Their ecology and ours

Visionary, the philosopher André Gorz had foreseen, in this text published in 1974, the capture of ecology by industry, financial groups – in a word, capitalism.

 

To talk about ecology is like talking about universal suffrage and Sunday rest: at first, all the bourgeois and all the partisans of order tell you that you want their ruin, the triumph of anarchy and of obscurantism. Then, in a second step, when the force of circumstances and popular pressure become irresistible, you are granted what you were refused yesterday and, fundamentally, nothing changes.

 

The consideration of ecological requirements keeps many adversaries in employers. But it already has enough capitalist supporters that its acceptance by the money powers becomes a serious probability. So it is better, from now on, not to play hide and seek: the ecological fight is not an end in itself, it is a stage. It can create difficulties for capitalism and force it to change; but when, after having resisted for a long time by force and cunning, he finally gives in because the ecological impasse will have become unavoidable, capitalism will integrate this constraint as it has integrated all the others.

 

This is why we must ask the question frankly from the outset: what do we want? A capitalism that accommodates ecological constraints or an economic, social and cultural revolution that abolishes the constraints of capitalism and, thereby, establishes a new relationship between people and the community, their environment and nature? Reform or revolution?

 

Above all, answering that this question is secondary and that the important thing is not to mess up the planet to the point that it becomes uninhabitable. Because survival is not an end in itself either: is it worth surviving [as Ivan Illich wonders], in "a world transformed into a planetary hospital, a planetary school, a planetary prison and where the task principle of the engineers of the soul will be to manufacture men adapted to this condition”? (…)

 

It is better to try to define, from the start, what we are fighting for and not only against what. And it is better to try to foresee how capitalism will be affected and changed by ecological constraints, than to believe that these will cause its disappearance, nothing more.

 

But first, what, in economic terms, is an ecological constraint? Take for example the gigantic chemical complexes of the Rhine valley, in Ludwigshafen (Basf), in Leverkusen (Bayer) or Rotterdam (Akzo). Each complex combines the following factors:

— natural resources (air, water, minerals) which until now were considered free because they did not have to be reproduced (replaced);

— means of production (machines, buildings), which are immobilized capital, which wear out and which must therefore be replaced (reproduced), preferably by more powerful and more efficient means, giving the firm a advantage over competitors;

— of the human labor force which also needs to be reproduced (the workers must be fed, cared for, housed and educated).

 

In a capitalist economy, the combination of these factors, within the production process, has as its dominant goal the maximum possible profit (which, for a firm concerned about its future, also means: the maximum of power, therefore of investments, global market presence). The search for this goal has a profound effect on the way in which the various factors are combined and on the relative importance given to each of them.

 

The firm, for example, never asks itself how to make work the most pleasant, so that the factory best manages the natural balances and the living space of people, so that its products serve the ends that give human communities. (…)

 

But now, in the Rhine Valley in particular, human overcrowding, air and water pollution have reached such a degree that the chemical industry, in order to continue to grow or even just to function, is obliged to filter its fumes and its effluents, that is to say to reproduce conditions and resources which, until now, passed for “natural” and free. This need to reproduce the environment will have obvious consequences: it is necessary to invest in depollution, thus increasing the mass of immobilized capital; it is then necessary to ensure the amortization (reproduction) of the purification installations; and the product of these (the relative cleanliness of air and water) cannot be sold for profit.

 

There is, in short, a simultaneous increase in the weight of the capital invested (in the “organic composition”), in the cost of reproducing the latter and in the costs of production, without a corresponding increase in sales. Consequently, one of two things: either the rate of profit falls, or the price of the products rises. The firm will obviously seek to raise its selling prices. But it will not get off so easily: all the other polluting firms (cement, metallurgy, steel, etc.) will also seek to make the end consumer pay more for their products. Taking ecological requirements into account will ultimately have this consequence: prices will tend to increase faster than real wages, popular purchasing power will therefore be compressed and everything will happen as if the cost of depollution were taken from the resources whose dispose people to buy goods.

 

Their production will therefore tend to stagnate or decline; recessionary or crisis tendencies will be aggravated. And this decline in growth and production which, in another system, could have been a good thing (fewer cars, less noise, more air, shorter working days, etc.), will have effects entirely negative: polluting productions will become luxury goods, inaccessible to the masses, without ceasing to be within the reach of the privileged; inequalities will widen; the poor will become relatively poorer and the rich richer.

