This past July, Earth reached the hottest temperature since record-keeping began, according to the U.S. National Centers for Environmental Prediction. And the record-breaking temperatures are impacting everything from our bodies, to our food supplies to the habitability of the planet. Meanwhile, Texas Governor Abbot recently signed legislation prohibiting localities from passing any laws that require shade or water breaks for outdoor construction workers. As we continue to see the devastating effects of rising temps, it’s clear we need to rethink how we conceptualize and deal with heat. Our guest this week points out that simply cranking up our A.C. units isn’t the way out of this and that we instead need to urgently reduce our reliance on fossil fuels. Jeff Goodell is author of “The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet” and a contributing writer at Rolling Stone. Goodell joins WITHpod to discuss the deleterious ways extreme heat impacts every living thing, what rising temps reveal about fault lines in governments and more.
Note: This is a rough transcript — please excuse any typos.
Chris Hayes: Hey, WITHpod listeners. Before we get into today’s episode, I’m excited to share that we are taking WITHpod on the road again, the first time since the pandemic. I’m going to be at the House of Blues on Monday, October 9 in Chicago. I’ll be in Philadelphia at the Fillmore Theater on Monday, October 16, in New York City at the Town Hall on Sunday, November 12.
You can buy tickets online at msnbc.com/withpodtour. Join us in person for some fascinating conversations with amazing guests. Tickets are going to go fast, so buy yours today at msnbc.com/withpodtour using the special code WITHPOD. Can’t wait to see you in the live audience this fall.
Jeff Goodell: And I fear that it’s going to be something much more like COVID, that it just becomes this, we adapt by saying, oh, well, 10 workers died on a rooftop in Houston. It’s hot out, that’s unfortunate, but, you know, it’s a hot day, and that’s what happens on hot days sometimes, and we carry on.
And, you know, we’re going to forget not only that these deaths were or could be preventable, and they didn’t have to die if we had water breaks and intelligent labor laws to protect these kinds of workers, but also that this climate that is killing people is the climate that we created by 50 years of denial and political insanity, and that we are kind of stewing in our own juices that we’ve created this world.
And so that’s the kind of adaptation that I’m kind of most concerned about, and yet I feel is kind of clearly inevitable.
Chris Hayes: Hello, and welcome to “Why Is This Happening” with me, your host, Chris Hayes.
Well, it’s summer, which I love. I’m a big summer fan. I guess it’s not probably not a controversial opinion, though it may be a controversial opinion if you live in places like Austin, Texas or Tucson, Arizona, which have seen insane record heat this year, and they’re not alone in seeing insane record heat.
In fact, this is the warmest summer as far as we know in recorded history. To the best that we can tell, probably going back 100,000 years, we’ve got global temperature anomalies running about 1.5 degrees centigrade above the old mean. That’s terrifying.
1.5 degrees centigrade above the pre-industrial global temperature was the goal to stop global warming at 10, 20 years ago, even as recently as a few years ago, and we’re hitting it now. And again, we’re not experiencing the warming, that there’s a lot more warming already in the system because of the carbon emissions. So, we’re going to heat up from here.
Now, hopefully, this summer is like particularly anomalous, but it’s an indicator of where things are now and where they’re going. And, I don’t have to tell you, I mean, I think if you’ve been watching the nightly news even, or even reading the newspaper, I mean, the ravages of this heat are everywhere, around the world. They’re here in the US, in places that have been experiencing triple digit temperatures for weeks at a time in a way that’s totally unprecedented. The craziest and creepiest detail to me was that the water off the coast of South Florida at one point, the ocean water was like 96, 97 degrees Fahrenheit, I mean, like sous vide temperature, basically, the ocean in the summer.
Ocean temperature anomalies have been even crazier than land temperature anomalies. We’re seeing totally and almost in literal senses off the charts heat in the ocean. And all of it’s a reminder of an obvious basic truth, which is like we talk a lot about all the complex cascade of effects that will happen from climate change and global warming, sea level rise, changes in weather patterns, in more intensifying, you know, storms that are harder, flooding, et cetera.
The biggest thing is it’s going to get warmer. And, you know, heat is tough on people. And particularly when it starts to hit certain threshold amounts. We are looking at a new landscape of how to think about heat, how to deal with heat.
There were several stories in Texas of people who died from heat exhaustion, some of whom I believe were working. I had a moment when I was driving, I forget where I was driving. And it was a really hot day.
And I just read a story about the heat in Texas and I saw a bunch of roofers, just on a roof, laying new roof, you know, in the blazing sun. And this was in the Northeast. It was hot, but not, you know, insanely so.
And I thought, you know, I assume there’s roof crews in El Paso, right? And roof crews in Tucson and roof crews in Austin, Texas, where it’s triple digits. And like, what are they doing? And what protections are there for them? What kind of regulations are we going to have for when people can and can’t be out in that kind of heat?
And that’s in the US. That’s in the richest society on earth. I mean, you know, there’s roofers in Iran. And there’s roofers in India. And, you know, they’ve got temperatures that can be 10 degrees Fahrenheit warmer, pushing up against the threshold of human tolerance.
So, we have a new heat regime to deal with. It’s here now. And I want to talk about the ins and outs of that with someone who’s a great writer and reporter, who I’ve followed for years and just wrote a new book specifically on that.
His name is Jeff Goodell. And he’s author of a number of books. He wrote a great book about coal, a great book about sea level rise. And his latest is called “The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet.” He’s a contributing writer at Rolling Stone.
And Jeff joins me now. Great to have you on the program.
