Welcome to Planet Days, a green newsletter for a greenwashed Planet. Thank you to Sam Liptak for editing this morning’s post.
If you’re new to Planet Days, every other week I try to send out a three-minute read on what it means to go green — ranging from topics on air-conditioners and lawns to electric vehicles and trains.
🌡️🥵 I’m writing this in my hometown of Washington, D.C., which is currently under a hot weather emergency — whatever that means (and the topic of this post).
Congrats. You just survived the hottest month on record.
I say survived because heat is our deadliest weather disaster, killing more people than nearly every other extreme weather event combined. Just last year, summer heat waves killed 61,000 people in Europe — events that would have been “virtually impossible” without climate change.
Understanding this severity, leaders around the globe are scrambling to keep cool, dialing up the urgency. But we’re still struggling with how to warn people about the dangers of heat. And the results are fatal.
Part of the disconnect is the unique nature of heat, which is impossible to see and tough to communicate. Climate journalist Jeff Goodell, author of the new book The Heat Will Kill You First, recently described this phenomenon:
“Heat is invisible, unlike hurricanes, where you see roofs being blown off houses and streets swamped with storm surges. Drought can also be very visible — like Lake Mead [in 2022] — and of course wildfires are communicated easily. Yet I'm sitting in Austin looking out the window, and I couldn't tell you if the temperature is 70 degrees outside or 115.”
Another issue is how heat is categorized in the U.S.: federal law, for example, doesn't consider extreme heat a disaster, unlike tornadoes, hurricanes, or wildfires, leaving communities largely on their own to respond to heat waves.
With that in mind, some are pushing United States President Joe Biden to declare extreme heat a federal disaster, which would let the Federal Emergency Management Administration deploy emergency response teams, delivering air-conditioners, medical supplies, and the like to heat-affected areas.
In addition to taking such steps, we can at the very least get better at talking about heat:
For example, officials should make clear the difference between temperatures and heat indexes, the latter of which considers humidity and better indicates the actual threat posed to your body.
The U.S. can also borrow from some European countries by naming its heat waves, the same way we do hurricanes and tropical storms, to make abstract events more concrete.
Amid this Wet Hot American Summer, President Biden contributed his own heat talk with a public address on Friday. He stopped short of declaring heat a federal disaster but did announce new measures for combating heat, including opening cooling centers, planting trees, improving forecasts, and boosting protections for workers.
Still, the pressure is building for the White House to do more. Many people want President Biden to declare a climate emergency, which would allow the White House to bypass Congress and unlock federal spending to address the root cause of this heat: human-caused climate change. Eighteen other countries and the European Union have issued similar declarations.
But we shouldn’t hold their breath. Biden has so far been a pretty climate-forward president (for the U.S.), managing to both push for climate action while avoiding pissing off too many voters who think he’s overstepping his power: On Friday, he linked brutal heat to the “existential threat of climate change” in his first sentence, but his orders still fell in line with his limited executive authority.
Perhaps most importantly, Biden’s speech offered something that is too often overlooked in climate communication: simple guidance.
When talking about these disasters, we so often take the 30,000-foot view that we forget about what it’s like on the ground. If you’re sick, you don’t care about the history of respiratory infections — you care about getting better. The same goes for heat: Most people care less about how much coal the world burns through, and more about staying cool during this heat wave and the next.
In that way, leaders across the country can provide resources and guidance to people who have never felt this kind of heat. Whether it’s heat waves or wildfire smoke or flooding, we’ll all need to get better at educating ourselves about the impacts of climate change.
As Biden said Friday, “People just need to know where to go and what to do.” Sometimes it’s as simple as that.
For ways to stay cool this summer, check out HEAT.gov.
Good piece, especially the point about making heat waves concrete.