Records for global and local temperatures are breaking with an alarming frequency. Texas is, as we publish this podcast, in the midst of yet another monster heat wave, this time with a heat index in and around Houston of 115 degrees. Heat poses serious risks that often go underappreciated compared to other extreme weather events that are more visceral like hurricanes or droughts or wildfires.
But in fact, heat kills more people than all other natural disasters combined. And rising heat is contributing to all of the other natural disasters. Many workers, like those in agriculture and construction, can't escape the heat by going indoors and too many Texans can't afford to keep the AC on. In Texas, we consistently see about 30% of the population having to choose between food, medicine, and power, which is extremely dangerous during these heat waves.
To better understand heat, I spoke with Jeff Goodell the bestselling author of The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet, which is now out in paperback and I highly recommend it. During the podcast, Jeff explains in detail how intensifying heat impacts our health and communities. We talked about the scale of heat related illnesses and deaths, the need to reimagine how we build our homes and cities to actually cope with and adapt to heat and to retrofit our existing infrastructure. We talked about the strain that heat puts on the power grid, the subject of an op-ed Jeff wrote for the New York Times recently, and the need to reduce emissions a whole lot more.
We also talked about the deadly combination of heat waves and other natural disasters. What is commonly now being referred to in the language is evolving around these things as compounding disasters. Unfortunately, tragic examples just in the last month in Houston were following the Hurricane Beryl outages. There was a heat wave, temperatures were consistently in the 90s, and there were a number of heat related deaths.
I encourage you to check out not only The Heat Will Kill You First, but Jeff's other books, The Water Will Come about rising sea levels, which is a great read, Big Coal, which goes back a ways, but I think holds up as well as all his articles in Rolling Stone over the years, as well as his recent op-ed in New York Times.
I hope you enjoy the episode. Timestamps, show notes, and the transcript are below. If you like the episode, please don’t forget to like, share, subscribe, and leave a five-star review wherever you get your podcasts.
Timestamps
4:12 - Physiological impacts of heat and how to stay safe
9:13 - Scale of heat-related deaths and illness
12:28 - What is a Hurricane Katrina of heat and how is heat a threat multiplier
17:58 - Resilience solutions for heat and extreme weather
23:52 - Maintaining hope in the face of the realities of climate change
32:43 - What will happen to frontline climate communities like Houston as climate change continues to exacerbate extreme heat and other weather conditions
36:51 - Economic costs of natural disasters
41:49 - Need for corporate and political leadership; reimaging how we structure cities and communities; strategies and technologies for mitigation and adaptation
50:08 - Climate denialism and climate nihilism
56:51 - Recommended reading and Jeff’s future research
Show Notes
The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet by Jeff Goodell
Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America's Energy Future by Jeff Goodell
The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World by Jeff Goodell
The Heat Wave Scenario That Keeps Climate Scientists Up at Night - New York Times Op-Ed by Jeff Goodell
Obama Takes on Climate Change: The Rolling Stone Interview with Jeff Goodell
Beryl was the weakest a hurricane could be. Why does it feel like Houston isn't the same? Article from Sarah Smith, Houston Chronicle
Heat-related mortality in Europe during the summer of 2022 - Nature Magazine
Transcript
Doug Lewin
Jeff Goodell, welcome to the Energy Capital Podcast.
Jeff Goodell
Hey, thank you for having me. Good to be here.
Doug Lewin
So good to talk with you. As you know, I'm a big fan of your books, have read some of the earlier ones, Big Coal and The Water Will Come. But The Heat Will Kill You First is the one you put out last summer. This book is really amazing. I highly recommend, everybody listening, read it. We'll talk about it a lot today, but it really is worth the read.
One of the things I've been telling people about this, and I was gratified to see Jeff, and I'm sure you'll be gratified too, I was home where I'm from in St. Louis, and my mom had a copy of your book and that means you've really broken through, not that my mom isn't well read or whatever, but she usually doesn't read about climate change. And I had told her in a previous conversation, I said, not only did I learn a lot from this book, I think it actually has the potential to be a lifesaver because we're not ready for the changes that are happening, the heat that is intensifying people don't yet understand I was hoping, I mean, you know, look, we talk a lot about adaptation. We were going to talk about that in this conversation, but a key adaptation strategy is knowledge and learning.
Can you talk a little bit about, cause I just want to start here because if people get nothing else out of this and I hope they get a lot more out of it to understand what heat does to the body, to understand the warning signs, and to understand hyperthermia. Everybody kind of knows hypothermia, but people don't really understand the term hyperthermia that the opposite can happen. You can overheat, understand those warning signs and what to do. I think this is a great service you provide in the book. Can you talk a little bit about heat and how people can be attuned to the signals there's a problem and what to do?
Jeff Goodell
Sure, but first let me say, it makes me very happy to hear that your mom had my book. That's one of the measures of success for me as a writer. So when people's moms have my book, I know that it's actually getting out there.
So most people just are not aware of how dangerous heat really is. And it really, to talk about that, it really starts with thinking about your body as this sort of exquisitely tuned, you know, kind of heat balancing machine. You know, we're not conscious of it. Nothing, none of this happens in a conscious way, but you know, our body works very hard to maintain an internal body temperature of around 98.6, 98 or 99 degrees. It kind of goes up and down a little bit during the day and night.
But that stability of that temperature is very important to all our kind of metabolic functioning and into a healthy body. And we all know that when you go to, if you're not feeling well and you go to the doctor, the first thing they do is take your temperature. It's a sign of something wrong. And, you know, what happens when we get into an extreme heat situation is our body temperature starts to rise and we have, our bodies have over millions of years of evolution designed a way to deal with that, which is sweat. And we all know that. That's what happens when we get hot. Our cooling mechanism is sweat.
