Sahara Desert swept through the region, bringing temperatures that were up to 36 degrees F above normal for that time of year. At the Córdoba airport in Spain, the thermometer hit 102 degrees F — the hottest April temperature ever recorded in Europe. Researchers at World Weather Attribution, an international collaboration among climate scientists, plotted the region’s highest expected three-day temperatures in today’s climate against the expected time interval between those temperature extremes. (The higher the temperature, the less frequently you’d expect it to occur.) When they compared this to simulations of a world with 1.2 degrees C (2.2 degrees F) less warming, they found that a heat wave like April’s is now likely to occur every 100 years, rather than every 400, and is about 3.5 degrees C (6.3 degrees F) hotter.
A field of half-dried sunflowers during a 2022 heat wave in Mallorca, Spain.
Clara Margais / Picture Alliance via Getty Images
Scientists have reached similar conclusions for dozens of other heat waves. Out of more than 150 heat-related attribution studies that researchers have conducted since the early 2000s, more than 93 percent have shown evidence of human influence. “You can be confident that heat waves are increasing everywhere globally due to climate change,” said Sarah Kew, a climate researcher at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute and a core contributor to World Weather Attribution, an academic collaborative.
According to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, heat waves that used to happen once every decade in the preindustrial era are now happening nearly three times as often and are 1.2 degrees C (2.2 degrees F) hotter. At 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) of warming — the upper limit that nearly 200 countries have agreed to as part of the Paris Agreement — they’ll happen 5.6 times per decade and will be 2.6 degrees C (4.7 degrees F) hotter.
Although rapid weather attribution studies don’t usually consider the specific reasons why climate change is making heat waves worse, Horton, the Columbia University professor, said there are a few heat wave ingredients that can be reliably linked to climate change: drying soils and vegetation, for example, or warming bodies of water that can’t cool the air as much as they used to. Some experts also suspect that the warming Arctic — which has heated up four times faster than the rest of the planet since 1979 — could be causing a slower, wobblier jet stream, which would be more conducive to atmospheric blocking. But this is still an area of debate.
Other researchers are also beginning to show how heat waves can have knock-on effects for other natural disasters. Marine heat waves, for example — which have become more common over the past decade — may contribute to stronger hurricanes, since they warm up air above the water. This extra heat lowers the pressure and can create swirling, hurricane-force winds. High heat is also a key ingredient in tornadoes and severe thunderstorms that cause lethal flooding, making it possible that these disasters will get worse with more frequent and intense heat waves.
Vehicles drive past a sign on the 110 freeway in Los Angeles warning of extreme heat. Patrick T. Fallon / AFP via Getty Images
Droughts and wildfires also interact with heat waves in sometimes complicated ways: A heat wave can often exacerbate drought, drying out soils and plants by increasing “evaporative demand,” a measure of how thirsty the atmosphere is. This in turn can create conditions that are ripe for wildfire, as forests and grasslands dry out. But, as noted above, these parched conditions can also make heat waves more powerful — creating a feedback loop in which dry conditions and scorching temperatures reinforce each other. Researchers estimate that, under 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) of warming, compound events where both heat waves and drought occur simultaneously will become more severe and happen about once every eight years — four times more often than in the mid-20th century.
As heat waves worsen, so too does the sense of dread they bring to vulnerable populations.
“Even before it happens, there’s a lot of anxiety,” said Esther Min, director of environmental health research partnerships for the nonprofit Front and Centered, a coalition of Washington state-based organizations led by communities of color. “It’s already brutal on the physical body when it is hot, but if you know it’s going to be difficult and you might not be able to escape it? … There’s that mental health aspect that I hear people these days talking about a lot more — that anxiety, that grief, that frustration.”
This only compounds the physical risks of heat waves, she added, which may include everything from dehydration to heat stroke. As with virtually every other climate impact, these risks are inequitably distributed. They fall disproportionately on poor people, many of whom can’t afford an AC unit or the added electricity costs that come with it, or on people of color, who may live in redlined neighborhoods that experience an urban heat island effect thanks to a lack of cooling tree cover and green space. Such areas can feel up to 20 degrees hotter than other neighborhoods — usually whiter, more affluent ones with more greenery.
Children, the elderly, and people experiencing homelessness are also ill-protected from extreme heat. “We need to think of how we can protect these vulnerable populations,” said Yafali, who works for the organization Nested Communities to provide rental assistance, transportation services, and other aid to Seattle-area youth of color who are at risk of losing their housing. He said many of the people he works with have struggled to cope with the region’s increasingly frequent bouts of extreme heat.