Jeff Goodell: Thanks for having me, Chris.
Chris Hayes: Well, I mean, it’s macabre and ghastly how relevant the book and its timing is. But given how long you’ve thought about and this written about this, what’s your reaction to what we’re seeing this summer?
Jeff Goodell: Well, my reaction is sort of twofold. One is, you know, completely expected. This is all what scientists have been telling us is going to happen. And they’ve been telling us this for decades. Even these extreme heat waves that we’ve been seeing are well within what the kind of climate models have predicted.
But on the other hand, it’s sort of horrifying to see this stuff manifesting itself in such extreme ways, not just in one or two places, but around the world. And, you know, it’s further evidence that this thing that we’ve called the climate crisis is not a distant faraway event. This is happening in real time to us now in ways that, in the cases of extreme heat, you know, can kill us.
Chris Hayes: Let’s just talk about what the body does with heat. Like, let’s just do some of the basic biology. Like, it’s hot out. You know, let’s say it’s, you know, really hot, 96 degrees, 98 degrees, somewhere around there. What’s your body doing to process that heat to make sure that you maintain the core temperature that creates, you know, our sort of equilibrium?
Jeff Goodell: Yeah, and equilibrium is an important word because, you know, having a steady body temperature is really important to all of the sort of metabolic processes of our body. So, I mean, everybody knows that you go to a doctor, the first thing they say is, “Do you have a fever?” You know, I mean, a sign of your body temperature being out of whack is a sign that something is wrong.
And our bodies are actually really good sort of heat reckoning machines, you know. They’re really good at maintaining a stable temperature within a certain range. And we have a really good mechanism for dealing with heat, which is called sweat. And that is how –
Chris Hayes: I want to say I’m particularly good at this. This is something I’m really, actually, and not to brag, but I’m actually kind of an A student. This is actually an area of expertise of mine.
Jeff Goodell: Yeah, and you know, sweat is a very simple mechanism, right? You have a lot of little glands on our body that squirts water onto the surface of our skin. And when it’s hot, that water evaporates and it cools the blood beneath our skin.
And so, when it gets hot, what our body does without us thinking about it, this isn’t completely, you know, beyond our consciousness mechanism, your heart starts pounding faster and it starts pulling the blood away from your internal organs and away from your brain actually, towards the surface of your skin –
Chris Hayes: Wow. Right.
Jeff Goodell: — where it can get to that cooling area and that cooler blood then recirculates and cools your body down.
And as long as the temperatures are not too extreme, as long as you’re not out there pounding nails on a hot roof, increasing your body temperature by exercise, which also generates internal heat, this mechanism works pretty well. It doesn’t work very well when it starts getting beyond the thresholds that our bodies can tolerate. And this mechanism can work to cool it.
Chris Hayes: So, the physics there is that that sweat, when the evaporation, is that it’s transferring heat away, right?
Jeff Goodell: Right.
Chris Hayes: That’s what’s happening. As the water from the sweat evaporates, it’s taking heat with it away from the skin and thereby cooling the blood that’s close to it.
Jeff Goodell: Exactly and it’s very straightforward. It’s an excellent mechanism. But it does give you, just to take this to another level, you begin to see why wet heat is more dangerous than dry heat, for example, because in humid conditions, evaporation doesn’t work as well, because there’s already so much water in the air.
The air is already saturated with water, so it doesn’t take up the water as easily. So, 100 degrees in Miami feels very different than 100 degrees in the Mojave Desert.
Chris Hayes: You talk about this in the book. You know, there’s the opening of “Ministry of the Future”, incredible sci-fi book about climate change. There’s this insane scene of this heat wave in India.
It’s unbelievably awful to read, but incredibly well done. And there’s this concept of like a wet bulb temperature. And, I guess, this is an obvious point to the point where it’s a cliche, right? People say it’s not the heat. It’s the humidity, or they say it’s a dry heat. I didn’t quite realize how much that’s true at not just the level of sensation, but actually like deeply physiologically in terms of your health. Like, the humidity and the amount of water in the air combined with the heat really matters for like the threshold of what your body can do where.
Jeff Goodell: Right, because if you have a high wet bulb temperature, which is a complex measurement of how heat affects our body that combines air temperature, humidity, solar radiation, how much, you know, sunlight you’re getting, wind speeds, in some cases, what you’re wearing, things like that, how much exercise you’re getting, wet bulb is a very sophisticated metric.
But it does have a direct impact on how dangerous it is because sweating is our only cooling mechanism. And if, you know, in high wet bulb temperatures, high humidity, that mechanism basically doesn’t work.
And so, then, we’re just left with our own kind of rapidly escalating internal body temperature, which, you know, once your body temperature starts to rise and the sweat cooling is not working, whether it’s because you’re in a high humid environment or you’re climbing a mountain outside when it’s 110 degrees in the desert, and you’re generating a lot of internal heat, your heart starts pumping faster and faster and it starts basically freaking out.
And so, people who have any kind of circulatory problems or heart problems are immediately at risk as it puts more and more stress on your heart and it pulls more and more blood away from your brain. That’s why you feel lightheaded –
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jeff Goodell: — and sometimes even hallucinogenic and all that kind of thing.
Chris Hayes: And then at a certain threshold, you can pass out or die, right? I mean, obviously, people die of heat exhaustion.
Jeff Goodell: Yes. So, at a certain point, you know, and it’s different for everyone depending on how robust their hearts are and things like that. I mean, let me be clear, a lot of heat deaths are based on heart attacks, heart failures, because people’s hearts just give out, especially older people or people who have –
Chris Hayes: Because it’s trying so hard to circulate that blood. Yeah.