What happens is that sometimes we get into situations, whether it's because we're working hard outdoors or because the temperature outside is so hot that our body can't dump heat fast enough. And so your body temperature starts to rise. And as it starts to rise, it puts more and more strain on your heart. Your heart starts freaking out saying, okay, I got to cool things down. We got to push more blood out to the skin. So it starts pulling the blood away from your internal organs, away from your brain, pushing it all out towards the skin, which is one reason why you feel lightheaded sometimes when you start to get hot, your heart starts pounding, you start sweating. And that puts a lot of strain on your internal organs.
For most people, that's a warning sign. You start to feel dizzy. You start to feel your heart pounding. You start to feel that something is going wrong. You have that feeling of, I've got to get to some shade. I've got to get out of the heat. And if you do and you get out of the heat, and you can stabilize your body temperature, then you'll kind of be okay and your body will recover.
But if you can't, if you're still out in the heat and if you are working or you ignore these warning signs, your body's temperature starts to rise around 102, 103. You begin to get into the risk of heat stroke, which is basically a way for your body begins to shut itself down in order to preserve itself and to bring blood to the most important organs to keep them from being damaged.
If you don't get out of the heat, your body temperature gets to 103, 104, then you start to get into real trouble. Literally the cell membranes in your body start to melt. And you basically begin hemorrhaging and melting from the inside. It's really not pretty. And the way to deal with this is not, is one way and that is to get out of the heat. There's no, you can't take Tylenol to lower your body temperature. You know, when you go to the hospital and you're overheating, they put you in a cold place. And sometimes they, in the Pacific Northwest during the heat waves, they were putting ice in body bags and zipping people up in ice covered body bags. When you're in extreme heat conditions, you gotta get out of the heat. You gotta cool off, cold shower, jump in Barton Springs, put cold compress on your neck and your wrists and your feet, even feet in cold water helps. You just gotta get out of the heat, whatever you need to do to do that.
Doug Lewin
Yeah. And you talk a lot about that in the book that like a lot of people, their heads go and before I read the book, my head always went there, you just got to drink more water, like get more water into you. And hydration is important. But if you're in some kind of a heat stroke, water and going to save you, you've got to cool the body.
Jeff Goodell
Yeah, there's this notion that you can deal with any kind of heat as long as you have enough water to drink. But water in itself does not cool you down. It's not the drinking of water that cools you off. The importance of water is that when you're in extreme heat conditions, you sweat a lot. And you can quickly sweat out the amount of water that you have in your body. So you need to replenish that water in order to continue to keep sweating to cool down. But it's a real myth that as long as you have enough water, you'll be okay.
Doug Lewin
Another major takeaway I got from your book that I did not realize before is that heat kills more people than all the other natural disasters combined. If you take hurricanes and earthquakes and tornadoes and just all of them and add them all up, they don't equal heat. Can you talk a little bit about some of the statistics and sort of the scale of this problem?
Jeff Goodell
Yeah, that is certainly true that heat kills more than all other kind of weather related climate impacts combined. But it's really hard to get good numbers on it for two reasons. One is our understanding of the risks of extreme heat are pretty new. When I first started reporting this book five years ago there was very little research on this and very little kind of public health awareness of the risks of extreme heat. And one of the problems is when people die of extreme heat, it's not like they die of a gunshot wound where you can look at them and say, well, he was shot. That's clear what happened here. When people die of extreme heat, they often die of something else, of the proximate cause of something else, a heart attack, some other kind of internal organ failure, sometimes a fall off of a ladder because they got dizzy from the heat and they fell off a ladder. Car accidents, all kinds of things.
The upshot of all this is that it's widely understood by public health officials and researchers who look into this that heat mortality numbers are hugely under-recorded and that we don't really know how many people heat kills every year. We have statistics like in Europe in the summer of 2022, and it was really hot, not as hot as last summer, but still pretty hot. There was an estimate of 60,000 people dying between May and September in Europe from extreme heat.
Doug Lewin
In which year, Jeff?
Jeff Goodell
The numbers for 2022.
Doug Lewin
Oh wow, 60,000.
Jeff Goodell
Yeah, you know, the Global Lancet did a study a couple of years ago trying to come up with some kind of global tally of deaths from extreme heat and they came up with a little over 400,000 a year globally. And even that they caveat as being an underestimate. So we really don't have a good idea.
And one other thing to add to that is mortality is just one metric. Maybe not even the most important metric. Emergency room visits go way up. We know that prolonged exposure to extreme heat has other long-term health implications like kidney damage because you're processing so much water. And then we're also learning about all kinds of psychological impacts of extreme heat, which I think all of us intuitively understand. And this translates into higher levels of domestic violence, things like that. We're also really good study showing suicide rates are higher during heat waves. So there's a lot of other implications beyond just mortality numbers.
Doug Lewin
Yeah. Heat, think a good way to put it is heat is kind of this ultimate, you know, threat multiplier, right? It's like a military term to talk about a threat. A threat that makes everything else around it worse. And heat clearly does that. Goodness. I mean, we're seeing that all over the place with all of the various natural disasters.
I wanted to talk with you a little bit about this actually, because that was something that also stuck out to me from the book was a conversation you had with Mikhail Chester of Arizona State talking about some kind of a Hurricane Katrina of heat, which I think is a very interesting concept. And I want you to talk about that. I'm also interested in, when we're recording just not very long after the Hurricane Beryl hit Houston. We've seen this before, but it just, again, brings it into greater focus. This kind of threat multiplier of a hurricane actually causes power to go out. then because hurricanes often happen in really more like August, but this one was July, you end up with these triple digit temperature days and you could actually end up with an actual Hurricane Katrina hurricane, plus a Hurricane Katrina of heat. And so again, you kind of get this compounding effect. So let's talk about the threat multiplier piece, but maybe first just start off and talk a little bit about this concept of what what Hurricane Katrina of heat, what does that mean?
