Jeff Goodell and Kathy Baughman McLeod on Extreme Heat, the Perils of Apathy, and Why It’s Not Too Late

Moderated by Isabel Flower
Illustrations by Althea James

ISABEL FLOWER:

Jeff, your book The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet (2023) presents several theoretical frameworks for understanding heat that have really stuck with me. I want to start with thinking about heat as invisible, and how the difficulty in imaging it is very closely tied to the difficulty in communicating it. In what ways is heat, as a symptom of climate change, misunderstood or underestimated? How is extreme heat an active, man-made force?

JEFF GOODELL:          

Heat is unique, unlike other climate and weather impacts, in that it’s invisible. I’m looking out my window in Austin right now and I can’t tell if it’s 70 degrees outside or 120 degrees. There are no visual clues to inform of a risk. If you look outside during a hurricane, you see the roofs flying off houses and trees bent in the wind. During a flood, you can see water rising and overflowing. Heat doesn’t have that visual analog; there are no traditional or iconic media images associated with it. That’s also one of the difficulties in writing about it, which is further amplified by the way we use the concept of heat in our language, as it has an inherently positive connotation. When we meet somebody we think is attractive, we might tell a friend that he or she is “hot.” When I worked for Rolling Stone we put together annual “hot” lists of the best movies, albums, and songs. So, in our culture, the word “hot” doesn’t immediately communicate danger. A lot of people like warmer places, which is evolutionarily natural. I mean, I live in Austin. A lot of people would prefer to live in a place where they can walk around in shorts and flip-flops for most of the year. All of this is what makes heat so difficult to communicate about, and therefore so dangerous, because we don’t recognize the risk. That’s why it’s called the silent or invisible killer. Heat kills far more people than any other climate or weather impact. It’s very dangerous, but it’s difficult to understand.

Extreme heat waves, and the rising of temperatures on average, are a direct result of burning fossil fuels; 80% of manmade carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are from fossil fuels. This is not complicated—we’ve understood it for 150 years. It’s as straightforward and widely recognized as gravity. When we burn fossil fuels, we put CO2 into the atmosphere. The CO2 traps infrared heat that radiates back to earth and is absorbed by the oceans, and by almost everything else, and then it acts as a blanket to catch heat that is reflected again into the atmosphere. 

There are two things that are really important to understand. One is that CO2 is not like traditional air pollution. When I grew up in the 1970s, air pollution was rampant throughout America. Think about the yellow skies many of us experienced this past summer. Then we passed the Clean Air Act, we put catalytic converters on cars, we put nitrogen oxide scrubbers on industrial facilities, and our air got a lot cleaner almost immediately. But CO2 doesn’t work like that; it exists in the atmosphere for thousands of years. And so, by continuing to emit CO2, we are essentially creating a new climate for ourselves that will persist long after we stop emissions. It’s also important to understand that as long as we continue to put CO2 into the atmosphere, it will continue to get hot. The less we put in, the less warming there will be in the future, but, even if we got to zero carbon emissions tomorrow (which we won’t, of course, as we’ll be lucky to get to zero by 2050) current temperatures would not go back to what they were, or to the climate we grew up in. We need to grasp that we have already created a new climate for ourselves that is radically hotter, much more unpredictable, and fundamentally unsuited for how our world is built. Our buildings, our infrastructure, and our societies are constructed for a world that no longer exists.

KATHY BAUGHMAN MCLEOD:

Like Jeff said, the challenge in visualizing the dangers of heat is one of the biggest barriers to protection. Giving heat a visual identity—a comprehensible “brand”—is essential to keeping people from dying from it.

Isabel:

I never thought about it like that, but I guess one does need a communication strategy around danger to create awareness and normalize preventative behaviors, just like we have for, say, smoking cigarettes or leaning on subway doors. I’d like to create some context for talking about cities in particular. Could you speak to how heat disproportionately affects densely populated urban areas? Jeff, I’ve seen you use the phrase “temperature apartheid,” which I think is especially relevant for the purposes of Deem, as we focus on the social outcomes of design. 