Jeff Goodell: Exactly. Right. It just puts an enormous strain on the heart. But if your heart is strong, and if your body keeps working to try to cool it off, and it’s not working because, you know, either you’re exercising too hard or it’s too humid and you’re not able to dissipate enough heat through sweat, then your body temperature inside starts to rise and rise and rise.
And once it gets to 102, 103, 104 degrees, which is, when you think about it, not that much beyond, you know, the 98.6 or 99, a normal temperature, you start having real serious internal problems. I mean, to put it bluntly, your body starts to sort of melt from the inside.
The membranes of your cellular structures begin to, what scientists call denature, which is basically what happens to the proteins of eggs when you cook them. You start hemorrhaging inside. Your body just starts literally kind of melting down from the inside. It is not pretty.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, that point about, I mean, I’ve used this metaphor before on air, and I think it’s useful, this sort of fever metaphor, because one of the things I think is happening, even when I’m doing the opening, I say 1.5 degrees centigrade. It’s like, well, 1.5 degrees, that doesn’t sound like a lot, like, I don’t know.
Jeff Goodell: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: But if you think about it as three or four degrees Fahrenheit, right, and we’re headed towards two degrees centigrade, so, you know, somewhere around four degrees Fahrenheit, what we’re used to, you know, that’s the difference between 98.6 body temperature and 102.6.
And if you got a 102.6 fever, like, you’re sick. You’re really quite sick.
Jeff Goodell: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And like, you don’t got a lot of headroom above 102.6, particularly if you’re elderly or have heart issue, you know. So –
Jeff Goodell: Right.
Chris Hayes: — in some ways there’s a sort of useful micro macro kind of –
Jeff Goodell: Right.
Chris Hayes: — comparison between what your body’s doing and what the planet as a system’s doing, which is kind of only work in fairly narrow bands when it comes down to it.
Jeff Goodell: Right, and in my book, I call it the sort of Goldilocks zone of, you know, all organisms on Earth have evolved in this sort of temperature range that we are very well adapted, not just us humans, but butterflies and redwood trees and corn and corn crops and, I mean, everything, lizards. Everything is evolved in their sort of thresholds of temperature range that they can deal with.
And as our planet heats up, we’re pushing farther and farther outside that Goldilocks Zone, to which our bodies and the bodies of other creatures and all living things are not adapted and we don’t have like sweat 2.0, right?
Chris Hayes: Yeah. And when you say it that way, we’ve only got this one thing. I mean, it’s an obvious and sort of simple observation, but it’s a penetrating one, like, that’s it.
Jeff Goodell: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Like you got one machine –
Jeff Goodell: Right.
Chris Hayes: — you know, on your body to cool you down, that’s it. That’s all you get.
Jeff Goodell: Right.
Chris Hayes: Well, the other thing we have though is technology, right? I mean, that’s where the sort of next, kind of, you know, when we circle out one. So, like, obviously, as biological organisms, we evolved a certain threshold. Although we should say over the course of that long, you know, million years for, you know, humans and 250, 200,000 years for homo sapiens, that, you know, there’s been significant temperature fluctuations over that period of time.
There’s been ice ages and things like that. But we have a sort of biological inheritance for what we can do and what temperatures, but then of course we’ve got, you know, we’re the tool makers, right? So, we’ve come up with ways to cool things down. And that relates to sort of this next level out from like the sort of biophysical thing about heat, which is the social, civilizational aspect.
Like, talk a little bit about the interplay between like where people live, where societies grow up, where we have civilizations, and what the heat profiles are like.
Jeff Goodell: Yeah, I mean, so, we do have this thing called tech. First of all, to go to your basic point here, we do have this thing called technologies and adaptation. It’s not all just, you know, what our sweat mechanism can handle.
And we also have migration, right? So, I mean, we can move to cooler places. And that’s what animals do, plants do, we all do when we reach these sort of limits of our Goldilocks zones, we move. And that’s what humans have done during, you know, the sort of natural climate variations of the past.
And, you know, we have settled in places where we are able to deal with those ranges of temperatures with the technology that we have, right? I mean, which is one reason why, say Texas, where I live right now, and Florida, before air conditioning, we’re like not what they are right now, right? And you can make a very strong argument that air conditioning changed American politics in a very profound way.
The whole Southern strategy that Nixon, you know, kind of invented was developed because of the massive migration to Florida and Texas as a result of air conditioning. And so, these tools have allowed us to move into new places.
And, you know, I live in Austin. People obviously lived here in Austin before air conditioning. But it’s a whole lot nicer to live here when you can have access to air conditioning. But air conditioning as one tool of adaptation is wonderful and also deeply problematic.
Chris Hayes: I want to get to that, but I just want to linger here for a second and just stress a point here. And I think I maybe made it before (ph) on the podcast. And again, this is a very obvious point. So there’s no like novelty in it. But it’s a really fundamental one. And it’s one I come back to.
For 99.99999 percent of time of the human experience, we have had a technology to make ourselves warmer if it’s cold, but no technology to make ourselves cooler if it’s hot. So, the vast experience of humans on the planet is, we have fire and –
Jeff Goodell: Right.
Chris Hayes: — you know, you can live in cold places, and you can make it warmer. But literally, until air conditioning, you know, we had ice. You could go in ice caves. You could jump into water.
Obviously, there’s things that people have been doing through all of human history. But as a reliable technology to change things from, it’s too cold, I want to get warmer, it’s too warm, I got to get cooler, we had the first one for all of human society and the last one for like the last maybe 70 years.
