This story is part of Record High, a Grist series examining extreme heat and its impact on how — and where — we live.
More than 113 million people in the United States are suffering under extreme heat as another massive “heat dome” expands from Texas westward toward California. Meteorologists expect the Southwest’s heat wave to intensify over the weekend, delivering some of the year’s highest temperatures and pushing California’s Death Valley near its all-time-record temperature of over 130 degrees Fahrenheit. The midday heat in cities like Phoenix, Arizona, has become so intense that ordinary surfaces such as streets and metal railings are too dangerous to touch without risking burns.
But apart from these eye-popping highs, experts said the real danger of the Southwest’s heat wave will be its sheer duration. The mass of stagnant air responsible for the event has already lingered over Texas and Louisiana for weeks. It’s feeding on itself to generate more heat as it moves west, depleting ground moisture and discouraging cloud formation, which ensures that it won’t disappear for at least another week. During that time, more than a third of the country’s population will be under a heat warning issued by the National Weather Service.
Daytime highs in Phoenix have already topped 110 degrees F every day in the month of July, and the city is expected to stay that hot for at least another week, shattering the previous record of 18 consecutive days above that threshold. Furthermore, large metro areas like Phoenix will remain hot even in the middle of the night as heat soaks into concrete and asphalt. The daily low temperatures in the nation’s fifth-largest city aren’t expected to fall below 90 degrees F for another week or more.
That long stretch of heat will have disastrous impacts for human health, said Juan Declet-Barreto, a social scientist at the nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists who studies climate vulnerability.
“The magnitude of these events in terms of the temperatures that are being forecast and the length of time is very, very, very worrisome,” he told Grist. “It’s an absolute crisis.”
The worst-affected populations are outdoor workers and people who get around on foot or using public transportation, since they can’t shelter from the heat in air-conditioned environments. If a heat wave only persists for one day, some people can cope by staying inside and blasting air conditioning, but weeks of unrelenting heat make it difficult to avoid the exposure that can cause life-threatening heat stroke.
And that’s not the only worry. A long stretch of triple-digit days can make it harder for the heart to pump blood and the lungs to circulate air, leading to flare-ups of cardiovascular disease and lung disease. Even for people who spend most of their time indoors with the air conditioning on, prolonged heat can lead to dehydration, irritability, confusion, and dizziness. For vulnerable populations like elderly people and those with obesity, health effects can recur for years.
“The body loses the capacity to self-regulate,” Declet-Barreto said of temperatures above 105 degrees F. “This is even truer for populations of advanced age, people with physical or mental disabilities who may not be able to communicate their level of discomfort, and people with less resources [who] are going to be hard pressed to run the AC.”
Big cities are even more vulnerable to long heat waves than rural areas because of what’s called the “urban heat island” effect. During a hot day, the pavements and buildings in a city like Phoenix absorb all the heat of the sun as it pours down on city streets. At night, after the sun sets, they release all that trapped heat into the surrounding air, which keeps local temperatures elevated even when there’s no humidity. Furthermore, people who can’t afford to run their air conditioning all day may shut it off at night, leaving them exposed for hours.
“In the southwestern cities like Phoenix that are naturally hot and also have a very brutal urban heat island effect, you’re not going to see any respite,” said Declet-Barreto. “The body doesn’t really get a chance to rest.”
A study published last year in the medical journal The Lancet found that a rise in nighttime temperatures is associated with a rise in heat-related mortality. Most of the deaths are among elderly people, who can face serious health risks even at 90-degree temperatures. Scientists now believe that human-caused climate change has an undeniable effect on almost all contemporary heat waves, making them both more severe and more frequent. As soils dry out and ambient air gets hotter every year, heat waves like the one blistering the Southwest this week are becoming tens or even hundreds of times more likely.
Soccer (football) players competing in the Women’s World Cup have organized to take climate action over flying to and from the tournament locations in Australia and New Zealand. The campaign is the biggest of its kind in the history of the sport.
The climate action is led by Sofie Junge Pedersen, a player for Denmark, and includes 44 players and counting who plan to offset their flight emissions as well as donate to other climate initiatives. The participants hope to have at least 50 campaigners by the start of the World Cup on July 20.
“For about five years I have paid for carbon offsetting or compensated for flying, because unfortunately it is difficult to avoid in my job,” Pedersen wrote in The Guardian. “I have always felt bad because I know how much pollution a flight causes. I have felt it was something I wanted to do and something that is good for the planet, although we realise it is not the solution.”