Jeff:

There’s a well-known phenomena called the urban heat island effect. The average temperature in cities measures between 5 and 15 degrees F hotter than the surrounding area. Cities are built of concrete, steel, asphalt, and glass. These materials absorb and radiate heat. Everyone knows how that works, because we’ve all stepped barefoot onto a sidewalk or driveway on a hot summer day. Think about how hot that surface gets, and imagine how that effect is magnified by the entire city. It’s then further true that some parts of cities experience this more than others. In virtually every city in the world, the richer areas are cooler than the poorer areas. Richer areas tend to have more trees, parks, and green space. Poorer areas have less of all those aspects of landscape design, as well as less access to cooling technologies. Meanwhile, we’ve barely even thought about how to deal with heat in cities since the invention of air conditioning, because everyone thought AC would solve the problem of heat. In the book, I call this the technology of forgetting. We’ve consciously forgotten how to build cities with heat management in mind, such as by using white and reflective paints, or positioning streets and thoroughfares to capture and direct the wind. There’s a whole bunch of heat-related considerations that we used to factor into the designs of cities but no longer do.

Kathy:

Like most things, heat doesn’t affect individuals or communities equally. This is especially true for women, pregnant people (especially pregnant people of color), babies and small children, senior citizens, and people of low socioeconomic status through any function of poverty, disinvestment, or underinvestment. In the US, redlining and discriminatory housing finance practices from decades past mean that many communities don’t have natural infrastructures such as trees, shade structures, built-in water features, etc. And all of this makes those communities only hotter. 

We see dramatic temperature differences within American cities; one study by the organization American Forests cites as much as a 17 degree F difference between neighborhoods in the same city. This plays out through public health effects. I recently launched a new NGO called Climate Resilience for All. We’re taking on extreme heat for the world’s most vulnerable communities through a gender lens. Women are disproportionately impacted both physically and financially. There are many examples around the world of how heat culturally affects women because of social norms such as their clothing, eating last in the family order, and being responsible for getting water. Women, on average, put 90% of their income back into their community and their family. The number for men is much lower, closer to 40%. Women are a great investment when it comes to building resilience to extreme heat.

We work with an organization in India called the Self-Employed Women’s Association; it’s 2.8 million women who are self-employed in roughly 120 different trades and trying to work their way out of poverty. Many work outside and when they are exposed to extreme heat, it can be deadly. In speaking with them, we learned about their frequent miscarriages, and the persistent rashes many of them experience year-round. They told us how they used to experience rashes for about four months out of the year, but now it’s all the time. They are frequently dizzy and often have blisters on their hands from holding tools that weren’t made to be used in these new high temperatures. They’re also the ones preparing the food for their families, so when some outdoor labor shifts got moved to late afternoon and evening when it’s cooler, the men were able to take those shifts while the women needed to be home cooking the evening meal and caring for the children. The further women are pushed into poverty, the more impoverished their communities also become. Women are the backbone of all communities. There are lots of solutions that can help reduce those inequalities and vulnerabilities, but I’ll pause there for now.

Isabel:

Thank you, Kathy. This clarity is much appreciated because something that we’re trying to really capture in this issue is an understanding of how climate change across all of its manifestations disproportionately affects some groups of people more than others. I want to return once more to the city in particular; one of the biggest design projects of the future will be around how we’re going to make cities work for the heat conditions to come. Like Jeff said earlier, even if by some miracle we stopped all carbon emissions immediately, we would still be facing a much different climate than the one even the world’s youngest cities were designed for. Would you be able to share some examples of design solutions for urban heat that you’ve seen implemented, or that you’re hopeful about? 