Jeff Goodell
Well, it's a term that was coined by Michael Chester, a researcher at Arizona State who I talked to while I was reporting my book. And actually the wind event, that derecho in Houston a few weeks ago, inspired me to write a New York Times opinion piece, where I talked about this. It was really one of the most striking kind of findings or thought provoking findings during my reporting of the book. Which is talking about the confluence of extreme heat events and blackouts, right? And it goes to this question of air conditioning, which is something that we could talk about for hours in itself.
Air conditioning is widely seen as, I give book talks all the time, people say, well, yeah, I understand heat's problem, but we just need to get more air conditioning for more people and everything will be fine. And of course it's much more complicated than that. But this idea of a heat Katrina talks about that. The way we build buildings now, especially in places like Houston and Phoenix and things like that, are, they're glass and steel or, they're not designed with ideas of natural ventilation. The windows are sealed and you just bolt in an air conditioning unit and that's what the sort of climate control system for a building is.
And that's all well and good, except if you have, when you have an extreme heat event, you get more and more power demand, it puts strain on the grid. And if that all happens at the same time as you get a major wind event or a hurricane, you can have something like what Mikhail talked about as Katrina of heat, which is the confluence of an extreme heat event at the same time as a blackout, whatever the cause of that blackout is.
And he and a bunch of other researchers did a really comprehensive study looking at three different cities. And I'll just be very brief about it. And they found that with a five-day blackout, 48 hours of actual no power, and then three days in the kind of gradual restoration of power, during an extreme heat wave, they used Phoenix as one study. They estimated that there could be as many as 13,000 deaths within 48 hours and more than 800,000 emergency room visits in those 48 hours, which is just a kind of mind boggling kind of statistics. You know, I looked into this study pretty closely and talked to all of the authors and they all think it's an underestimate of the scale of the risk.
And so, it really starts to paint this picture of how vulnerable a modern city that depends on air conditioning really is and how air conditioning is wonderful, as important as it is for keeping us cool. It's also like this sort of Damocles hanging over us. And that has a lot to do with the way we build buildings. They're designed to functional only as long as the air conditioning is functional and then if and when the air conditioning goes they turn into convection.
Doug Lewin
I've been talking a lot during the restoration of Hurricane Beryl, and will continue to afterwards, about the importance of having microgrids of how we've got to be. I mean, yes, we need to be smarter about the way that we design our buildings and I think passive house is something that is worth looking at, because you want to have resilience built in so that if you don't have that equipment, you can still, it's still survivable. But we also just have to recognize that like the infrastructure that's out there, it is what it is. And it's, it can be changed and modified in some ways and we can build smarter going forward, but we've got what we've got and we are reliant on power. And when we are going to have a lot of people die and a lot of people visit emergency rooms in dire straits if we get those kinds of conditions.
And this is what I hope people start to take away is like the sort of politicization of climate change and of people saying it's not happening or saying it's a hoax or that kind of stuff. It's not just wrong. It's dangerous because we have to get our heads around these massive threats that are in front of us and start to plan a different way of existing and adapting. And you know what's the old saying you know you can't deal with a problem unless you acknowledge the problem exists. It's like the first step of AA or something like that right? Yeah talk a little bit about the solutions to that, microgrids are one of them, I mean what else can we actually do to get ahead of this, we're not ahead of it we're behind it, what can we do to deal with it?
Jeff Goodell
Well, I mean, I think you're right. First of all, microgrids, I want to underscore the importance of that. I know you've talked about it and written about it a lot. And, you know, there is this rebuilding that's going on right now. Right? And the question is, are we going to rebuild, you know, this power infrastructure in exactly the same way with this ancient 150 year old transmission system, the same centralized power plants with these giant lines going everywhere, or are we going to start thinking differently about this stuff? And I think these moments of crisis are a huge opportunity to do that. And you know, so that's, so certainly that is one thing is making this idea of these extended, huge blackouts that this hurricane heat Katrina just explores making them far less likely by changing our good infrastructure.
The idea of you mentioned passive houses, things like that, that's all well and good, but that doesn't help with all the existing infrastructure. I mean, one of the things we need to do is get a lot better at targeting and understanding where vulnerable populations are. And then deploying people, emergency services, relief people to those places. We don't do that very well. I mean, think about how much better we are at planning for hurricanes and building awareness of hurricanes than we are for heat waves. There's no comparison.
And interestingly, a couple of the study researchers who were working on that, who wrote that Heat Katrina story, one of the things they're doing now is you know, looking at a particular city, and what I happened to look at was San Francisco, but they were mapping, you know, urban heat. Certain neighborhoods are hotter than other neighborhoods because of things like tree canopy and things like that. So they can see a huge variability within just the sort of block by block mapping of a city, of the temperatures in that city. And then they can map onto that vulnerability indexes like age of the people who are living there, income of the people who are living there. And by getting a much more precise understanding of where the risk is, they can then know during an extended heat wave, we need to go to this block because we have 400 senior citizens who are here who don't have much money and whose building is really bad. They're gonna be in trouble far quicker than the people who were living up on the hill with the big shaded trees. And so then targeting relief in those kinds of areas is really important. That's not a complicated and not even really inexpensive thing, but it's getting much more sophisticated in how we think about relief during these kinds of events.
Doug Lewin
It absolutely is. And you talk about in the book, there's a difference, maybe it was San Francisco. I thought it was Portland during the heatwave or something where there was a measurement of some of the neighborhoods that had a lot of trees were in the upper nineties. And some of the places that were more like urban heat islands, more your sort of concrete jungle, it was like 120 degrees in some of these. So a 20 to 25 degree difference just within a city.