Pedersen performed a climate change presentation to teammates in Denmark and Juventus Football Club last year, which led to the idea of offsetting flights to the World Cup. The teams were supportive, so they took the idea to Common Goal, a collective football movement for equality and sustainability, and the nonprofit Football for Future.
From there, players Jessie Fleming, a midfielder for Canada, and Elena Linari, a defender for Italy, inspired other soccer players to take on the initiative and create a global campaign.
“This is a topic I feel passionate about, and I hope this action my teammates and I are taking accelerates the climate conversation and sets a precedent for what athletes can do to push for more environmental policies in football,” Fleming told The Guardian.
The players are starting their campaign by donating to climate resiliency, carbon offsetting and climate adaptation actions as a short-term solution. Participants use scientific methodology to calculate the carbon emission tonnage of their World Cup-related flights, then donate money to initiatives by WWF Australia, WWF New Zealand and DanChurchAid.
In her letter on The Guardian, Pedersen noted that the campaigners realized they weren’t saving the world, and that flights need to be made more sustainable as a long-term solution. But the campaign participants hoped to become an example to fans of how to take even just one action for a more sustainable future.
The participants of the campaign also hope to influence officials to consider carbon emissions when bidding for tournament locations.
“There’s currently no sustainable solution for the environmental cost of air travel,” Elliot Arthur-Worsop, founder of Football For Future, said in a statement. “Governing bodies need to acknowledge the impact that their tournaments have on the natural world and introduce carbon considerations as key criteria in the bidding process for hosting future tournaments.”
The 2022 Men’s World Cup claimed to be a carbon-neutral event, but an analysis found that the advertising amounted to greenwashing, primarily because the organizers didn’t include stadium construction in evaluating emissions and impact. Stadiums in previous World Cup events were built over vulnerable wildlife habitats. Then, there are all of the flights that organizers, players, and fans take to get to the events.
“The 2026 Men’s World Cup is predicted to be the most carbon intensive event in the history of the beautiful game, with travel representing 85% of total emissions,” Arthur-Worsop said. “This trajectory is not compatible with a healthy planet for future generations, let alone the future of football. Things need to change, and the 2030 World Cup host selection is a perfect moment for FIFA to make a meaningful statement.”
Electric vehicle sales in the United States set a record this past quarter and are on track to break the 1 million mark in 2023, which would be an unprecedented figure and a milestone for the industry. This surge comes even as many vehicle models have lost their eligibility for federal, and some state, incentives.
Analysts at both Wards Intelligence and Cox Automotive reported that consumers bought nearly 300,000 EVs between the beginning of April and the end of June. That represents a year-over-year jump of roughly 50 percent, and included growth in May and June, the first two months after federal tax credit rules became more stringent. Plug-in hybrid sales climbed as well.
“There are some vehicles that are intriguing enough to buyers that you don’t need a rebate,” Christie Schweinsberg, a sustainability analyst at Wards, said, noting the ever-increasing range of EVs and options for consumers to choose from. “People will still want to buy.”
But there are signs that the torrential pace of sales growth may not be sustainable. According to Cox, at the end of June dealers had, on average, about a 53 day supply of internal combustion vehicles in stock. The inventory runway for EVs, on the other hand, was more than double that. Overall, there were more than 92,000 electric vehicles available in the second quarter, compared to about 20,000 a year prior.
“The demand is not keeping up with production, which is the opposite story of a year ago,” Michelle Krebs, executive analyst at Cox Automotive, said about electric vehicles. “We call it the ‘Field of Dreams’ moment. Automakers are building more but not enough consumers have come to the field.”
Krebs attributes the glut to both a post-pandemic boost in production and traditional consumer hesitations about buying electric vehicles. Price, she said, is the primary barrier among buyers that Cox surveys, because EVs remain generally more expensive than a similar gas-powered model. Concerns about charginginfrastructure is another reason that would-be-owners stay on the sidelines.
The landscape for incentives on electric vehicles has become more confusing as well, said Krebs. At this time last year, dozens of models qualified for a federal tax credit of up to $7,500, with many cities and states offering additional incentives. Since then, some places, such as Oregon and New Jersey, have run out of money for their rebate programs. The Inflation Reduction Act that Congress passed last year established manufacturing standards aimed at encouraging automakers to invest in U.S. production facilities and battery supply chains. That legislation has, at least in the short-term, significantly trimmed the list of models eligible for a tax credit.