Jeff:

No one living in a city should die in a heat wave as long as there is access to risk education and cooling aids. If you understand the risk, it’s not that hard to design ways to prevent death. That’s why the kind of work that Kathy and others are doing is so important. The first-level step is figuring out how to get the message out. How can we best communicate about this? How do we rank and perhaps name heat waves to help people understand when a risk is coming and what they should do to prepare or react? How can we encourage people to check on their families and friends?

Then there’s the next level—things like making sure power companies can’t cut off people’s electricity because they’re behind on their bills, which happens often and can literally kill people because running an air conditioner is so expensive. Whether people can afford to run an AC might be an hour-to-hour negotiation and if they get behind on their bill, the companies make sure they can’t. That’s fairly simple, and there are many low-hanging-fruit policy possibilities for thinking differently about heat in urban areas, like planting trees and increasing shade in obvious places such as bus stops. Here in Austin, they’re experimenting with a program that will make all buses automatically free once the outside temperature gets above a certain number. Again, a relatively easy change to implement. The real challenge will be structurally redesigning how cities work by creating significantly more green spaces, eliminating cars from dense areas, creating mandatory design requirements for reflectivity on the majority of streets, roofs, etc., and making buildings that don’t require anywhere near the level of AC we’ve come to rely on or, better yet, don’t require AC at all.

It’s certainly possible to build cities that work really well in hot climates. Look at where civilization started. There were very sophisticated civilizations in very hot places, long before there was air conditioning. In the Middle East in the 16th century, they were making ice without electricity just by understanding how to move air around and pass it over cooling water underground. There are all kinds of great design solutions, old and new, but change will require first understanding the risks and then finding the political will to take action. There is a tremendous amount of economic, cultural, and political inertia behind doing things the way we (think) we've always done them. Shifting is enormously important for building safer, cooler cities.

Kathy:

Some of this is really basic stuff, like shade. The city of Freetown, Sierra Leone, is one of our partners at Climate Resilience for All. The mayor, Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr, is on our board and her colleague, Eugenia Kargbo, is the Chief Heat Officer for the city. Women often work in open-air marketplaces all day in the burning sun. The produce, meats, and other goods they’re selling are spoiling more quickly, diminishing the window for sale, increasing waste, and reducing both the womens’ income and their health, as they’re standing in the sun, too. What do they need? First and foremost, shade. At my former organization, we worked with the community leadership and governance of the three biggest markets in Freetown to allow the women who work there to design the shade structures and determine where to put them. These structures will also have solar-powered lights inside so that the market can stay open for longer after the sun goes down. You’re probably thinking…“That’s it?” and yes, it is. That’s where we are. That’s what we are doing, because we don’t seem able to reduce our emissions in a manner that will help reduce the temperatures, at least for now. What is now necessary are some of the most basic interventions that protect people from the inevitable. 

Earlier, Jeff mentioned heat wave naming and categorization. That’s also one of the best things we can do to protect health and save lives. There’s hard evidence that it works: people do more to prepare, they call others to talk about it and to encourage them to prepare, they adjust their plans. That literature is in peer review right now. Ultimately, we’ll see lower morbidity and mortality rates. We only have mortality data right now. We don’t have morbidity yet. (Morbidity expresses illness, while mortality expresses the number of deaths.) 

We also need mainstream recognition of the signs of heat-related stress and sickness, not only for ourselves but for others. If your job is to supervise outdoor manual laborers, then that means knowing how to recognize symptoms of heat stress and illness, when to change shift times, and advising workers on appropriate shade, rest, water, and clothing. In some parts of the US, agricultural workers are picking fruit at 3AM because the daytime heat is deadly. Another little-studied factor is the effect of heat on sleep. Being overheated while sleeping prevents quality rest. Workers who are not rested are coming in tired and are likely struggling with thinking clearly, have reduced hand-eye coordination, and are at risk as they operate equipment. This, too, is dangerous. Like Jeff said, most of these issues can be avoided. 