Jeff Goodell
Yep.
Doug Lewin
Yeah, we've got to be able to target some of these solutions to the most vulnerable. Do you think those efforts are actually like, there is a climate vulnerability index, I think, Environmental Defense Fund and some other groups have worked, maybe some of the researchers you talked to, like is that, are you actually seeing that get out there? Are you seeing people actually, like when you talk to people and follow up from this book, is it being used or is it just kind of a niche only in a few places?
Jeff Goodell
I mean, it's being used. People are getting an increase in education and awareness of, you know, extreme heat risk has changed a lot in the last couple of years. You know, the National Weather Service is experimenting with a heat wave ranking system, similar to a hurricane ranking system with a heat wave level one, level two, level three, level four, which I think is really important in building awareness about the risks that are coming.
The media still does a lot of stupid shit, you know when there's a heat wave, showing pictures of people playing in fountains and you know hanging out at the beach and not doing…
Doug Lewin
Right. Eating ice cream, that's my favorite one. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah…
Jeff Goodell
Exactly, exactly. And doing a terrible job of communicating, you know the risks that people face but they're getting better at it too. So there's certainly been a lot of improvements. But the biggest thing that needs to happen is we need to stop burning fossil fuels. I mean, the way that we deal with extreme heat is by stopping the increase of extreme heat. And the major mechanism by which these heat waves are increasing and why it's getting hotter and hotter for longer and longer periods of time is because we're continuing to put CO2 into the atmosphere. And so that's really where the focus has to always come back to.
It sounds banal to anybody who thinks about climate and energy at all, but I think that a lot of people still don't grasp the real connection between how we get our energy and these extreme heat waves that we're having and the consequences of those extreme heat waves. You know, I've been heartened by incredible changes, right? People always ask me, you've been writing about this for 25 years, why aren't you like an alcoholic, you know, with a bottle of bourbon in your basement scrolling on the wall in crayons about, you know, the lost future for your children.
Doug Lewin
That was going to be my next question.
Jeff Goodell
I mean, part of the reason is because I kind of meet inspiring people all the time who are engaged in this and fighting for all kinds of things and really believe in a better world. But also because I see tangible progress. And you've talked about this a lot. We see it here in Texas, right, with the incredible transformation of the grid here. And that's really inspiring.
The problem is of course, none of this is happening fast enough. In a certain way, the speed of the impacts and our vulnerability as human beings to these changes are happening faster than the transformation. And you know the, I think what's happening in Houston right now just shows the vulnerability of all of these systems.
In my book I talk about human beings having this sort of Goldilocks zone of where our temperatures can be, we started out talking about that. But our entire civilization has a Goldilocks zone and we've built our world with this idea that there'll be these certain ranges of temperatures. And once they get above that, things start going wrong in weird ways, in all kinds of ways. I mean not just… railroad tracks melting, tarmac at airports turning to pudding, transmission failures, new diseases emerging because animals are moving around in different ways, crops failing. I mean, there's just a lot of complexity to this that I think we are just beginning to get a taste of.
Doug Lewin
I think that's exactly right. And I actually want to go a little deeper into this because I think it's one of the most fascinating things about this whole notion of like, how do we actually deal with this? Well, if you don't mind, let's make it personal. So you were just saying, people ask you, how are you not in the fetal position with a bottle of alcohol or something like that? But to make a little less cartoonish. You've written about this for decades. What you've just described is really a catastrophe, right? It's sort of an ongoing slow and sometimes not slow. What's the famous, was it Faulkner or Hemingway? How does bankruptcy happen? It's like very slowly and then all at once, right? This is kind of what we're seeing with some of these climate impacts.
I get asked this a lot and I know you do too is like, yeah, how do you, are you optimistic? Are you hopeful? And it's such a difficult question because I feel like both of these things are true. I am at the same time, intensely depressed, upset, frustrated, despondent and hopeful and optimistic because I have, cause I read the articles about what is happening with sea level rise and all the things you just described.
And I have day-to-day interactions with people that are making the change. And even sometimes on a good day, I feel like maybe I'm able to help make some change myself. Certainly not every day and holding those two things together is extremely difficult trying, you know, weighty. And I just feel like people don't talk about this enough. Are you having more conversations like that? Is anything I'm saying making sense?
Jeff Goodell
No, I think you're articulating the sort of psychological predicament of our time. I mean, I think that anybody who is informed and thinking about this in any kind of serious way feels the same way. I alternate between incredible hopefulness. When I first started writing about coal, was like, really? We'd dig up old rocks and then put them in a train and ship them to this big thing where we crush them and then burn them like at a big campfire to boil water to create electrons to send over wires for hundreds of miles to power our iPhones. Seriously, that's how we do it? And so when I look at now, you know, solar, wind, all these kinds of incredibly more elegant, efficient and cheaper kinds of transitions. It looks, feels like a big progress, right? And I'm very inspired by that. I think about microgrids and I think about electric bikes and all these kind of changes, electric cars that are happening that are so obviously superior.
And, you know, I grew up in Silicon Valley. I knew Steve Jobs when he was running around barefoot and, you know, shouting Bob Dylan lyrics at everybody. And so I have a lot of faith in technological progress. But at the same time, you know, the forces that we are unleashing here by this rapid warming are really awesome and profound and scary. I think anybody, I mean I certainly feel the loss of things. And I think how we grapple with the fact that we're gonna lose a lot of stuff we love, whether it's the beach that you've made out with your partner the first time. I have to sell my family house in Northern California because of the risk of wildfire. My mom just doesn't want to live there anymore because the Paradise Fire in 2018 was 15 miles away. The Redding Fire was 20 miles away. Inevitably, her place is going to burn. She doesn't want to be there anymore. Insurance is insanely expensive. So we're going to lose this place that we've had for 40 years. That means a lot to our family.