And there’s a lot about human migration development that is embedded in that. You know, your point about the Southern United States, but even the air conditioning or lack of air conditioning in Europe, or what we see as public health issues emerging around heat, I mean, this asymmetry is a really important fundamental one to understand about where human civilization happens.
Jeff Goodell: Right, absolutely. And that’s why places that are changing so fast right now are so maladapted to these changes, right? So, I mean, Paris is a great example of a city that has obviously thrived for centuries in a relatively stable climate that never had these extremes of heat. And just in the last few years, the last decades or so, they’ve had a number of extreme heat waves.
There were, you know, in Europe last year, 60,000 people died from extreme heat just during the summer of last year. And it’s partly because the city itself, these places that we’ve settled, as you pointed out, are so maladapted to heat. They have not taken that into consideration in the construction of the cities because it’s nothing that they had to deal with before.
And so, to think about re-imagining Paris, which has all these tin roofs that are iconic for what Paris is, part of this, you know, the 18th century development of Paris has also turned the city and these buildings into like convection ovens during the summers in, you know, 2022 and 2023.
Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: So, you just said about the sort of air conditioning is sort of problematic as an incredible technology that it is. Why do you say that?
Jeff Goodell: You know, for one thing, it plays into the, oh, we can solve climate change with the silver bullet kind of thing. Where is the solution for climate change? Let’s just, you know, turn up the thermostat and get everybody air conditioning and what’s the problem, right?
And so, yes, democratizing air conditioning, making it more accessible to more people is really important. It’s certainly an important strategy to pursue in all this, but it is not a cure-all for this.
First of all, there are billions of people on this planet who do not have air conditioning, and for all intents and purposes, are never going to have air conditioning. And so, you know, what are they going to do? We are not going to air condition the ocean.
You know, we are not going to air condition the fields where wheat and corn grow, our food comes from. You know, air conditioning is going to have no impact on where mosquitoes go that are carrying dengue and malaria as our temperatures warm up.
I mean, and then there’s the final part of it, which I’m feeling here in Texas right now as it’s really hot and energy demand surges. There’s these threats of a major blackout, which, you know, one of the infrastructure experts in my book talks about a Heat Katrina, comparing it to Hurricane Katrina. So, where, you know, our sort of comfort is connected to this umbilical cord of reliable power.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, that Heat Katrina phrase from the book stuck with me because I was also reading an article about just emergency planning in places like Phoenix or Scottsdale or Maricopa County in Arizona. You know, if you have a combination of triple digit for a week and a mass blackout, you’re going to have a lot of heat deaths because at that point, you know, if you don’t have air conditioning and you have persistent heat, like you’re looking, and the Chicago heat wave in the 1990s in which you didn’t even really have a blackout, you know, still produced I think 800 deaths, as Eric Klinenberg chronicles in his great book on that –
Jeff Goodell: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — that, you know, there’s real, real public health, like an acute public health threat of the combination of heat wave and blackout. And of course, they’re related because it’s when the heat goes up that the grid gets the most stressed.
Jeff Goodell: Right. And it’s because of the way we have built buildings that are so dependent upon air conditioning. So that when they go away, they become convection ovens. You can’t open the windows, you know, everything is sealed and partly for efficiency purposes. And, you know, there’s one way of thinking good reason for all that.
But it’s also very bad reason for all that when you think about flexibility for what happens when the power goes out. I mean, there was a study in last year for Maricopa County that suggested 80,000 deaths in three days. I mean, brutal.
Chris Hayes: Eighty thousand deaths in three days.
Jeff Goodell: Yeah, in Maricopa County.
Chris Hayes: If you had a blackout, the worst kind of heatwave, a three-day blackout.
Jeff Goodell: A three-day blackout, right.
Chris Hayes: You just mentioned, you know, when you’re talking about air conditioning lots of places don’t have air conditioning and functionally won’t.
So, let’s talk about the places. We were talking about a lot about the U.S., and I think that’s, you know, most of the people who listen to this podcast, though not all, international listeners, we know you’re there and we love you and appreciate you. Where are the places that are most exposed to this? Like, when we sort of zoom out, like, what are the front edges of the heat frontier as we’re entering this era?
Jeff Goodell: Well, I think that, you know, I would have to point to Southern Pakistan, which has already seen a lot of record-breaking extreme heat waves that have lasted longer and longer. Northern India also has a kind of heat band there that is always on the forefront of extreme temperatures.
You know, parts of China, I think, are also very vulnerable. Sub-Saharan Africa is very vulnerable with very low air conditioning availability.
But ironically, when you think about the actual biggest mortality risks, it’s not always directly correlated with temperature because, you know, as we saw with the Pacific Northwest heat wave, for example, that was a really interesting example where, you know, we had over, in 2021, over 1,000 people died in the Pacific Northwest.
Obviously, a very sophisticated, very wealthy part of the world, but they were completely maladapted to heat. Almost nobody had air conditioning. Also, almost nobody has any kind of heat education, like what to do? Like what do I do?
And so, in certain ways, the most vulnerable places are these places that are maladapted to heat and where you have huge population centers with no air conditioning and no idea what to do when it gets hot.
Chris Hayes: That’s really interesting. So, there’s right, two categories. There’s places that are really hot all the time and are going to get pushed up to like hotter and hotter, but at least those places are built for the heat in some ways and people’s patterns of life and habitus and, you know, structures are built.
Well, I mean, you know, you encounter this, you know, when you’re talking about Paris, you know, if you go to a place like in, you know, Southern Italy, right, like, there’s no sun coming into any of the houses, right? Like, they –
Jeff Goodell: Right, exactly.