 

Taking ecological costs into account will have, in short, the same social and economic effects as the oil crisis. And capitalism, far from succumbing to the crisis, will manage it as it always has: well-placed financial groups will take advantage of the difficulties of rival groups to absorb them at low cost and extend their hold on the economy. The central power will strengthen its control over society: technocrats will calculate “optimal” standards of depollution and production, will enact regulations, will extend the areas of “programmed life” and the field of activity of the apparatuses of repression. (…)

Would you say that none of this is inevitable? Without a doubt. But this is indeed how things are likely to happen if capitalism is forced to take into account the ecological costs without a political attack, launched at all levels, wresting control of operations from it and opposing a completely different project of society and civilization. Because the proponents of growth are right on at least one point: within the framework of the current society and the current model of consumption, based on inequality, privilege and the search for profit, non-growth or negative growth can only mean stagnation, unemployment, a growing gap between rich and poor. Within the framework of the current mode of production, it is not possible to limit or block growth while distributing the available goods more equitably.

 

As long as we reason within the limits of this unequal civilization, growth will appear to the mass of people as the promise - however entirely illusory - that they will one day cease to be "underprivileged", and non-growth as their condemnation to hopeless mediocrity. It is therefore not so much growth that must be tackled as the mystification it fosters, the dynamics of growing and always frustrated needs on which it is based, the competition it organizes in encouraging individuals to each want to rise “above” the others. The motto of this society could be: What is good for all is worth nothing. You will only be respectable if you have "better" than the others.

 

But it is the opposite that must be affirmed to break with the ideology of growth: Only what is good for everyone is worthy of you. Only that deserves to be produced which neither privileges nor lowers anyone. We can be happier with less opulence, because in a society without privilege, there are no poor.

 

André Gorz

André Gorz died in September 2007. This text, which appeared in April 1974 in the environmental monthly Le Sauvage, was published in 1975 by Éditions Galilée, under the name of Michel Bosquet, as an introduction to the collection Ecologie et politique.

https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2010/04/GORZ/19027

 

TRANSLATED BY JULES LETAMBOUR...

 

 

 

André Gorz (French: [ɑ̃dʁe ɡɔʁts]; né Gerhart Hirsch, German: [ˈɡeːɐ̯haʁt ˈhɪʁʃ]; 9 February 1923 – 22 September 2007), more commonly known by his pen names Gérard Horst (pronounced [ʒeʁaʁ ɔʁst]) and Michel Bosquet (pronounced [miʃɛl bɔskɛ]), was an Austrian and French social philosopher and journalist and critic of work.[1][2][3] He co-founded Le Nouvel Observateur weekly in 1964. A supporter of Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialist version of Marxism after the Second World War, he became in the aftermath of the May '68 student riots more concerned with political ecology.[4]

In the 1960s and 1970s, he was a main theorist in the New Left movement and coined the concept of non-reformist reform.[4] His central theme was wage labour issues such as liberation from work, the just distribution of work, social alienation, and a guaranteed basic income.[5]

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/André_Gorz

 

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Malignant obsessions distract us from the collapse of human civilisation By Guest author Michael Callanan

 

The real drama played out in the North Atlantic last week wasn’t the latest hubristic exercise in “frontier tourism”, but the current sea surface temperature (SST) anomaly rise, recorded on the Northern Hemisphere summer solstice, June 21, 2023.

This measure describes the difference between the current average SST in the North Atlantic Ocean and the 30 year average between 1982 and 2011.

A difference of more than 0.8°C has been extremely rare over the past 12 years: the average SST anomaly has been around 0.3°C. This year, as of 21 June, it’s 1.3°C, an increase of over 300%.

As is widely known, but perhaps not widely enough, decreased oceanic ice sheet coverage is significantly diminishing the albedo effect, or the reflection of solar radiation off the ice surface. This is a system highly susceptible to positive feedback: the more the ice sheet disappears, the more heat will enter the system; the more heat, the less ice, and so on. Even a small child can understand the general dynamics of such a system. It’s not rocket surgery.