I think everybody's gonna go through things like that. Places are gonna go away. The idea of summer, when you and I grew up, summer was this sort of fun time. And it's just like, I was out playing baseball and running around and hiking and everything. And now, I get calls like once a week from parents concerned that their child is gonna die playing football out on the field, it's so hot. And is it worth the risk of letting their child play high school football because they're all suited up and it's, you know, a hundred degrees and really humid and are they gonna die out there? Ao it's just like all of these complicated changes that are happening. It's very difficult to keep the whole picture in your head at once, right? And to not be stupidly optimistic or stupidly doomy, you know? And I think that… understanding that this is not, we're not in this sort of binary moment. It's not like, you know, I have talked to a lot of people in the media, they always end with the question, well, Jeff, are we doomed or not? You know? And it's like, no, that is not the way to think about our predicament right now.
Doug Lewin
Yeah, I totally agree with that. I think it is hard not to be very upset, even depressed at some of these things. But yes, the doom stuff is not, if you feel that, and there's probably people listening that do feel that, talk to somebody, get some help. It is not wrong to feel that, but you can't stay in it too long because there's too much to be done. We've all got to figure out how to roll up our sleeves. And again, that's not to say, like you said, you can't be, I like that phrase, stupidly optimistic. And I feel some techno-optimists are, right? We're just one invention away from solving this. Like, no, we're not.
And I think part of the weight of this too is knowing that this isn't, you write about this very eloquently in all of your books, but particularly in Heat Will Kill You First about this isn't going to affect everybody the same. We were talking about this earlier with inequity and vulnerable populations, knowing that it's going to hit folks harder. But that, again, that should be even more motivation to try to get these solutions that we know many of them already exist. That's part of my problem with some of the techno-optimists is like, we don't necessarily need, sure, we're going to need some breakthroughs, fine. But so much of the technology is already here. You know, it's just a matter of getting it to people, right?
So there was a great article, I'll put a link in the show notes. I believe her name is Sarah Smith, a writer from Houston Chronicle, wrote this beautiful piece the other day about her observations, over the last, you know, seven or eight days after Hurricane Beryl. And it does feel like we're getting more and more of this journalism and literature of people processing these very complex emotions of knowing while people will still live in Houston, a lot of the people that are there will not, right? I mean, we saw this after Hurricane Katrina. A lot of people left New Orleans and went to Houston. Now a lot of those people that made that migration, if you want to call it that, are going to be looking at, can I really stay in this city? I didn't have power for a week and it was a category one. I think we're going to start to see people start to move away because of these things. Are you seeing that in your reporting? I'm sure you're seeing that in your reporting already, certainly some places in the world, right?
Jeff Goodell
Absolutely. You know, and I read that piece, I thought it was a really thoughtful and sort of beautifully stated piece about loving a place, but realizing that the long term future here, this is not where I want to build a long term future, because the long term future for Houston is really not, it's not a happy place for a lot of people, right? I mean, it's not like it's going to go away or anything. But do you want to live in a place where you're under constant threat of hurricanes, of rebuilding, you have the heat, you know, the changes in disease patterns that are happening, sea level rise. I mean, Houston is really the belly of the beast when it comes to climate vulnerability.
So a lot of people are reanalyzing, making calculations about, okay, well, is this where I really want to buy a house and put down roots or do I want think differently about my life. And you know, migration is a complex thing. In my book, I wrote about the fact that, you know, I moved from a, you know, what by any rational analysis is a much more kind of climate sane place of upstate New York to Austin, which is a much hotter, much more vulnerable kind of place. And I did it because I fell in love with a woman who lived here, who had a job here, and I wanted to be with her.
So people move for all kinds of reasons, right? Jobs, relationships, taking care of elder family, being with children. I mean, there's all kinds of reasons. So it's very complex. But in the big picture, there's no question that anyone who thinks that these kinds of rising climate impacts are not going to have a profound economic impact and population impact on these places like Houston and Phoenix, Miami, and other places like that are just not dealing with reality. I mean, people are starting to put this calculus into their thinking. I mean, this is a very new thing. I've been writing about this stuff for a long time. Ten years ago, people were not asking me at every dinner party I go to or every time I'm having a beer with somebody, where should I move? But now I get that all of the time. People are trying to make a calculation about, well, Detroit, you know, a lot of water up there, it's cooler, real estate is fairly cheap. Why shouldn't I go there?
And I of course make the point: there's no running away from climate change. There's no place that you can go that becomes this sort of bubble to protect yourself and escape it. But there are certainly better and worse places than others. I think in a place like Houston, as with my mom's place in California and many other places, economics are going to be just a big driver. I mean, when you have wildfire insurance that goes up 10 times in one year, when you have flood insurance that is impossible to get for houses, when you have things like that that are really driving people kind of out of places, that's gonna be a big force in this.
Doug Lewin
You know, it's interesting, there's going to be two different hearings in the House, interim hearings, the Texas House of Representatives will have two different hearings on insurance in Texas, because this is becoming, we're seeing more and more articles about this. Anecdotally, I'm talking to more and more people that are telling me, hey, I just can't get insurance from my house anymore. It's not that it's expensive. I just can't buy a policy at any price.
There was a tweet the other day from a Texas House member, the Chairman of House Transportation said as Beryl was, he's in far south Texas like Rio Grande Valley area. And as Beryl was getting closer and it looked like it was going to come there he got a call from his insurance company, I won't name them, but that they were canceling his policy. Before the hurricane arrived. Like, Hey, the hurricane's a few days away. Sorry. You're canceled. This was a state representative. Like, so you're right. We aren't ready for this. These kinds of things are happening now and they're happening very fast. So the financial, like all the things we're talking about, the physical, the heat, the hurricanes, the sea level rise. Now we're starting to get into this area of the financial impacts, not being some theoretical thing in a paper somebody wrote at a university somewhere, but people actually having their insurance canceled. What does that mean if you can't insure your home? I mean, I don't, I'm not sure I know.