Chris Hayes: You know, they have built structures, and no one’s out in the middle of the day, like no one.
Jeff Goodell: Right.
Chris Hayes: It’s just inside in the dark, like, so, that’s an interesting thing that’s somewhat counterintuitive, that there’s also risk for places that are really just not built for heat in any way. And if they get hit with a super anomaly, you know, a one in a hundred-year event, you know, in the old way of measuring it, that can be really dangerous.
Jeff Goodell: Exactly, exactly. I mean, I saw the reverse of that in Texas here, because we had this ice storm three years ago that knocked out power for a number of days. And I’ve lived in the Northeast for a long time. For me, an ice storm and dealing with these extreme cold events, I knew what to do.
I knew how to drive. I knew, like, what precautions to take and everything. People in Texas had no idea. They were completely clueless about how to handle an extreme cold event. And it’s the same kind of a thing in these kinds of northern cities that could get hit with a heat wave.
Chris Hayes: You know, there’s also this sort of iron law, as I think Bill McKibben said on the podcast last week, of climate change is the less you contributed to it, the more exposed you are to it, right? So, you know, the poorest countries, the places in the global south, the places like the island nation of Tuvalu, which didn’t produce, you know, to a first approximation, any carbon emissions –
Jeff Goodell: Right.
Chris Hayes: — compared to the United States, right, they’re the ones who are on the front edge of it. And, you know, when you talk about places like India and Pakistan and folks in the Middle East, there’s also this sort of global south, you know, huge kind of justice question of who’s going to face the worst of this first.
Jeff Goodell: That’s absolutely true. And I talk about this in my book about the line between the cooled and the dammed. But it’s not just in the global north versus the global south. I mean, that’s the sort of big partition. But it’s also, you know, here in Texas and in every other place, it’s the vulnerable people who maybe have air conditioning but can’t afford to turn it on or afraid if they do turn it on, they won’t be able to afford dinner.
Or the guy you talked about working on the rooftop. And he’s out there, and he thinks rightfully, in many cases, that if I try to take a break, I’m going to get fired. So I’m going to keep working, and maybe I’ll die, maybe I won’t. Heat draws a very bright line between the vulnerable and the protected.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, and even within a society, like who’s working inside –
Jeff Goodell: Right.
Chris Hayes: — in air conditioning and on Zoom, and who is digging ditches, laying foundation, hammering roofs, cutting hedges, I mean, the full list of those jobs that have to be outside, some of which can be relatively well compensated, but in the main are lower wage jobs and lower status jobs.
Jeff Goodell: And people who don’t vote. I mean, here in Texas, Governor Abbott, in the midst of the heat wave, right, three weeks ago, a month ago, whatever it was, signed legislation prohibiting any state or county from passing any laws requiring shade or water breaks for outdoor construction workers.
Chris Hayes: The law preemptively prohibits localities from affirmatively passing legislation that would require shade and water breaks for people working outdoors.
Jeff Goodell: Correct.
Chris Hayes: It is not allowable in the state of Texas for a municipality like El Paso, for instance, which set a record for the number of three-digit days it ever had, if I’m not mistaken, to say it’s the law in El Paso that if you’re running a construction crew, they got to get shade and water breaks every X hours. You can’t do that.
Jeff Goodell: You cannot do that. Thanks to Governor Abbott. Yes.
Chris Hayes: Truly, that’s really sick.
Jeff Goodell: It’s sick, barbaric, yes. The sort of rationalization for the legislation was like streamlining the laws and there’s too many conflicting state and local laws, blah, blah, blah. It’s just flat out barbaric. And you know, I live here in Texas. I see who the people are, who are keeping the state going. And, you know, they are largely, you know, brown.
A lot of Mexican workers, they are amazing and incredible people. But they’re not the people who vote. They’re not the people that Abbott cares about. I mean, look at the immigration politics, right? I mean, it’s hard not to see a kind of racial dimension of this, you know, very explicitly in the way we deal with heat.
Chris Hayes: As I was watching this summer unfold, and I read that Maricopa County survey, and I was reading the local El Paso coverage, you know, it was interesting, too, because, like, I don’t know why I was reading the El Paso coverage. But, you know, El Paso had a really, really brutal heat wave. And, like, again, El Paso is a hot place, right? So it’s not like these people are like whining.
Jeff Goodell: Right.
Chris Hayes: You know, it’s like they know.
Jeff Goodell: Right.
Chris Hayes: They know what it’s like to live in a hot place. They live in El Paso. And people were still like, “Whoa, this is a lot.” I do wonder, to circle back to a point you made, the main thrust of internal migration in the U.S. over the last 60 years is places that have winter to places that don’t have winter, basically.
People have been going to the Sunbelt, away from the Midwest and the Northeast. I’m oversimplifying, but that’s the basic thrust. I do wonder is there a point at which people are like, I don’t want to live in Tucson. Like it’s too hot?
Jeff Goodell: Well, based on my purely anecdotal evidence from the last three weeks or four weeks in Austin, I would say there’s going to be a mass stampede out of places like this. But, you know, yes, I think that there is absolutely going to be, in fact, one could argue already, is a turning point in all of this because, first of all, migration is complex.
You know, I moved from the relatively gentle pastures of upstate New York, Saratoga Springs to the belly of the beast here in Austin, not because I was seeking out warmer weather or anything, but because I fell in love with a woman who lived in Austin, and I wanted to be with her.
Chris Hayes: That’ll do it, yeah.