This is a very similar scenario to the predicted release of the super-greenhouse gas methane from the thawing Arctic permafrost: another positive feedback loop.

Widely publicised responses to the disappearing Arctic ice sheet cover have, amazingly, emphasised not the risks but the emerging commercial opportunities: opening up undersea gas fields and the shortening of shipping routes, both of which will of course exacerbate the problem. There has to be a better term than irony or black humour to describe these responses.

True to form, following the “Titan tragedy”, which the mainstream media has fully exploited, replete with macabre orchestrations including timelines of remaining air available to the doomed submariners, the media has begun to ask important questions, like how to justify the millions of dollars spent on rescue efforts. Others warn of the significant risks to hardy adventurers now posed by the effects of climate heating. In a similar vein we are being warned that climate change is having a hazardous effect on carefree plane travel, as clear-air turbulence has increased up to 55 per cent from 1979 to 2020: another bizarre twenty-first century mash-up, this time of blaming the victim and putting the cart before the horse. As previously mentioned, we surely need a new vocabulary to fully encapsulate the grim juxtaposition of irony and horror these situations reveal.

Meanwhile, more than 500 “migrants” have drowned off the coast of Greece in one of the deadliest refugee shipwrecks in recent history, a truly momentous loss of innocent lives which elicited minimal media coverage by comparison. The ranks of refugees fleeing political, economic, military and climate crises, now estimated at over 110 million human beings, surely aren’t going to decrease any time soon.

Mindlessly obsessed with the fate of five “explorers” in an imploded mini submersible, humanity has yet again failed to heed the signs pointing to the impending titanic forces threatening a catastrophic collapse of human civilisation. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has called it “collective suicide”. Given the relative numbers of complicit perpetrators and inevitably innocent victims of the climate and extinction crises, homicide is possibly a more accurate term.

 

READ MORE:

https://johnmenadue.com/malignant-obsessions-distract-us-from-the-collapse-of-human-civilisation/

 

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A new high temperature record has been set in the village of Oymyakon in Russia’s Far East, known internationally as the world’s coldest permanently inhabited settlement. Wildfires have occurred in the region as a result of a recent heatwave.

Temperatures in the village, which is located in the remote Yakutia region or Sakha Republic, reached 32 degrees Celsius (89.6F) on Monday, according to local media, surpassing the previous record of 30.5 degrees Celsius set on the same day in 1949.

The head of the Sakha Republic, Aisen Nikolaev, declared a state of emergency in the region on Monday as massive wildfires spread over the weekend. On his Telegram channel, Nikolaev noted that the Oymyakon district was among the worst affected.

Oymyakon is among the coldest places in the Northern Hemisphere, having recorded a low temperature of -67.7 degrees Celsius (-89.9F) in 1933. However, an unverified record was set seven years earlier, when a low of -71.2 degrees Celsius was reported.

Despite the extreme weather conditions, Oymyakon has a permanent population of around 500 people.

Climate change poses a particularly acute threat to Yakutia, as much of its infrastructure is built on permafrost. Experts warn that thawing could lead to major social and economic ramifications in the region.

https://www.rt.com/russia/579175-oymyakon-pole-cold-temperature-record-set/

 

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World experienced hottest day ever recorded on July 3, US data says

Monday, July 3, was the hottest day ever recorded globally, according to data from the U.S. National Centers for Environmental Prediction.

Monday, July 3, was the hottest day ever recorded globally, according to data from the U.S. National Centers for Environmental Prediction.

The average global temperature reached 17.01 degrees Celsius (62.62 Fahrenheit), surpassing the August 2016 record of 16.92C (62.46F) as heatwaves sizzled around the world.

The southern U.S. has been suffering under an intense heat dome in recent weeks. In China, an enduring heatwave continued, with temperatures above 35C (95F). North Africa has seen temperatures near 50C (122F).

And even Antarctica, currently in its winter, registered anomalously high temperatures. Ukraine's Vernadsky Research Base in the white continent's Argentine Islands recently broke its July temperature record with 8.7C (47.6F).

"This is not a milestone we should be celebrating," said climate scientist Friederike Otto of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment at Britain's Imperial College London.

 

"It's a death sentence for people and ecosystems."

Scientists said climate change, combined with an emerging El Nino pattern, were to blame.