“We certainly see an impact because of it,” said Michael Stewart, a spokesperson for Hyundai, which saw its vehicles, which don’t currently meet the new requirements, drop off the federal list. While sales of all of Hyundai’s EV models grew despite losing the credit, he believes that progress toward the company’s, and country’s, ambitious EV sales targets could have been even greater with them.
Still, the Hyundai Kona and BMW i4, which also does not qualify for federal tax credits, saw sales nearly triple. Market leader Tesla benefited from having recently regained access to tax credits and saw a 76 percent jump in sales of its popular Model Y.
Companies have combated the gaining EV headwinds in part by lowering prices – the average cost of an electric vehicle has dropped almost 20 percent, to $53,438, in the last year alone. Manufacturers have also utilized a loophole in the Inflation Reduction Act that allows them to claim a credit on vehicles they lease rather than sell. Hyundai has been particularly aggressive about promoting leases, which Stewart says have gone from accounting for around 5 percent of the cars the company moves off the lot to about 30 percent.
In the wake of the Inflation Reduction Act, Hyundai and other companies have announced plans to produce more electric vehicles in the United States and source more battery components domestically. This would make more models eligible for federal tax credits in the future. But, for now, both Schweinsberg and Krebs say the growing inventory indicates that the growth of electric vehicle sales could start to drop.
One factor, said Schweinsberg, is that cars often see a decline in sales within a year or two of a new model being introduced – a threshold that some EVs are reaching. “Typically it does well when the new generation comes out,” she said, adding that it’s probably too early to tell exactly what the trajectory for electric vehicles might look like.
Krebs predicts that EV sales will continue to grow, though “maybe not at the pace that a lot of people had hoped for.” To her, that’s not necessarily surprising given the dramatic shift the industry is attempting to make.
“It’s the biggest change in the industry since Henry Ford’s moving assembly line,” she said. “There are going to be bumps in the road.”
More than half of the world’s oceans have changed colors in the past 20 years, becoming more green than blue. The culprit? Climate change. In a study, published Wednesday in Nature, decades worth of research showed 56 percent of the world’s oceans experienced color change between 2002 to 2022.
The ocean changes color for many reasons, such as light bouncing off of particles and sediments in the water, and decaying organic matter, but the main color-changing factor is varying populations of phytoplankton: tiny plantlike microbes that capture and store carbon dioxide and are considered the foundation of the marine food chain. Phytoplankton contain chlorophyll, like terrestrial plants do, and scientists involved in the study were able to monitor ocean health by studying changes to chlorophyll in phytoplankton and measuring how much blue and green light were reflected from the surface to satellites in space.
Much of the ocean appears blue to the human eye, but the ocean’s color actually contains a mix of wavelengths, including blue, green, and even red. Using data gathered from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiomete also known as MODIS, on NASA’s Aqua satellite, researchers were able to utilize sensors that recognize colors too subtle for human eyes to differentiate, helping scientists confirm that the world’s oceans are changing color. Additionally, researchers found tropical ocean regions near the equator have become steadily greener over time as opposed to other parts of the world
The study’s authors say that natural instances, like seasonal or yearly variations to phytoplankton blooms, don’t explain the oceans’ shift in color, and don’t account for the change. Instead, researchers say the greening might better be explained by carbon dioxide absorption by plankton and algae communities and could signal an even more serious problem: Oceans absorb nearly 25 percent of the world’s carbon emissions and may not be able to absorb more in the future.
California’s Imperial Valley is one of the few places where a 95-degree day can be described as unseasonably cool.
In the shade of a sissoo tree, with a dry breeze rustling its leaves, JB Hamby called the weather “pretty nice” for mid-June. Over his shoulder, sprinklers ticked away over a field of onions. Every few minutes, a tractor rumbled across the broiling asphalt of a nearby road.
Hamby is a water policy bigwig, especially around these parts. He helps shape policies that define how water is used by arguably the most influential water users along the Colorado River. Hamby holds two jobs – he serves on the board of directors for the Imperial Irrigation District (IID) and was recently appointed to be California’s top water negotiator.
And he’s only 27 years old.
The Colorado River is governed by more than a century of legal agreements, most of which were hammered out by generations of older white men. The ranks of the river’s top policy negotiators have begun to diversify in recent years, including more women and people of color, but still tend to skew older. Hamby’s inclusion marks the first time a member of Generation Z will be at the negotiating table, making deals for the Southwest’s most important water source.