Freetown has a program called “Freetown Is a Tree Town,” in which citizens are rewarded for taking care of a specific tree. The caretakers use an app to log and report on the tree’s growth and health. The city is about to reach their goal of planting a million trees through this program. I think it’s essential to underscore the power and cost-effectiveness of nature-based solutions, as well as to revisit ancient practices of designing and building for airflow, rather than the sealed structures that have become normal in modern times.

Isabel:

Kathy, you’ve written about how important Chief Heat Officers (CHO) are going to be moving forward. Could you explain a bit more about that role?

Kathy:

The role of the CHO is to wake up every single day thinking about how to protect the most vulnerable people in their community from heat. Who and where are the people who need help the most? How do we prioritize them? Which solutions work for them? How much do those solutions cost and how can we pay for them? How will we evaluate if the implementation of those solutions has been successful? These questions are the contents of a heat action plan, and it’s the CHO’s job to make that plan and see it through. 

Heat’s foremost damaging effect is on the human body. Floods, fires, and other natural disasters are most known for destroying our physical and built assets. Heat is like the orphan climate hazard because it’s silent and invisible, but also because its impacts aren’t commonly recognized through asset damage, and the insurance and banking sectors don’t measure humans as assets. Sure, you have health and life insurance, but that’s different from the way that FEMA and private property and casualty insurance companies quantify the damage of climate hazards. My point is—we start with health. We can’t let anyone die from this. To do their jobs, CHOs need the power of their jurisdiction to make decisions, to influence, to garner resources, etc. So far, all nine are women, which has also been quite successful; if women are disproportionately impacted by heat, why would we not have disproportionate numbers of women leaders to solve this problem?

Jeff:

That’s a very good question. I do want to point out that the economic cost is really important. The Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas just reported that the heat this summer, which was extreme, cost the state $27 billion. And that’s just Texas, and just this one summer.

Kathy:

$27 billion? Wow. For 2020, Vivid Economics did an analysis showing a baseline estimate of $100 billion in worker productivity loss for the whole US, with a disproportionate 18% burden on Black and Hispanic workers in the South. But putting those numbers together makes it clear that we’re only scratching the surface of this one cost dimension.

Jeff:

Yeah, and it’s incredibly sad that economic costs are what garner attention. One would hope that the fact that people are dying, or experiencing severe health impacts, would be sufficiently motivating. But often it’s not. It’s the financial cost of that loss of life that raises the alarm. I live through that here in Texas.

Isabel:

Something that I found to be very moving in the book, Jeff, was the connection you drew between heat and COVID. I feel like we’re navigating a very uncomfortable moment of collective reckoning around what it looks like to actually center our most vulnerable communities’ right to life, and so far it seems our culture and government are firmly and flagrantly unwilling to do so. Like with COVID, heat is not always a direct cause of death, which makes its effects difficult to measure. Like with COVID, we are seeing how, in your words, “quickly and easily people are able to normalize the deaths of others, especially if they were sick, old, or otherwise living on the margins.” Do you think we are capable of a shift in collective values around individual interest, sacrifice, and solidarity in order to better protect each other?

Jeff:

That’s a profound question. The simple answer is, we have to care. No matter who we are, we have to care about what happens to other people, to people who don’t seem like us, who don’t look like us, who don’t talk like us. We’re stuck in a political cycle that demonizes the other. And in order to develop policies that can protect people’s lives from heat, or from COVID, or from any other challenge on that scale, we need political leadership that truly considers and values the life of every human being. We also need a culture that believes in science, and that believes in the leadership of science. The anti-vax movement is all about eroding our trust in science and medicine and encouraging us to disregard what experts are telling us. Similarly, it’s very hard to reimagine a city for the 22nd century if a third or more of the population thinks climate change is a conspiracy. The broader politics of this are really important. In the climate context, we have to think about adaptation and mitigation. One part of that, as we discussed, is cutting emissions by getting off fossil fuels as quickly as possible. But, at the same time, we have to adapt to this changed world that we’ve already created and will likely continue to create. We need to do two things at once, and that’s hard, especially politically. 