 

"Unfortunately, it promises to only be the first in a series of new records set this year as increasing emissions of [carbon dioxide] and greenhouse gases coupled with a growing El Nino event push temperatures to new highs," said Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist at Berkeley Earth, in a statement.

 

https://www.france24.com/en/americas/20230704-world-experienced-hottest-day-ever-recorded-on-3-july

 

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Phoenix hits 43C for 19th straight day, breaking US city records in global heat wave

A dangerous 19th straight day of scorching heat in Phoenix set a record for U.S. cities Tuesday, confined many residents to air-conditioned safety and turned the usually vibrant metropolis into a ghost town.

https://www.france24.com/en/americas/20230719-phoenix-set-a-record-for-us-cities-in-global-heat-wave

 

Heat records set in southern France's Alps and Pyrenees mountains

Local temperature records were set Tuesday at several monitoring stations in the south of France including in the Alps and Pyrenees mountains, the French weather office said.

https://www.france24.com/en/france/20230718-heat-records-set-in-southern-france-s-alps-and-pyrenees-mountains

 

Why is Europe experiencing such intense heatwaves?

The southern half of Europe is experiencing scorching heat this week. Temperatures are set to reach up to 40°C in certain parts of France this Tuesday. In Greece, several fires broke out on Monday, leading to the evacuation of coastal areas. In the United States and China, record-breaking temperatures exceeding 50°C have already been recorded. So-called "heat domes" and a "double jet stream" phenomenon are to blame. Our Science Editor Julia Sieger tells us more.

https://www.france24.com/en/tv-shows/science/20230718-why-is-europe-experiencing-such-intense-heatwaves

 

China recorded a record-breaking temperature of 52.2°C on Sunday 16 July.

The searing heat hit the remote northwest township of Sanbao in Xinjiang's Turpan Depression, state-run newspaper Xinjiang Daily reported.

The previous high of 50.3°C was recorded in 2015 in Ayding, also in Turpan - a vast basin of sand dunes and dried-up lakes more than 150 metres below sea level.

https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/07/17/record-breaking-522c-temperature-hit-china-on-sunday-stoking-fears-of-

 

Europe heatwave: British holidaymakers are changing their plans as temperatures surge

People travelling to the hottest destinations - including Spain and Italy - have been warned to be prepared for conditions which are a "massive shock to the system" as temperatures in some parts approach 48C (118.4F).

https://news.sky.com/story/europe-heatwave-british-holidaymakers-are-changing-their-plans-as-temperatures-surge-12922233

 

Climate change and El Nino shatter heat records in Arizona and around the world

The extreme heat scorching Arizona in the United States has hit a new record, reaching the 19th consecutive day of at least 43 degrees Celsius. 

Phoenix isn't the only place suffering, the European Union has issued red alerts for high temperatures in Italy, north-eastern Spain, Croatia, Serbia, southern Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro.

Heat waves this summer, which saw temperatures climb to 53C in California's Death Valley and over 52C in China's north-west, have coincided with wildfires from Greece to the Swiss Alps and deadly flooding in India and South Korea.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-07-19/arizona-tumbles-heat-records-temperatures-reaches-110/102618602

 

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NEIL OLIVER IS OFTEN CORRECT BUT ON CLIMATE HE IS HALF-BAKED, BECAUSE OF THE HYPOCRISY OF SOME CLIMATE FEAR-MONGERS. TRUTHFULLY, WE ALL SHOULD KNOW THAT BURNING FOSSIL FUELS IS RAISING THE TEMPERATURE ON THE SURFACE OF THE PLANET. SERIOUS SCIENCE IS CORRECT ON THE SUBJECT WITH THE BEST PROGNOSIS. WE HAVE EXPLAINED AND DEMONSTRATED MANY TIMES ON THIS SITE THAT GLOBAL WARMING ISN'T A FURPHY. GLOBAL WARMING IS ANTHROPOGENIC, I.E. IT IS HUMAN INDUCED. 

WE HAVE ALSO STUDIED THE JET-STREAMS THAT ARE THE BOUNDARIES BETWEEN CLIMATIC ZONES AND THEIR STRANGE BEHAVIOUR FOR THE LAST FEW YEARS.