Jeff Goodell
Right, right. And who's like, so, you know, we have two storms in Houston, more or less back to back having to rebuild the grid system. Who's gonna pay for that? I mean, obviously, the utility or the power company is gonna pay for it on one level, but also everybody else is gonna pay for it on another level. And I've been reading about people complaining about their rates going up as a result of this, even if it's only a few dollars.
You look at it in a pulled back a little bit and you look at things like the Ike dike, right? There's a proposal to build this, you know, kind of fancy dike, you know, at the mouth of the shipping channel to protect the city from higher storm surge and protect the refineries and things from damage from bigger storm surges during…
Doug Lewin
$30 billion, roughly, right? At least last estimate I saw,
Jeff Goodell
That's the estimate now. I mean, anybody who's looked at these kinds, it's like a 30 year project. What you know is going to be 70 billion by the time it's done and it's not gonna work the way they expected it to work. And it's gonna have all kinds of ecological implications that we have not considered. Who's paying for that, right? I mean, where's that money coming from? I mean, it's not just coming out of nowhere, anywhere. It's gonna come out of somebody's pocket somewhere and in places like Houston, there'll be some federal funding for this. I think maybe half of the Ike dike is supposed to be federally funded. But still, it's gonna come out of people's pockets and these costs in every kind of way are going to just increase. And that's gonna be a big driver in the future of not just Houston, but all of these high risk climate cities.
Doug Lewin
Yeah. And as we start to wind down here, I think one thing I'm interested in exploring more and more is the sort of interplay of mitigation and adaptation, right? What are the solutions that we can put into place that help us adapt and reduce emissions at the same time? Cause a lot of times I think again, cause most people don't think about this a lot of times they, if you play a word association game and you just ask people, we’re going to reduce carbon emissions. One of the first things they're going to think is, that's expensive. That's going to cost a lot of money. And some of these adaptation strategies are, and some of the mitigation strategies are very expensive, but others just make fantastic economic sense. Energy efficiency, microgrids, things like this that you could actually put in place that not only help to adapt and be ready for, because speaking of depressing things, like thinking of Houston being hollowed out at some time in the future. I really love Houston. I think it's a great city, a world-class city, great museums and great food and great people and diversity and energy and vibrancy. We have to figure this out. New Orleans is another one. I love New Orleans. We can't allow New Orleans to just fade out. To me, that's not even an option. I know it is because it may end up happening. But if we can put in place some of these solutions that help people adapt and reduce emissions, that might be the best of both worlds. You've talked to a lot of people, like you said, you're talking to people that leave you optimistic. What are some of the other things you see that do give you some hope that check both of those boxes, that reduce emissions and help to increase the adaptation to heat and other climate impacts?
Jeff Goodell
Well, there's a number of things, but first let me say that I think there's going to be this sort of real separation between cities and places that have political leadership that understand this problem and begin to take action on it and kind of reimagine their cities and their places. And I talk about cities because they really are, I think, the sort of epicenter of a lot of the sort of leadership on this stuff and really showing what things can be done and what can't.
It's the same thing about kind of getting smart about these changes that are coming about heat, about energy and everything. It can change. You know, there's multiple benefits of learning about this and accepting it and making smarter choices about it, whether it's as an investor or, you know, in your own personal life about whether you're going to go for a walk at noon when it's 103 degrees out, right? And understanding how your life could be at risk for that kind of thing.
And so, you know, when you look around the world, I'm struck with like cities like Paris, which, you know, you have a very strong political leader there. She's doing amazing things. The Olympics are turning into this showcase for not only doing things like cleaning up the Seine and things, but also, you know, repurposing buildings, rebuilding in ways that demonstrate that, you know, different thinking about how we rebuild and reconstruct a city that showed these sort of multiple benefits. And I think that cities and places that have the political leadership to do that kind of thing are going to be the places where people want to live and want to be. So in a very simple practical sense, this idea of walkable neighborhoods, not having 18 lane freeways. I know Houston has a lot of highways, Austin has a lot of highways, we're not ever, we're not going to demolish them at any time. But this idea of more walkable neighborhoods of, beginning to have congestion pricing like New York has dealt with, but, you know, weaning ourselves off of some of the sort of these kind of knee jerk ways of constructing a city, which is more cars, more highways and everything like that is really going to be important in reimagining a kind of climate ready city and a place that people want to be. Because ultimately that's what it's going to be, right?
It's like, why do I want to live in Houston? Well, because it's got great museums, it's got great food, and it's got great walkable neighborhoods. And what are the things that we are going to want out of where we live in this hotter climate, we're going to want places where we feel safe. Safety is really important, not just from guys with thugs on the street, but from these kinds of climate disasters and this acknowledgement that these things are going to happen. But we have political leadership in this place. We are doing things to make the city safer, whether it's microgrids, so we're not worrying about this heat Katrina's or whether it is more walkable places, whether it's cooling centers, whether it's swimmable areas, places to get out of the heat, you know, water fountains to make sure that you have water wherever you go, bicycle lanes so that you have more access to places on bikes.
You know, just thinking differently about what a habitable place looks like in a time of rapid climate change and what people want, I think is really important because it's not like we're in some kind of political negotiation for a party platform or something. This is physics. This is going to happen. No amount of negotiation with the atmosphere is going to change this warming that we're seeing until we do things like reduce fossil fuel emissions. But this is not a negotiable thing. So I think clear-eyed reality leadership who really grasped this stuff and really try to solve the problems and think in new ways is really going to be the difference between cities that succeed and fail in this century.