As the heat gets worse, community organizers like Yafali and other groups across the country are calling for a range of solutions, including more heat pumps in apartment buildings — which provide both heating and cooling — and community monitoring systems to check in on at-risk neighbors. Seattle is looking at some of these solutions as part of its first-ever extreme heat mitigation strategy. Martha Lucas, executive director of the Washington State Coalition of African Community Leaders, said something as simple as better communication systems could also help. A lot of the people she works with don’t use email or don’t speak English, she said, making it harder for them to receive temperature warnings and guidance on how to keep cool. “They have a wide range of ages and abilities, and not everybody understands,” she said.
Still, progress is slow and some people are already being pushed to their limits. Even with his AC units, Yafali is nervous for Seattle’s next heat wave — especially how it will affect his young daughters. Back in 2021, he saw them through the extreme heat by checking in compulsively, making sure they were drinking enough water and not spending more than 30 minutes at a time in the blazing sun. “We were able to navigate the heat dome,” he said, even as he witnessed many others deal with crippling heat cramps and exhaustion.
“I’m really worried,” he said. “We have to better prepare.”
This story is part of Record High, a Grist series examining extreme heat and its impact on how — and where — we live.
Heat waves can delay flights and melt airplane tarmac, but Amazon won’t let them hinder Prime deliveries. Extreme heat and unsafe working conditions under the merchant giant have now spurred drivers to unionize. In Southern California, 84 delivery drivers joined the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and negotiated the first union contract among any Amazon workers in the country. And since June 24, these workers have been on an indefinite strike.
Amazon’s requirement of drivers to make up to 400 stops per day, even when temperatures exceed 100 degrees Fahrenheit, can make operating one of those ubiquitous gray and blue vans a particularly hazardous occupation. Raj Singh, a driver, knows that only too well.
“Sometimes it reaches 135 degrees in the rear of the truck and there’s no cooling system,” said Singh, who has worked the job for two and half years and through the height of the pandemic. “It feels like an oven when you step back there. You instantly start feeling woozy, and it’s gotten to the point where I’ve actually seen stars.”
Even on scorching days, said Singh, “Amazon sets these ridiculous paces. Some people even have to miss their guaranteed 15-minute breaks, because if we break the pace, they contact us to try and find out why we’re behind.”
“On the days that you work, it’s basically mandatory overtime,” he added. “You don’t stop until you’re done or you get reprimanded.”
Last August, after the drivers prepared a list of demands around pay, safety, and extreme temperatures, Amazon responded by offering workers two 16-ounce bottles of water a day.
Heat exposure affects delivery drivers across companies. UPS has reported at least 143 heat-related injuries on the job in recent years, and a United States Postal Service driver recently died of heat exposure. UPS, whose iconic brown-uniformed drivers are directly employed by the company, recently agreed to install air conditioners in their trucks after drivers across the country picketed work sites and threatened to strike. But Amazon’s 275,000 drivers are hired through 3,000 third-party subcontractors, with whom Amazon can cancel contracts with little explanation or warning, making it particularly difficult for workers to unionize or fight to improve conditions.
Despite the fact that workers who deliver Amazon packages sport branded vests, shirts, and pants; drive Amazon-branded trucks; have schedules and wage floors set by Amazon; receive routes from an Amazon app; and can be disciplined and fired by Amazon, the company claims they aren’t technically employees. On paper, the drivers are employed by a network of small businesses that each rent 20–40 vans and employ up to 100 people. The 84 drivers in Palmdale work for Battle Tested Strategies, one of these businesses, which operates out of an Amazon warehouse.
On April 24, the drivers announced that they had formed a union and had bargained a contract with Battle Tested Strategies to address fair pay and worker safety in the heat. They asked that Amazon respect the terms of the new contract, which guarantees $30 hourly wages, health and vehicle safety standards, and the right to refuse unsafe deliveries.
Instead, the company immediately announced that the subcontractor “had a track record of failing to perform and had been notified of its termination for poor performance well before today’s announcement.” It also said their contract would expire on June 24. That morning, the 84 drivers awoke to no assigned routes from Amazon or Battle Tested Strategies. They are currently on an indefinite strike (in their view, from their Amazon jobs) and hope to convince the trillion-dollar company to recognize the union, respect the contract, and end what they view as retaliation against workers. Teamsters across the country are now picketing warehouses in solidarity.
Teamsters picketing in Connecticut. International Brotherhood of Teamsters
The Teamsters union, which represents the 84 drivers, has argued that Amazon exerts nearly total control over these workers. In their estimate, the company must recognize these drivers as employees and bargain with them directly in order to keep them safe in the heat.