OVERALL, THE POLITICAL GAMES ABOUT CLIMATE ARE THE THINGS TO FEAR. IF YOU READ THIS SITE CAREFULLY (IT MIGHT TAKE YOU A FEW YEARS, MIND YOU) YOU WOULD FIND THAT "WE'VE ALREADY LOST THE FIGHT AGAINST RISING TEMPERATURES"...

ACCORDING TO HUMBLEGUS'S RESEARCH, THERE IS ENOUGH CO2 AND OTHER WARMING GASES IN THE ATMOSPHERE NOW, TO RAISE THE TEMPERATURE OF THE ATMOSPHERE UP TO 9 DEGREES CELSIUS — ONCE MOST OF THE ICE CAPS AND GLACIERS HAVE MELTED. THE MELTING OF THE ICE IS HIDING THE TRUE EXTENT OF THE WARMING. 

SO WHAT DO WE DO? PREPARE FOR WAR IN THE COOLEST PLACES ON EARTH?....

MEANWHILE AS THE POPULATION FEAR "CLIMATE CHANGE" OR "COVID", POLITICIANS GO AND DANCE AWAY, SPENDING CASH AND BURNING THE PLANET SOME MORE IN ORDER TO DRIVE GAS GUZZLERS, ROB RUSSIA OR GO ON HOLIDAYS....

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vkpcBMmvP0

Neil Oliver: "Fear mongering" over high temperatures is an 'incessant attempt to keep us frightened'

 

‘All of this is part of an incessant attempt to keep us frightened of one thing after another!’ Neil Oliver joins Dan Wootton to discuss the "fear mongering" news coverage of high temperatures and the hypocrisy of eco-zealots like Just Stop Oil.

 

YEP.... JUST STOP THE OIL. STOP THE OIL, THE WARS, THE HYPOCRISY, THE DELUSIONS AND UNDERSTAND THE SCIENCES: THE PLANET DOES NOT CARE ABOUT WHAT WE THINK NOR ABOUT WHAT WE DO. THE SURFACE OF THE EARTH IS A SYSTEM THAT HAS HAD DYNAMIC CHANGES SINCE ITS FORMATION 4.5 BILLION YEARS AGO. WE SCIENTIFICALLY KNOW THESE CHANGES. WE KNOW THAT THE PRESENT "GLOBAL WARMING" IS HAPPENING IN A TIMEFRAME WHEN WE ARE GOING TOWARDS A NATURAL ICE AGE.

WE KNOW THAT WARMING GASES (CO2, METHANE NOx) ARE NOW FAR IN EXCESS IN THE ATMOSPHERE FOR THE LAST SEVERAL MILLION YEARS, THOSE IN THE MIDDLE OF A QUITE WARM PERIOD... WE KNOW OF TIMES WHEN SEA LEVEL WERE AT LEAST 75 METRES (SOME SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE PLACE THIS AT NEARLY 200 METRES DURING SOME ERAS) ABOVE PRESENT. WE KNOW THAT THE RATE OF PRESENT CHANGE — THOUGH SLOW IN HUMAN TERMS — IS "CATASTROPHICALLY FAST" IN TERMS OF Geomorphology. "GLOBAL WARMING" IS FAR BIGGER IN TERMS OF ENERGY RELEASE THAN THE METEORITE THAT HIT THE PLANET 65 MILLION YEARS AGO AND ERADICATED THE DINOSAURS.

THE IDEA FOR US IS TO AVOID THE FATE OF THE DINOSAURS... WE CAN.

 

FEAR ISN'T ENOUGH......

 

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The fast rise in global warming manifested by current extreme weather events betray a dangerous underestimation of the Earth’s liveable climate, while governments ignore climate science, claim to set limits on domestic emissions but allow major export of fossil fuels and emissions worldwide on a scale threatening life on Earth.

With current policies there appear to exist few limits on global carbon emissions, as reported by Rogner (1997): ‘The global fossil resource base is abundant and is estimated at approximately 5000 Gt (billion tons). Compared to current global primary energy use of some 10 Gt per year, this amount is certainly sufficient to fuel the world economy through the twenty-first century”. According to these estimates future production of coal, oil and gas render a mass extinction of advanced species more than likely.