For a long time, there was this idea that you couldn’t talk about adaptation because it would take away from conversations about mitigation. We need to be doing both. One of the things that I am concerned about with adaptation—and this connects to the parallels with COVID—is that we might just get used to it, that we might just accept the damage we are doing and focus on remedying the effects rather than halting the causes. With COVID, it felt like, at a certain point, our leaders decided that it was okay if people kept getting sick, and that X number of thousands were going to die. That became millions. And that’s just the way it is. I remember how, in the beginning, the number of people dying was unbelievable. I remember being shocked and horrified, but then, as the years passed, the knowledge that this was going on faded into the background. I take precautions for myself and for my loved ones, but COVID became just another part of the world as I know it. I’m very afraid that climate change could become just that. It’s always been hot in Texas, but we soon might think that 120-degree days for months at a time is just the way it is, and that it’s too bad that ten USPS workers died in one day from heat stroke but that’s the cost of living in a hot place. We cannot accept this, and we cannot forget that all of this is manmade. Human beings created this climate and we still have a lot of control over what happens next. Perhaps that is the most important thing that we need to communicate—that it doesn’t have to be this way and there’s still a lot we can do.

Kathy:

I’d like to say one thing, but I first want to leave open some space to process what you said, Jeff. It’s deep. We’re not just talking about heat anymore. We’re talking about a culture of apathy and a loss of humanity. I think about the 1200 people who died from heat in the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia two summers ago, but we didn’t hear about it. Families lost loved ones, public officials expressed their sadness, but there was no outrage. I think that’s because many of those people were old and they were poor. 

The thing that I want to add is that heat is insidious. It’s not just silent. It’s pernicious. It drives anger, it drives conflict, it drives violence. It aggravates stress and mental illness. It creates contraindications for medications that we aren’t even aware of. It makes a lot of other things worse. 

Isabel:

Thank you both for your perspectives on this. It’s so powerful to hear you express your frustration but also your faith that it’s not too late. I appreciate how you pointed out that we have a cultural problem in how we perceive ourselves as individuals in relation to other people. 

Kathy:

It’s so critical.

Isabel:

I have a question about migration, and then I’d like to end with something a little more personal. To start, we know that millions of people around the world—climate refugees, they’re now called—are fleeing from unlivable climate conditions. But Americans are still moving to places with more climate risk. Even before I read Jeff’s book, this was something I’d noticed, like waterfront mansions being erected on Miami Beach, for example. It’s disorienting. How do we talk about this?

Jeff: 

I’m a textbook example of the complexity of migration. I, an environmental journalist, used to live in upstate New York in a relatively cool place with lots of trees and water sources. Though there are no true bubbles of protection from the ravages of a changing climate, there are places that are better and worse, and upstate New York was a better place than Austin, where I now live in the belly of the beast. Why did I do that? I moved here because I fell in love with a woman who lives and works here, and I wanted to be with her. That trumped everything else. I’m sharing this because I think it underscores that migration is very socially complex. All summer I heard Texans saying, “I’m getting out of here. This is just too much.” But cheap real estate, tax structures that incentivize corporate jobs, family needs, parents, children, love—these all factor into where people choose to spend their lives. So then what happens when it gets so hot that we hear about people dying from stepping outside to check their mail? We’re getting closer to that point, which is why cities especially need to take this very seriously.

Kathy:

In the US and abroad, climate-related droughts and flooding are taking a huge toll on rural farming communities. People are moving to cities in search of better economic opportunities and living in informal settlements, many of which are made from corrugated steel. These structures are like toaster ovens and they’re very bad for the health of their inhabitants. Forced migration and informal settlements have to be factored into planning around how to solve extreme heat in cities. A billion people are migrating right now, and that will only become more pointed as places become not just economically unattractive but downright uninhabitable. 