“I think every generation has an opportunity to do it better or worse than the prior one,” Hamby said. “My hope, at least, is being one representative of a generation about trying to make things better.”
The Imperial Valley holds a special place in the Colorado River conversation. It uses more water than any other single entity along the river – which includes dozens of farming districts and big cities like Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Denver. Using that allocation, the valley produces about $3 billion in crops and livestock each year. The district has been described as brash, combative, and eager to push back on its critics.
The district is situated in California, the state with the largest allocation of the river. During negotiations in the winter of 2022-2023 the state became the lone holdout to a watershed-wide consensus deal to reduce uses along the dwindling river, much of that due to reluctant agricultural districts like IID.
JB Hamby browses old documents inside an archival vault at Imperial Irrigation District headquarters on June 21, 2023.
Alex Hager / KUNC
As climate change shrinks the Colorado River’s water supply, the Imperial Valley is increasingly in the crosshairs. Water managers from the seven states that use the river are squeezing every last drop out of a finite supply, and looking for new ways to conserve. They’ve turned to IID, and other farm districts, and cranked up pressure to cut back on agricultural water use as states draw up new rules for water use before 2026, when the current guidelines expire.
Hamby was elected as chairman of the Colorado River Board of California in January, giving him a seat at the river’s most important negotiating tables alongside other state delegates generations his senior – representing nearly half of the river’s roughly 40 million users.
And he’s taking that seat at one of the most critical moments in the river’s management, where users are collectively trying to figure out how to get by with a lot less water by making decisions that could upend generations of policy and attitudes around the West’s water.
Agricultural roots
Hamby was raised in Brawley, California, where about 25,000 people live amidst a sea of sprawling crop fields. Hamby’s family has lived in the Imperial Valley since his great grandfather left Texas during the Great Depression. He got a job digging irrigation ditches for the same water district his descendant now helps run.
“This blasting hot, tough place with tough people that have struggled and made hardscrabble existences in time and have had dreams to be made and dashed and made a living and a life out of hardscrabble desert,” Hamby said, “I think it shapes all of us. And I don’t think I’m any different.”
Hamby’s passion for water issues goes hand in hand with his interest in history. He was a history major during his time at Stanford University, and unlike many students, long nights in the library have lingered long after graduation.
Now, he spends a lot of free evenings among stacks of leather-bound documents and rolled-up maps in the district’s archives.
During some downtime between meetings on a June afternoon, Hamby twisted a dial and swung open the antique vault door that seals off a dusty room full of papers going back more than a century. In here, he’s spent hours rifling through minutes from the district’s earliest meetings.
“There’s really nothing new under the sun in the Colorado River space,” he said. “People change, some of the words we use to describe things change, but the core themes and issues are the same ones we deal with now than as we did 100 years ago.”
Hamby plucked a stiff maroon folder from a chest-high shelf in the corner of the vault.
“Here’s a good one,” he said, leafing through the yellowed pages within.
Hamby began reading from a handout given to local farmers in the 1940s or 50s during an information campaign against the Central Arizona Project, warning them of “subversive attempts” to “mislead” California growers on Colorado River issues.
The Imperial Irrigation District and the Central Arizona Project, a canal that carries water to Phoenix through more than 300 miles of desert, have carried their tensions into the 21st century.
Rows of crops grow in Imperial Valley, California on June 20, 2023. The scorching hot valley produces about $3 billion in crops and livestock each year using the Colorado River’s largest single water allocation.
Alex Hager / KUNC
“Your own experience is a very painful and expensive teacher,” Hamby said. “So it’s good to learn off of other people’s expense.
A seat at the table
Even decades before the current supply-demand imbalance put Colorado River water users in a bind, meetings were heated. Hamby recalled hearing about a particularly “spirited discussion” where the district’s board members sat around a table, each stashing a gun in the drawer in front of them.
While this century’s water negotiations have perhaps included fewer firearms, contentious and well-publicized water debates played out during Hamby’s childhood in the Imperial Valley. His curiosity grew as negotiators drew up the Colorado River’s current managing guidelines in 2007, and then re-upped its rules with the drought contingency plan in 2019. When he got old enough to get involved himself, Hamby felt it was important to help prepare the Imperial Valley and the state of California for the next wave of negotiations.