Doug Lewin
Yeah, cities and I think states and regions and countries too, right? At all different levels, right? These policies that are put into place and the policy direction is going to matter a whole lot. Because like you said, people aren't going to want to live in a place where it's, it's, know, these disasters are, these disasters are going to hit, they're going to hit a lot of different areas. They're going to hit harder and harder and the ability of places not only to adapt, but to thrive in the face of those. It's incredibly challenging, but the ones that do it better are going to have a major advantage, right? That makes a lot of sense.
Jeff Goodell
I mean, I just had a long conversation with Jim Farley, the CEO of Ford, and he was talking about exactly this stuff. And he's trying to do an amazingly complicated and difficult thing, which is, transform this enormous American automaker, this iconic American company going from internal combustion engines to electric vehicles.
It's an incredibly complex economic transformation that he's trying to lead this company through. And, you know, at the same time, he knows that China has invested a lot of industrial policy and things in building, you know, cheap electric vehicles. And they've done an amazing job because they've said, fuck it. We know the internal combustion engine, you know, it's like whaling or something. And the future is all about these electric vehicles. So we're going full speed ahead and they've, their electric car industry has just boomed and they've created these amazing, there's amazing electric car makers that are poised to start exporting these Chinese cars and basically due to the auto industry with Japanese Honda and Toyota and stuff did in the 70s and 80s.
And Jim is very clear about this and he's, you know, I'm not going to quote him but you know he basically said to me I need this transformation to happen fast. We need to get on with this electric vehicle thing because if we don't, we're toast. Ford, we are toast. We're going to get destroyed by people who understand that the future of automobiles is electric. And all this dicking around with subsidizing or slowing down the transition away from internal combustion engine is a kind of slow suicide for these companies because the future is electric and he knows that and his job is to make that transformation as fast as possible and as intelligently as possible. And that's the job of cities. They're in the same position. The climate is changing radically. What worked for Houston in 1950 is not going to work for Houston in 10 years or now even. mean, this transformation, everything is at stake here. And I think that some people in industry see that more clearly than our political leaders do.
Doug Lewin
That's right. Yeah. And I, again, totally agree absolutely on cities. I think it's also, we really have to think about this more cities, counties, states, regions, even working together and which, what you describe with electric vehicles is certainly one of those things.
You know, we've been talking a lot about Houston. I'm very excited about, you know, the potential in the Inflation Reduction Act was a grant made to Harris County for what's called Solar for All. And that's going to give the potential to really start to get some of these microgrid type of capabilities there that when the next hurricane hits, you know, maybe not the next one, because that could be any day, but, you know, two or three hurricanes down the road, there's a lot more resiliency built in. And that again, those are solutions that are reducing emissions all year long, reducing people's power bills all year long, creating jobs in the local area.
I just, I feel very strongly about this, Jeff. I don't know if you're at this point. I get asked a lot, like, what do you do with climate deniers? What do you do with people that continue to say it's not happening? And I'm at the point in my life where I'm like, I'm not arguing about it. I just assume if you said to me, you know, this is a podcast people can't see, but on the video, I'm about to drop a pen. And if somebody said to me, when you let go of that pen, it's gonna go up to the ceiling, I'm not arguing with you. The pen is going down. These are just scientific facts. I don't see any reason to argue about it.
There is a small percentage of the population, unfortunately a very influential part of the population, that doesn't believe it's happening, but there's a lot more that do. And let's try to continue to expand that out and even where we can, even in the cases where somebody doesn't believe in it, as if it's the Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus and your beliefs really matter here. They don't. Like you said, it's physics. But even where that happens, are there areas we can work together because the solutions that are there are better than what... Electric vehicles are a great example. People that drive them love these cars, right? They have better torque and they're fun to drive. There's less maintenance and like, so you may not buy an electric vehicle because you're worried about climate change, but you might buy it because it's a better car. Fine. But I think from a policy perspective and for political leadership, we've got to have people in place that understand that this is happening. And when, and when they don't, they can stand in the way of a lot of the solutions and not only lead death and disease and all that kind of stuff, but also just really threaten the long-term viability of a place economically and in every other
Jeff Goodell
Yeah. I mean, just to go back to electric cars thing for a moment, you know, Jim was talking about this. He actually was bringing up hurricanes and power outages, the things that we've been talking about and how an electric vehicle can, you know, be a kind of lifesaver and how it can, you know, power your house. And the idea of being able to use electric vehicles as sort of, you know, basically, rolling battery storage, which they of course are, but actually being able to use that battery to power things during power failures and blackouts is really important. And it's another example of kind of co-benefits of something, right?
And so, I mean, I love your vision of solar for all and grids. I mean, I'd love the idea of how we can build a more resilient place and how Houston can be a place where, okay, a hurricane hits, but our houses are not built on floodplains. We're building in smarter places. They're more resilient. We know what's coming. We know what to do. We have microgrids. We're not worrying about blackouts. There's just a way of thinking about this that lowers our vulnerability hugely in this. And that's really inspiring. And that's, you know, where we're going.
For the climate deniers, you know, I share your view about, you know, it's like talking to people about flat earth or something, or like whether there's aliens walking among us. Nothing I'm going to say in five minutes is going to change someone's mind. If they think that there's an alien sitting next to them, then I'm not going to change their mind.