“Fulfilling the promise of the contract will require fundamentally changing Amazon’s exploitative business model,” said Randy Korgan, head of the Teamsters’ Amazon division. “And we will keep fighting until that happens.”
Amazon maintains that the drivers don’t actually work for the company. Spokesperson Eileen Hards called the Teamsters “intentionally misleading,” adding that the strike “does not include Amazon employees and is mostly attended by outside activists.” She reiterated that Amazon had terminated its contract with Battle Tested Strategies.
But according to Daniel Ocampo, a legal fellow at the National Employment Law Project, the National Labor Relations Act defines employment status by whether companies control conditions like pay, safety, and day-to-day work. “All of those are controlled at least jointly by Amazon,” he said. “For the drivers to meaningfully bargain over their conditions of work, they need to have Amazon at the table.”
“We’re here so we can have fair pay and safe jobs,” added Singh. “And we’re trying to get this done, not just for us but for every delivery driver that works for Amazon.”
This story has been updated to clarify that the drivers’ strike began on June 24.
This story is part of Record High, a Grist series examining extreme heat and its impact on how — and where — we live.
On an early August morning in 2021, a family — two parents in their 30s and 40s, their 1-year-old, and a big dog — set out on a hike in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains. The temperature was a comfortable 70 degrees Fahrenheit when they started out, but the day became dangerously hot as the four began the climb back up to where their truck was parked. At ground level, the temperature was likely hotter than 110 degrees F. They never made it back. All four of them — the dog, the parents, the baby — died on the trail.
County sheriffs struggled to determine what caused a healthy family to drop dead with no evidence of foul play or struggle. Was it toxic algae from the river that flowed along the bottom of the gulch they hiked beside? Did they accidentally breathe in carbon monoxide from an open mine shaft near the trail? But the answer was right in front of them the whole time. Two months after the bodies were found, authorities announced the official cause of death: hyperthermia and dehydration. The family had overheated.
That story is one of many examples of heat’s deadly toll in The Heat Will Kill You First, author and climate change journalist Jeff Goodell’s new opus about extreme heat. “If there’s one thing in this book that will save your life,” Goodell writes, “it is this: … if your body gets too hot too fast — it doesn’t matter if that heat comes from the outside on a hot day or the inside from a raging fever — you are in big trouble.”
Heat is an invisible, stealthy force, Goodell explains. Because we’re all familiar with it, we think we know how to handle it, how to game it. But heat can’t be negotiated with past a certain threshold — if your body gets hot enough, you die. It’s as simple as that.
The Heat Will Kill You First reveals how heat has fundamentally shaped the arc of human evolution, perhaps even inspiring our ancestors to stand upright, off the hot ground, millions of years ago. The book’s take-home message, however, is about the future. Humans have changed the natural course of the planet. Climate change is forcing us out of the temperature range we’re used to and into uncharted territory. What comes next?
“My goal in this book is to help people understand what risks we face as our world gets hotter and hotter,” Goodell told Grist. The Heat Will Kill You First is available this week in bookstores and libraries.
This Q&A has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
Q.In your book, you sketch out a full spectrum of heat-related catastrophes across the globe — a deadly heatwave in Paris, the deaths of migrants in the Sonoran Desert, hurricanes in Houston. What overarching story are you trying to tell by bringing those various threads together?
A.I think the overarching idea is that our understanding of the threats and risks of extreme heat is very nil, and that the risks and threats have been greatly underestimated. I really wanted to write about heat as this kind of invisible force in our world. We talk about things being hot in a kind of complimentary way where we meet somebody and they’re hot or we see a new movie and it’s hot, but we don’t really think about what heat is. And my goal in this book is to articulate that.
Q.There are so many climate impacts that are so visible. Heat, as you say, is invisible but it’s extremely visceral once it hits.
A.When anyone talks about climate change, they talk about the litany of things that climate change is going to do: the longer droughts and higher sea levels and increased precipitation and stronger hurricanes. But heat is the primary driver of all this stuff. The reason that the wildfires are burning in Alberta, the reason that there are orange skies in New York is all because of more and more heat. Heat is like the engine of planetary chaos in our world. But it’s very difficult to communicate about because it is not like a hurricane where you have dramatic images of storm surge coming in and trees blowing around and roofs flying off houses. Heat is literally an invisible force that is profoundly shaping our world.
But heat is also really hard to talk about and think about partly because it’s so familiar. I mean, everybody knows temperature, right? Everybody knows what a hot day is, a cold day is. Babies know this, right? I started writing this book when I had to take a walk in Phoenix 10 blocks or so downtown. And I thought I was going to die, it was so hot. And I realized that not only did I not understand the risks of heat and what it does to our bodies, but I didn’t even understand what heat is. And this is after I’ve been writing about climate change for 15 years.