A significant fraction of carbon gases released from combustion of fossil fuels on timescales of a few centuries remains in the atmosphere as well as leads to acidification of the oceans at a rate faster than its removal by weathering processes and deposition of carbonates. Common measures of the atmospheric lifetime of CO2 disregard the long time tail of its dissipation, which underestimates the longevity of anthropogenic global warming. Models agree 20–35% of the CO2 remains in the atmosphere after equilibration with the ocean over 2–20 centuries). Neutralisation by CaCO3 draws the airborne fraction down further on timescales of 3 to 7 kyr.

With atmospheric CO2 levels reaching 423 parts per million, according to James Hansen and colleagues humanity is facing a new Frontier, marked by intense heat waves, more than vindicating warnings by climate scientists over the last 40 years or so. Within less than a century the levels of CO2 and temperatures have risen to levels of the Miocene (23.03–5.33 million years ago), with implications for sea level rise (Spratt, 2023). Hominids, living during glacial to inter-glacial periods, rarely had to endure mean temperatures higher than 50oC, which are increasingly common at present. Governments, busy subsidising new coal mines and oil and gas wells and arming to the teeth for nuclear war, appear to be oblivious to the lessons of the last great world wars.

No longer does climate change represent a future scenario debated by scientists or deniers but it constitutes an accelerating reality (Figures 1 and 2) related to the latitudinal shift of climate zones, including expansion of the tropics into temperate regions, Europe and north America. The weakening of the circum-polar jet stream allows heat cells to penetrate polar latitudes and cold fronts to enter high latitude zones. The consequences are represented by accumulation of ice melt water off Greenland and parts of the circum-Antarctic ocean (Figures 2). Increased evaporation over land masses results in draughts while evaporation from warming oceans gives rise to major floods over large continental regions.

https://johnmenadue.com/planetary-inferno-nero-fiddles-while-rome-burns/

 

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https://www.democracynow.org/2023/7/17/extreme_weather_jeff_goodell

 

The world is in the grips of a dangerous heat wave that has sent temperatures skyrocketing to deadly levels throughout Asia, Europe and the Americas. Unless urgent action is taken to reduce carbon emissions, the United Nations says, Earth could pass a temperature threshold in the next decade when climate disasters are too extreme to adapt to. We speak with longtime climate journalist Jeff Goodell, author of the new book, The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet, about how the climate crisis is raising temperatures, the toll such heat can have on the human body, and how “heat is the primary driver for this climate transformation we are undergoing right now,” fueling natural disasters such as floods, wildfires and more.

TranscriptThis is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

We begin today’s show looking at the suffocating heat gripping three continents as the summer’s record-breaking temperatures continue to scorch large swaths of the United States, Europe and Asia.

China just saw its highest temperature in recorded history, topping 126 degrees Fahrenheit, smashing the previous record by three degrees.

In northern Syria, displaced people described the conditions at camps as akin to living in an oven, with children and the elderly facing few options for relief from 108-degree heat.

Meanwhile, a third of people in the United States faced excessive heat warnings or advisories this weekend, and Europe could record its hottest day ever this week. Italian authorities issued an extreme health risk in 16 cities as extreme heat dominated news reports worldwide.

SOFIA BETTIZA: As you can see, there are lots of tourists here in Italy. And some of them have collapsed in the last few days because of heat strokes. And that includes a British tourist who passed out in front of the Colosseum.

CHRIS LIVESAY: In Spain, thermal imaging resembles the sun, as ground temperatures reach a blistering 140 degrees. Forest fires ripped through the Spanish island of La Palma, destroying homes and displacing hundreds. More than a thousand miles away, the heat fans the flames in Croatia, as well.

FREDRICKA WHITFIELD: Water temperatures off the coast of Florida are hitting some of the highest levels on record, creating a dire situation for the coral reefs.

MARISSA PARRA: So, we are in Phoenix, Arizona, talking about the scorching heat. Now, it’s not just here in Arizona, but we’re outside of Valleywise Hospital, where they’re talking about an influx in patients suffering from all kinds of heat-related illnesses. We’re talking about heat stroke. We’re talking about heat exhaustion, as well as third-degree burns.

AMY GOODMAN: The heat wave in Arizona is on track to break the previous record of 18 straight days of temperatures suppressing 110 degrees Fahrenheit in Phoenix. Extreme heat now kills more people in the United States than any other extreme weather. Some of those most at risk include people who work outdoors, as well as unhoused people.