“I had a real strong interest in history,” Hamby said. “Particularly of our region and the history of the Colorado River and happened to grow up in the very place that really kick started all these discussions about a century ago.”
Armed with that robust knowledge of the past, Hamby plays his youth close to the chest.
“I’m sure other people occasionally think about it,” he said. “But it’s not something I really dwell on.”
Hamby’s colleagues agree that his age isn’t a hindrance.
“I think he’s turned it into a positive and brought sort of our fresh look at things,” said Tina Shields, IID’s water department manager. “You do things for so long and you do them because you’ve always done them. And I think he can shake things up a little from that perspective.”
Shields said the group of people shaping Colorado River policy has a long way to go in terms of diversity, but already looks different than it did in the early days of her career, when she would attend meetings in Las Vegas and be treated “like a cocktail waitress.”
“Maybe the diversity isn’t where it needs to be,” she said. “But I think it’s not the old white guys you see in the pictures from the old days.”
Hamby has had to balance any fresh perspective he brings to negotiating rooms with the needs of the people he represents. Right in his backyard, legions of growers make big money on farms that have belonged to their families for generations.
John Hawk, a farmer and county-level politician, took Hamby under his wing around 2019, when he first ran for the district’s board with the campaign slogan “Water is Life.”
“Some of the growers in the valley look at the value of the water as far as dollars and cents,” Hawk said. “But many of us in the farm community look at it as the value of producing crops. And I think JB looks at it that way.”
Perhaps Hamby’s most arduous task is to dig in his heels and try to keep water in California, just like so many of the state’s water negotiators before him. California’s Colorado River allocation isn’t just the largest among the seven Colorado River basin states – it’s also the most legally untouchable.
The 1922 Colorado River Compact dictates how water is shared in the arid Western watershed. The legal system prioritizes older uses of water, like agricultural districts, meaning their shares will be the last to be shut off in times of shortage. The legal scaffolding built on top of the compact shields the Imperial Valley’s voluminous uses.
California’s biggest water users would like to see that legal priority stay in place. When pressed on their role in negotiations about the river’s future, Hamby and other California water managers point to existing laws and say they should be followed. Water policy experts say California’s protected status on the river is unlikely to change without messy court battles, which states generally agree are best avoided.
“[Hamby] looks at the letter of the law and he says ‘It’s written, this is legal, and let’s support it,” Hawk said. “And I think you can’t ask for much more than that.”
Hamby seems to be sticking to that letter-of-the-law approach so far. Both California and the Imperial Irrigation District have signed on to conservation deals in recent months, but their contributions still lag behind Arizona’s agreed-to cutbacks.
In October 2022, the district was one of four agencies which agreed to cut back on water use by a combined 400,000 acre-feet each year from 2023 to 2026, reducing California’s total water use by about 9 percent. Imperial is allotted 2.6 million acre-feet each year, and is set to contribute more than half of the state’s entire conservation commitment.
JB Hamby speaks at a conference in Boulder, Colorado on June 8, 2023. Hamby, along with delegates from the other six states that use water from the Colorado River, must agree on new water sharing rules by 2026.
Alex Hager / KUNC
In January of 2023, just weeks after Hamby began his tenure as California’s top water negotiator, the state was the lone holdout on a water conservation proposal signed by all six of the other states which use water from the Colorado River.
After that proposal was released, Hamby told KUNC the process by which it was created was “horribly broken,” and not carried out in good faith.
Since then, Hamby said he’s worked to build better relationships with water leaders from other states, making things more conversational and less adversarial.
In May, California, Arizona, and Nevada agreed to conserve a combined 1 million acre-feet each year until 2026. They did so once promised at least $1.2 billion in federal funds, designed to help incentivize farmers to pause some water use.
Arizona’s top negotiator, Tom Buschatzke, credited his relationship with Hamby as a factor that helped clinch the deal among the two feuding states.
“JB and I met in Yuma and kind of just had a good one on one conversation. It wasn’t really even business. It was just, let’s lay our cards on the table personally, get to know each other and build a relationship,” Buschatzke said at a recent University of Colorado river symposium. “And I think that jump started where we got among Arizona and California in the end.”
That rings true from Hamby’s perspective as well.
“The Colorado River is history,” Hamby said. “It’s science, it’s law, but it’s relationships that are perhaps equal, if not greater than any of those things.”
This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Colorado River, produced by KUNC and supported by the Walton Family Foundation.
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