Portland, Oregon, residents fill a cooling center with a capacity of about 300 people at the Oregon Convention Center in June 2021. Nathan Howard / Getty Images
Q.There’s a perception in the wealthy West that climate change will affect us more slowly than other parts of the world. And while that’s true in many ways, you make the case in your book that heat is a universal, democratic force. Can you speak to your conception of heat and how it’s moving through society?
A.Everything that lives, whether it’s me or you or your mom or my mom or your ancestors or the pine trees in the backyard or the ants crawling across the floor or the lions in Africa, they all have thermal limits that they live in. Our bodies are very sensitive to heat. We work really hard to keep our bodies to 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit or thereabouts. And if it goes just a little bit off, I mean, everybody knows if you get a temperature of 101, 102, you’re in trouble. Something’s really wrong. Get to 105 and you better be in an emergency room. So it’s a very narrow range, and that affects all living things. Everything about our world has evolved in this sort of stable climate niche. Not too hot, not too cold, this kind of Goldilocks climate. And as we continue burning fossil fuels and dumping CO2 into the atmosphere, we’re moving out of that Goldilocks climate.
So heat is profoundly democratic in the sense that it affects everyone and everything that lives. People are saying, “Oh, well, yeah, that’s true, maybe. But, you know, we have air conditioning, we’re going to adapt, we’re smart and all that.” And that’s true. We are going to adapt. We do have air conditioning. But not everybody has air conditioning and not every thing has air conditioning. We’re not air conditioning the air. We’re not air conditioning the forest. The cornfields, the wheat fields that produce the food that we eat.
And there’s a profound gap in every city, everywhere, between people who have air conditioning and people who don’t. I wrote about that a lot in my book, this gap between the “cooled and the doomed.” So, yes, we can adapt. But even this notion that you and I are going to be OK, the rich Westerners, because we have air conditioning — well, yeah, fine, except when the power goes out. If you have an extreme heat wave like we’ve been having in Texas, and in the middle of that you lose power for a day or two, people will die. Lots of people, thousands of people. And so our comfort and sense of reliance on air conditioning is also in itself very dangerous.
Q.You’re publishing a book about heat, one that I assume was in the works for a number of years, at an extremely auspicious time. The globe is breaking heat records. The first days of July were the hottest ever recorded in human history. Did you think this might happen?
A.It would be funny if I could say, “Yes, I knew that in July of 2023, when my book was published, that we would have this extreme heat wave.” But no, it’s really weird. It’s like I’m living in my own Stephen King novel. It’s very eerie and spooky. But, that said, when I started this book in 2019, heat was not exactly a secret anymore. We’ve been talking about global warming for 30 years, 40 years. But it became clear to me that we hadn’t given it full consideration. So it seemed like fertile ground for a book.
I had no idea that this summer was going to happen and unfold the way it has. But there was a certain inevitability four years ago, when I started the book, that heat was going to become more and more of an issue because, after all, we are heating up our planet very quickly. And so understanding heat and how to deal with it and what the risks and dangers are seemed to be a pretty important question.
Q.You’ve been a climate reporter for many years, which means you’ve been witness to the many, many iterations of the public’s understanding of climate change. How does this moment feel to you now? Do you feel like we’ve entered a new era?
A.There’s certainly been a cultural shift about it, right? When I first started writing about climate change, I would tell people that I ran into at dinner parties or whatever that I was writing about climate change and they would kind of look at me with this cute little smile as if I was writing about the sex life of porcupines or something. And now everybody’s talking about it. The impacts of it economically and impacts on public health — it’s much more mainstream in the sense of it being a subject of discussion.
But we are — and heat is a great example of this — we are not even at the beginning of the beginning of the beginning of understanding the implications of what we’re doing and understanding the consequences of what we’re doing. I don’t mean that just in the grandest way, but also just in the simplest way. We don’t really understand how fast this can happen and what the real tipping points are.
Two years ago, in 2021, we had an extreme heat wave in the Pacific Northwest that everybody heard about. It was 121 degrees in British Columbia. No climate model was thinking about that, it was like snow in the Sahara or something. And it just shows how complex the system is that we’re messing around with. The great scientist and oceanographer Wally Broecker said two decades ago that dumping fossil fuels into the atmosphere is like poking a dragon, you never know how the dragon’s going to react. And that that is still as true today as it was 20 years ago when he said that.