Jeff Goodell: Yeah, so, you know, migration, where you live and things are complicated. But, you know, this general change that you were talking about, it’s been driven by cheaper real estate, you know, lower taxes, all kinds of, you know, economic incentives and things like that. But at a certain point, the dynamics start to change, you know, I mean, this kind of extreme, people think, oh, I’m going to go live in a warmer climate.
I can spend my life in shorts and flip-flops, and that’s going to be kind of really great. Who doesn’t like living in shorts and flip-flops, right? And people generally, I think it’s fair to say, like warmer climates than cooler climates.
But at a certain point, that changes. And there’s another version of the Goldilocks threshold. It’s like, wait, this is too hot. I can’t deal with this. You know, I went for a walk, and my dog almost died. And, you know, I don’t want to live like this anymore.
I mean, summer here is like vampire season, you know. It’s like, you don’t go outside during the day. If you’re going to go for a run or go for a walk, you get up at 4:30 in the morning. You go to Barton Springs, the public swimming hole in the center of the town, in the evening, and you can hear people jump in the water, their bodies kind of sizzling as they cool off, you know.
In some ways, that’s okay. But on other levels, it’s like, no, I don’t want to live like this anymore. Summer has become, for a lot of people in Texas, not a fun time. You were talking about how much you love summer. That vibe is gone –
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jeff Goodell: — or is vanishing.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, I mean, it’s like I did multiple winters in Chicago, which I did not enjoy and don’t like. And like –
Jeff Goodell: Right.
Chris Hayes: — it was like a bear. You kind of gritted your teeth through it, you know?
Jeff Goodell: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And you figure out ways to adapt and like you would like wear long johns every day, but again, like it’s long. It’s like –
Jeff Goodell: Right.
Chris Hayes: — yeah. And I think it’ll be interesting to see the degree to which that does start to change things.
I mean, the other question I guess for you is like, what do we need to do, right? So, like, we need to arrest climate change. Like, it’s bad enough at this level. And it’s going to get worse. So, obviously, we need to hit the Paris goals and it would be better if we got there faster. And we need to rapidly decarbonize the entire economy. And we’re not doing enough.
There’s some encouraging stuff happening on the energy front, there really is. It’s like the first time there’s any been any shoots of spring in the 20 years I’ve covered this story. But it’s got to happen much faster. So, all of that said, right, like, what do we have to do? Like, even that, we’re going to live in a warmer world. What should we be thinking about adaptation-wise?
Jeff Goodell: Yes, that’s a great point. And I just want to underscore that, yes, cutting fossil fuel emissions is by far job number one, quickly as possible, because that’s what’s causing, you know, this increase in heat. But, you know, we have to think differently about how we live. I mean, we have to think differently about how we design cities.
You know, I mentioned Barton Springs here in Austin. There’s a big swimming hole in the center of the city, is public park area. It’s a great resource. Not enough cities have enough of that kind of thing, green spaces in cities, places where people can go, bringing, you know, nature back into cities, more trees, more shade structures, things like that.
Passing laws that actually do require like water and shade breaks, doing the opposite of what Governor Abbott here has done, you know, building protections from heat into our culture and into our economy so that you don’t take your life at risk doing your job on a summer day in Texas. You know, getting smart about heat, about what the risks are and how to deal with it.
I mean, the reason I wrote this book is I have been covering climate change for 10 years, and even though, you know, we talk about global warming and heat in the general sense all the time, I took a 15-block walk down the street on a 115-degree day in Phoenix. And my heart was pounding and I was feeling kind of hallucinogenic. And I thought, wow, if I had to go 10 more blocks, I’m not sure I would make it.
I did not understand myself how risky heat is. And so, you know, getting smarter about this and getting more educated. And also, we in the media have to do a lot better job. I mean, there’s a lot of really bad messaging around heat and climate in general, but heat particularly, right? I mean, we do a lot of like, it’s a hot day, look at all the kids playing in the sprinklers, you know, or everybody’s at the beach today kind of imagery.
And we need to do a better job with messaging about that. You know, there’s the idea of ranking heat waves or even possibly naming them, the way we do storms. You think about how good our governments are at mobilizing people to understand the risks of an approaching hurricane. If we could do something even close to that for heat waves, that would save a lot of lives.
Chris Hayes: It’s so striking to me, again, all this stuff comes back to politics in the end, right?
Jeff Goodell: Right. Totally. Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Because like, you know, with climate, it’s like, we know what to do. We need to decarbonize the economy. But doing that is another thing because the politics of it are difficult and there’s entrenched interests that make a lot of money off fossil fuels and political representatives who are fealty to them.
And then negative partisan affiliation, you know, polarization such that like, if the Libs think climate change is real, well, then it can’t be real. The same way that like the COVID vaccine doesn’t work because the wrong people like it.
Jeff Goodell: Right, exactly.
Chris Hayes: So, what’s so striking with the Abbott thing was like it happened amidst all this. And I’m like, is there a tipping point? Like, is there some political tipping point on heat that changes things?
Jeff Goodell: You know, I would love to believe that there is and that there will be, and that there’ll be a moment when 10 workers die on a rooftop in Houston on a summer day, and that galvanizes the state of Texas to pass laws and changes everything. It’s, you know, that there would be or could be some kind of tipping point in this kind of thing. But I fear that that’s not going to happen.
And I fear that it’s going to be something much more like COVID, that it just becomes this, we adapt by saying, oh, well, 10 workers died on a rooftop in Houston. It’s hot out, that’s unfortunate, but, you know, it’s a hot day, and that’s what happens on hot days sometimes, and we carry on.