But what I think is more dangerous, right now. I think the denial thing is kind of fading away even among people like President Trump. It's more the, we can't change anything too fast because we're going to destabilize our economy or we don't want to risk making this transition too quickly. And I think a lot of the oil companies are in that category. Like, yes, we know we need to make this transition and we're helping the transition and we're really smart engineers and we, know, just give us a little bit of time and we'll figure this out. And, you know, I think that what a friend of mine, a writer named Alex Stefan calls predatory delay, which is really about slowing this down so that, you know, big investors and people who have a lot to lose in this transition, have time to get out or to get their money out of their investments fossil fuel infrastructure and other things. So I think the don't go too fast crowd is what's very dangerous right now.
And I also think the Doomer crowd are very dangerous. The people who say, civilization is over, we're completely fucked, let's just go to the beach and party, because it's all over. That I think is also an incredibly dangerous point of view that a lot of young people have. And I think is part of that binary thinking that we talked about earlier and partly influenced by, I think these sort of UN targets of 1.5 C, 2 C of warming and these thresholds that we have set are really important as goals, but they're too often considered tipping points. Like, okay, if we don't hit 1.5 C, we know we're doomed, or if we don't hit 2 C, we're doomed. And I think that kind of tipping point, you know, it's over or it's not, is incredibly dangerous because it really encourages apathy, it encourages checking out, it encourages a sort of spiritual malaise that is not helpful in any way in thinking about how we're going to kind of reinvent our world.
Doug Lewin
Yeah, totally agree. I would love to talk further. I have so many other questions, but you've been very generous with your time and I do want to wind this down, but would you just maybe share with the audience, you obviously wrote for Rolling Stone on climate for years and years. I read many, maybe all of your pieces there, they're great. Is there anything else you've written that really stands out that you'd like, hey, yeah, I wrote this one 10 years ago, but I think it's still very much worth a read. The other question I'd love to ask in kind of winding down is, what are you interested in investigating going forward? You've just written this amazing about heat or are you having thoughts about what you want to investigate and explore whether in a book or whether in other op-eds like you did on the grid with the New York Times.
Jeff Goodell
Yeah, so let's see about as far as pieces that I've done in the past that are worth revisiting. Well, one of the things that I'm actually interested in revisiting, which I have not done, is in 2015, just before the Paris climate summit, I went to Alaska with President Obama and spent a couple of hours talking to him about climate.
Doug Lewin
Yeah, that was an incredible article. We’ll link to that one, it was great.
Jeff Goodell
It was great, but I'm curious what it feels like now, given where our world is at right now. what I was reflecting on the other day, because there was talk just a couple of weeks ago when Biden had an interview about him being fed the questions ahead of time, and these questions about whether Biden's up to the job, and this idea that the journalists were being fed the questions was kind of surprising that he had been prepped ahead of time. And so what kind of journalism was this?
And I was reflecting back to my time with Obama where I had an hour and a half with him in a kindergarten classroom after a talk in Alaska that he gave. And it was amazing because there was no prep. There was nobody on his team, other than the fact that we were going to talk about energy and climate, asked me anything about what we were going to talk about. There was no vetting of any questions. I didn't submit anything. We didn't even talk about it. And then, you know, they just, his aides brought me into the kindergarten classroom near where he had just given a talk, went out of the room, closed the door, and we were alone for an hour and a half. I could have asked him anything. There was no supervision. It was just like him and I talking. At the time, I was very impressed with his ability to talk about climate and energy. And it was just a kind of virtuoso performance just as a person who was able to have a pretty deep understanding of all of this. But I wonder what that interview reads like today, I don't know.
As far as what's next, there's so much, it's such a, I have this strong feeling, I've been doing this for, writing about this for more than 20 years, and I still feel like we're at the very beginning of the beginning of this story. We haven't even finished the introductory chapter of understanding this. There's so much that is so rapidly expanding all the time.
My last two books have taken looks at slices of this with sea level rise and heat. And even those are sort of infinitely expanding universes. And so it's really exciting as a journalist and as a writer to think about this. People say, are you going to write another climate book? Well, of course I am, because there's so much that hasn't been written. There's so much to learn about and explore. I'm interested in some of the politics right now. I don't know yet what I'm really going to do. I do think this question of accountability now that we know the consequences of fossil fuel burning. Is there going to be any kind of accountability for this? How is this going to be thought about by future generations? But I don't really know yet. I'm still in this, you know, writing a book is like deciding to get married. You look at someone and you think, do I want to spend, X number of years waking up with this person every day. You're like really wonderful, but you know, how am I going to feel about it in mid-February after, you know, many, many long days at the office. You know, writing a book is such an emotional roller coaster that sometimes it's hard to kind of pull the trigger because, you know, you know so much is at stake.
Doug Lewin
Yeah, well, and let me just say again, The Heat Will Kill You First is extraordinary the way you do storytelling, actually bringing people's personal lives and stories mixed in. I couldn't more highly recommend this book. I hope everybody will read it. Jeff, is there anything I didn't ask you that you wish that I would have or anything else you'd like to
Jeff Goodell
I just, I always like to sort of just sort of end with this notion that I really do think the scale of this transformation we're going through is so enormous that it's hard to hold in our head at once as we talked about. But I also think the scale of the opportunity is hard to hold in our head at once. We're going to change everything about how we live, whether we like it or not. We're going to change where our energy comes from. We're going to change how we build our cities. We're going to change where we get our food, how we grow our food. I mean, just literally everything about how we organize civilization is going to change. And I think that the opportunities are so great to be smart about it and do a better job and build a better world. It's not like the world that we have is some kind of archetype of perfection. We can do it better. And there's going to be tremendous loss and suffering, but there's also going to be amazing advancements and beauty and opportunity in this moment. And I think it's really important to hold those two things in our head at the same time.
Doug Lewin
Very well said as usual. Thank you Jeff so much for being on the podcast.
Jeff Goodell
Thanks for having me, Doug.
Scorched Earth: Understanding the Deadly Impact of Heat with Jeff Goodell