The National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Program, or NEVI, is the Biden administration’s attempt to solve one of the biggest roadblocks to broader electric vehicle adoption: the limited availability of public charging stations. While at present there are just about 140,000 public charging ports available to EV drivers across the nation, President Biden has promised to use NEVI to build out a network of 500,000 public chargers on U.S. roads.
NEVI was created by Congress’ 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and over the last year the federal government has used it to disburse millions of dollars to states to build out the charging-station network. But the program is intended to achieve other goals as well: It’s one of the first attempts to implement the Biden administration’s commitment to ensuring that at least 40 percent of the benefits of climate and energy funding reach disadvantaged communities. That effort, called Justice40, is one of Biden’s most high-profile environmental justice promises and one that has been plagued by delays and controversies.
Both NEVI and Justice40 are complex and challenging initiatives to implement on their own, let alone simultaneously. The former requires states to build charging stations as quickly as possible to spur faster EV uptake, all while meeting a range of technical and complicated minimum standards. The latter requires that the distribution of those resources benefits communities that are classified as disadvantaged according to a range of demographic and environmental criteria. It’s now up to states to balance the sometimes-competing goals of the two programs.
A new report by a group of environmental and public policy nonprofits and think tanks examines the challenges that have emerged in this effort. Crucially, NEVI requires that states first build charging stations every 50 miles on so-called alternative fuel corridors — highways designated by the federal government for investment in electric, hydrogen, and other fueling stations — and within one travel mile off an exit from the corridors. Since disadvantaged communities are not always in areas that meet these geographic strictures, NEVI’s “strict siting requirements limit how benefits can be delivered to [disadvantaged] communities,” the report noted.
The report also found that since states had less than six months to submit their NEVI plans to the federal government, there were varying and often limited efforts to engage with community groups. Of the 20 states that the report examined, two — South Carolina and West Virginia — did not consult with community groups or hold public meetings at all before submitting their plans for NEVI funding. An additional four states only conducted private meetings with community groups and government agencies, but didn’t solicit feedback from the general public.
“A few months for a completely new program that they have to educate people about and a new bill they have to educate people about — that was a legitimate hurdle,” said Rachel Patterson, the lead author of the report and deputy policy director at the environmental group Evergreen Action.
NEVI funding is being distributed in phases over five years. States are first required to build fast-charging stations every 50 miles along the alternative fuel corridors and within a mile off an exit from an alternative fuel corridor. Once this requirement is met, states will have much more flexibility to use NEVI funding to place charging stations in communities of their choosing.
Patterson said that almost every state official her group spoke with identified the 50-mile requirement as a problem — not just in terms of getting chargers to disadvantaged communities, but in getting them to where they’ll be put to the most use, period. The requirement “practically doesn’t serve where the majority of the population is most of the time, and more so serves this American road trip fantasy that I’m not sure people are really doing with EVs right now,” said Patterson.
Rural states like Wyoming have voiced their objections to the 50-mile requirement. Since NEVI only supports 80 percent of the cost of building charging stations, states have to come up with the remainder. Wyoming officials have said that traffic on the state’s highways and demand for electric charging are unlikely to be robust enough for private companies to want to foot the cost of building even heavily-subsidized stations.
“There’s not going to be enough EVs to break even in five years,” said Loren McDonald, an electric-vehicle consultant based in California’s Bay Area. “There probably should be some flexibility for some of those states.”
Many of the state plans also failed to consider users’ personal safety while charging — a concern that is likely more prevalent for disadvantaged communities. Of the 20 state plans considered in the report, four states did not make any considerations for safety. Other states like Pennsylvania, however, listed lighting, visibility, and regular staffing onsite as key issues.
The states also had different approaches to identifying disadvantaged communities in the first place. While the White House has built a tool to identify communities with high environmental burdens for prioritization under Justice40, the Department of Transportation and the Department of Energy have also built their own tool for identifying Justice40 communities. Although the Federal Highway Administration, which is in charge of distributing NEVI funding, asked states to use the transportation and energy departments’ tool, some states chose to use state-level and federal tools.
“If multiple tools are used simultaneously, more of the population will likely be identified as disadvantaged and so benefits may be less targeted,” the report noted. It also makes it difficult to compare the NEVI program’s outcomes across states.
But Patterson stressed that these challenges are not insurmountable, and NEVI offers community groups, states, and the federal government a chance to find solutions.
“The NEVI program is such a great case study because very rarely are programs going to be written perfectly to comply with Justice40,” said Patterson. “Governments are going to need to do things like reach out to advocates and folks who have been thinking about this for a long time to figure out creative ways to get benefits to people.”
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