In 2020, Abrahm Lustgarten wrote a piece for the New York Times about how many Americans alone will be displaced by climate change. It’s sobering. We hear about “managed retreat” but what does that really mean? It’s more than migration when the place we are leaving behind is unlivable. We don’t have the risk literacy to understand or express it, and I want to reiterate that we don’t have the insurance piece of this right yet. The financial system doesn’t reflect the damage that we’re doing to the environment, and therefore to people. Right now, it’s an externality. There’s no upfront cost. It’s free to do damage and push it onto the public balance sheet. That can only go on so long, because the government can’t pay for the repairs and the protections that are necessary. So there’s a correction coming that will change the financial system and insurance may be the piece where it shows up first. Will a bank give a mortgage on a property if the materials aren’t built for the temperatures, or in an area that’s going to flood, or in a fire zone, or all three of those things? Will anyone insure it? So far, these considerations aren’t showing up in our choices the way they need to, and that’s reflecting the lack of risk literacy. But, slowly, it’s starting to shift. Recently, there’s been a slight increase in the value of upland property in Miami-Dade County. There’s a growing perception that more elevated land may be more valuable than the beautiful coastal environments where people with money have long wanted to live.

Isabel:

My last question can be answered however you wish. How do you calibrate your own mindset and navigate overall burnout while working in this subject matter?

Jeff:

I was in Santa Barbara early last week giving a talk and a woman came up to me afterwards and said, “I understand the difficult future we’re facing. I have two kids: one’s five, one’s eight. What do I tell them?” I get a version of that question a lot. But what I like to say to people is—you should tell your kids that they’re incredibly lucky, because they are part of a generation that is going to get to redesign everything. We are going to redesign where we get our energy from. We are going to redesign where we get our food from. We are going to redesign what cities look like. We’re going to redesign how transportation works. Amidst this crisis is an incredible opportunity to rethink how our world is built and to reevaluate what our priorities are. There’s going to be loss and there’s going to be suffering, but what if we could emerge from this with a better world? We need the younger generations to have a sense of that enormous opportunity.

Kathy:

I think the people who avoid burnout are very few and far between. Show me someone working in the space where humans and climate are interacting who hasn’t experienced climate grief and burnout. We’re constantly witnessing harm, and we’re witnessing it come to people and communities who have done literally nothing to cause it. All that, while knowing that we could do something about it. We have all the solutions to do it, but we don’t. I am losing the optimism that we’ll decarbonize at the rate that we must to prevent the death and suffering that we’re looking at right now. We have to be honest with ourselves. We’re not doing it. The white-knuckle grip that the oil and gas industry has on so many facets of our government, economic, and social systems is astounding. The investment they’ve made in fake science and false information in public communications is unbelievable. The trillions of dollars being made by the oil and gas industry, plus the trillions of dollars in taxpayer money they’re receiving as tax breaks and subsidies, is mind blowing. The connection between right-wing politics and denying climate change is a big smokescreen for money. Our financial systems will need to completely reform for us to get it right.

The thing that may determine your survival during a disaster is whether you know your neighbor. It all comes down to human beings, our relationships with each other, and our commitment to supporting and helping each other. That’s the beautiful part. That’s why I can get up every day and look at the suffering and the harm and still be ambitious and optimistic that we can do something because the evidence, and my own experience, support that we can. That’s what I can get up for.

Isabel:

Yes, we desperately need this clarity, but we also need faith. It seems that a lot of popular media is still posing the question as, “How will we solve climate change?” We’ve already figured that out, right? But we’re still framing it as a big mystery. 

Kathy: 

Yeah, that’s reckless and dangerous. We know exactly what to do. And there’s a hell of a lot of people doing it.●

Kathy Baughman McLeod is CEO of Climate Resilience For All, a global, gender-focused nonprofit dedicated to protecting people and livelihoods from the multiple impacts of extreme heat. CRA’s motto is, “When women are climate resilient, we will all be climate resilient.” www.climateresilience.org 

Jeff Goodell is a contributing writer at Rolling Stone and the author of seven books, including the New York Times bestseller The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet (2023).