And, you know, we’re going to forget not only that these deaths were or could be preventable and they didn’t have to die if we had like water breaks and intelligent labor laws to protect these kinds of workers, but also that this climate that is killing people is the climate that we created by 50 years of denial and political insanity, and that we are kind of stewing in our own juices that we’ve created this world.
And so, that’s the kind of adaptation that I’m kind of most concerned about, and yet I feel is kind of clearly inevitable.
Chris Hayes: More of our conversation after this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: We’ve been talking almost exclusively about land heat.
So, I want to talk a little bit about ocean heat because it’s something that you write about in the book and also because it’s actually way worse in the ocean right now than it is on land. Talk, first of all, about what percentage of the heat the oceans absorb and what the effects of rising temperatures in the oceans are.
Jeff Goodell: Well, you know, the oceans are like this giant heat sink for the heat that is accumulating in the atmosphere. You know, 90 percent of the heat that is accumulating is going into the oceans. And the oceans are like this giant kind of thermal flywheel that is holding all of this heat.
And just like our atmosphere, the ocean not only holds this heat, but it also, you know, they have essentially marine heat waves where because of the currents and because of various other phenomenon where you have these pockets of extreme heat.
And I wrote in the book about one in the Pacific off the coast of California called The Blob that hit in 2016, 2017. And, you know, they’re devastating events. They kill living things just like heat waves kill living things on land. Marine creatures have the same problems that all of us have, which is if it gets too hot, you have to adapt. And most, you know, fish don’t have air conditioning. And so, they have to either go somewhere cooler or die.
And some fish and other living creatures can move, but others can’t. The prime example being, you know, coral reefs, right? I mean, coral reefs are vulnerable to changes in ocean chemistry also, but heat is the big killer of coral reefs. And they’re magnificent, complex biological organisms that are stuck in one place.
And so, when you have a marine heat wave come through, like we’re seeing the temperatures off the coast of Florida right now coming close to 100 degrees Fahrenheit, I mean, this is a just extinction level event for coral reefs in the Florida Keys and throughout the Caribbean right now.
And, you know, we’re rapidly approaching a moment of just complete wipeout of coral reefs on the planet, except for a few places like in the Red Sea where there’s some heat adapted corals and things. They are incredibly vulnerable.
And the hard thing about marine heat waves and marine heat is, you know, we don’t see it.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jeff Goodell: Not many of us are divers going out there onto the reefs and into the ocean to look at what’s happening. So, we tend to ignore it. And yet, it’s a hugely consequential event, not only just for, you know, sympathy for, you know, these incredible ecosystems that exist on our planet, but also for food. I mean, the many, many nations depend hugely on marine catches for food supplies.
And it all brings up all kinds of questions about conflict in the ocean, about fishing rights and all kinds of things as fish move around, and whose right is it to catch the fish now that they’ve moved 700 miles farther north, things like that.
Chris Hayes: The coral rescue operation, I saw an article about people like, I mean, literally like go and get the coral off the reef in South Florida to try to save it. It’s that bad, which is like, if it stays in this water, it’s going to die.
Jeff Goodell: Right, and those are noble efforts. They’re trying to take pieces of these reefs and put them essentially in a safe harbor, in a safe place, in a lab or wherever, and then, you know, regrow them later. But the problem is the scale of what we’re talking about here and the slowness of coral reef regeneration. And a lot of it, I hate to say this, it’s really important work and scientists are learning a lot about the impacts of heat on reefs because of this and about potential resiliency and things.
But the idea that these kinds of restoration stuff are going to save these reefs in any meaningful way, especially given our continued, you know, hell-bent consumption of fossil fuels and continued heating is just, you know, a kind of tragic feel-good story.
Chris Hayes: Can I ask you a personal question?
Jeff Goodell: Yes, you can.
Chris Hayes: You’ve been covering climate change for how long?
Jeff Goodell: Twenty-three years. I just calculated it the other day.
Chris Hayes: Your coal book is amazing, and the water book is great, too. The chapter on the sort of water engineering of South Florida still sticks with me. I think about it all the time.
You mentioned earlier that you moved to Austin. You fell in love with a woman and you moved to Austin. And I was, I’ve been watching, I’m like the last person in the world to watch “The Last of Us”, the HBO, you know, zombie apocalypse. And, you know, one of the themes of that is like, it’s the apocalypse, but like, they’re humans and like, they fall in love, or they get mad at each other.
And it’s like, there’s just something about you saying that amidst this that had me like, think in those terms of like, how do you process this personally as someone whose job and life’s work is chronicling it, but also like, you’re a human in the world who’s going to wake up in the morning, make coffee, fall in love, et cetera.
Jeff Goodell: I’ve never quite thought of myself as part of the zombie apocalypse. But, yes.
Chris Hayes: Well, I mean, I’m hoping it doesn’t quite get as bad as “The Last of Us” –
Jeff Goodell: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — but like as you’re sitting here talking about like, well, like the coral’s gone, you know, and you could start to get that like panicky feeling. I mean, I have this feeling. I’m prone to anxiety anyway, but I’m just curious how you think about it.
Jeff Goodell: Yes, well, you know, first of all, there’s one part of me that thinks about it as a journalist, as a writer, and as somebody who is chronicling what, you know, I’m not the first to say this, but is clearly the great story of our time. It’s like how are we going to deal with these changes? And what does this say about human character and human potential for innovation? And, you know, it’s just this ever-expanding story that’s becoming more and more central to our lives.
You know, 20 years ago, when I started writing about climate change, I would tell people about it, and it would be like I was writing about the sex life of porcupines or something. It was like, you know, oh, that’s a cute little thing that you’re doing, you know?
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jeff Goodell: And now everybody wants to know, what should I invest in? Where should I move, you know? Are we doomed or not? You know, this sort of binary thing. And so, just from a journalist’s perspective, I find it incredibly fascinating, you know?
On another level, as a journalist, it feels like, okay, so, if I’m going to spend my life doing something like this, it’s meaningful. I feel like it’s making some kind of contribution to the world, of understanding and helping people to understand what’s going on. So, there’s that level.
Chris Hayes: It’s very meaningful, your work.
Jeff Goodell: Well, thank you, that’s very –
Chris Hayes: It’s been really meaningful work. It’s incredibly important work, and it’s work that I’ve loved and depended on. So, you should definitely feel that way.
Jeff Goodell: Well, thank you. And there’s a third level, which is a weird thing to say, but I will say it anyway, which is that understanding how fragile our world is, understanding how perishable all of this is. I felt this very powerfully when I went to Antarctica and looked at these enormous ice sheets and thought about them kind of going away. It gives you a kind of vividness to your sense of your time here on the planet, that this is all provisional, that, you know, this oldest oak tree I’m looking at in my backyard is only here because of these certain conditions and may not be here. I feel this very strongly when I walk on Miami Beach.
It’s like this place is fantastic in all kinds of human cultural ways. I love Miami Beach, but it is such a temporary arrangement of sand and steel. You know, it is just not going to be there that long in the larger sense, right? And, but it makes it kind of more wonderful when you think about it that way, because it’s like, okay, here and now, look at this amazing thing.
In 100 years when someone hears about this, they won’t believe it, but here, I’m here, and here it is.
Chris Hayes: I feel that profoundly, too, actually. I would say I have a similar way of thinking about it. I mean, now I don’t want to be overly confessional here. This is the second week in a row that we’ve done a climate-themed podcast, you know, because I don’t, I have a lot of guilt about how much I do or don’t cover it, frankly.
And, you know, I don’t have to get into this, I’m not going to use you as my therapist, but because this is what you do, I think, well, you know, there’s nothing more you could do than what you or Bill McKibben are doing. You both sort of devoted your life’s work to this, and this is what you do. And I don’t think there’s a single thing that’s more worthy to do, honestly, even though obviously there’s a million different things that people do that are worthy and meaningful.
But I have the same feeling of like, there’s something sort of terrifyingly sublime about understanding the contingency of human thriving.
Jeff Goodell: Yes.
Chris Hayes: You know, why is there something rather than nothing?
Jeff Goodell: Yes.
Chris Hayes: This sort of original question, and then why are we able to be in a place that where we can fall in love or we can raise our children or do anything is all because of this crazy interplay of a bunch of contingencies and will and ingenuity and social organization and social mobilization, solidarity and all these things that produce this cluster of things that make Miami Beach possible, that make like a little league game in a summer day in Austin possible, that make, you know, falling in love in Saratoga Springs possible.
Like, you know, that does inform something that’s spiritually profound in the midst of chronicling something as awful as what we’re going through.
Jeff Goodell: Yes, I mean, I feel that very strongly. And, you know, it’s a hard thing for a lot of people to kind of understand, but it’s also part of why I am so not a doomer, you know?
Chris Hayes: Yes, me, too. Yes.
Jeff Goodell: Because I think just as looking at my oak tree in the backyard, I can see, you know, new leaves coming off it and things like that. I also believe that out of this tumultuous moment, you know, and all of this change and all this disruption of this fragile contingency of things that you just went through, some amazing things can and will emerge.
And, you know, the hard thing is holding the scope and scale of the loss and suffering that are surely to come. I go to the Great Barrier Reef and it makes me weep, you know. I mean, it’s just such an incredible, magnificent structure of nature. And to think that it’s going to go away is just, you know, it really tears my heart.
But I also believe that out of this can emerge an amazing new world that will be flawed in its ways, too, but also better in many ways. And, you know, I look at a city like Austin and it’s like, we can do a lot better than this.
Austin’s a cool place, but every time I drive by a strip mall, I think we could do better than this, you know. I mean, there’s a lot of ways of building a city or powering a country that don’t require us to dig up black rocks and pound them up and burn them to generate electricity. So, the sense of possibility in this sort of rebirth kind of metaphor, I think, is also a huge part of what keeps me going in this.
Chris Hayes: Jeff Goodell is the author of numerous books. His latest is called “The Heat Will Kill You First, Life and Death on a Scorched Planet.” He’s a contributing writer at Rolling Stone and it’s been a great pleasure to have you on, Jeff. Thank you so much.
Jeff Goodell: Thank you, Chris.
Chris Hayes: Well, that got heavy there in the end, but I thought, you know, usefully so. It’s obviously something that weighs on my mind, and I think a lot of people’s minds. Made me think we should talk more about that aspect of the climate crisis, but great thanks to Jeff Goodell.
The book’s called “The Heat Will Kill You First.” You can get in touch with us. Tell us how you’re feeling. You can use the hashtag #WITHpod on what used to be known as Twitter. I won’t say its new name because I find it too annoying.
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“Why Is This Happening” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia. This episode was edited by Janmaris Perez, engineered by Bob Mallory, and features music by Eddie Cooper. You can see more of our work, including things we mentioned here, by going to NBCNews.com/WhyIsThisHappening.
“Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Bob Mallory and featuring music by Eddie Cooper. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here by going to NBCNews.com/whyisthishappening?