All this comes as a U.N. climate change report found the Earth could pass a dangerous temperature threshold in the next decade that could make climate disasters so extreme, we will not be able to adapt, unless urgent action is taken to reduce carbon emissions.

For more, we’re joined by longtime climate reporter Jeff Goodell, whose new book is just out, titled The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet. He says he decided to write it after he walked for 10 blocks in Phoenix on a 115 degree Fahrenheit day and nearly passed out, making him realize he had radically underestimated the dangers of extreme heat. Jeff Goodell has covered the climate crisis for over 20 years at Rolling Stone magazine. His guest essay in The New York Times is headlined “In Texas, Dead Fish and Red-Faced Desperation Are Signs of Things to Come.”

Jeff, welcome to Democracy Now! Congratulations on your new book. It’s so important. You describe heat as a, quote, “first order threat that drives all other impacts of the climate crisis.” Explain.

JEFF GOODELL: Well, you know, we’re seeing these extreme heat events right now that you just described in your intro. It is drawing everyone’s attention. But it’s really important to grasp that as we burn fossil fuels and loading the atmosphere with CO2, we are — you know, the temperature, we’re raising the temperature of the Earth, which is driving all of these other climate impacts that you have described and that we talk about when we talk about climate change, like sea level rise, like drought, like the wildfires that have been burning in Canada. Heat is the primary driver for this climate transformation that we’re undergoing right now. It is this invisible force that is changing our world.

AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about your experience of the heat yourself, from Phoenix to Texas. You write in your guest essay in The New York Times, “In Texas, Dead Fish and Red-Faced Desperation Are Signs of Things to Come,” “You can argue that Texas has done this to itself. The planet is getting hotter because of the burning of fossil fuels. This is a simple truth, as clear as the moon in the night sky. No state has profited more from fossil fuels than Texas.” Elaborate on this, and don’t speak in soundbites. Give us the whole meal.

JEFF GOODELL: Happily. So, I moved to Texas four or five years ago, and I had lived in the Northeast. And it was really eye-opening moving here, because Texas really is the belly of the beast when it comes to both the energy transformation and the impacts of climate change. You know, this is a state that was built around fossil fuels. There’s tremendous riches here as a result of our dependence upon fossil fuels. There’s tremendous sort of economic and cultural inertia around oil and gas in this state, and you feel it everywhere you go here.

But it’s also the state where this transformation towards clean energy is happening very quickly. We had, you know, an extreme heat dome in the last couple of weeks here. There was a lot of concern about the grid going down, and the grid was OK, and largely because of 25% of the power that was going onto the grid during this extreme heat wave was from solar power, which performs very well in hot weather and is not only more reliable, but cheaper. And so, we have these — Texas, even Texas, is making this sort of transformation to a cleaner grid.

The problem, of course, is that it’s not happening fast enough. And in Texas, you feel the changing of our climate in a very dramatic way. You know, there’s the risks of sea level rise in Houston. There’s the $30 billion “Ike Dike” that’s beginning to be constructed to protect the petrochemical industry and the Houston Shipping Channel there. There’s the heat waves that we’ve been suffering through in the last few weeks. There’s, you know, water shortages. As part of my reporting, I was in the Rio Grande Valley, one of the most productive agricultural regions in the country, and, you know, the Rio Grande is drying to a trickle there. And so, you know, there’s these cascading consequences here where you’re feeling the world changing beneath our feet, and yet the kind of politics and culture of this place are lagging far behind those changes.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeff, we’ve been talking about this for — well, since it was enacted, but as the deadly heat wave grips Texas, where you are, Governor Greg Abbott signed a bill eliminating mandatory water breaks for construction workers. I want to play a clip of Ana Gonzalez, the Texas AFL-CIO deputy director of policy and politics.

ANA GONZALEZ: Texas is the deadliest state when it comes to construction. One worker dies every three days in our state. In fact, more workers die of heat-related illnesses in our state than any other state.

AMY GOODMAN: This is the mayor of the Petro Metro — that’s Houston — Sylvester Turner, who warned the bill would have devastating consequences for people working outdoors.

MAYOR SYLVESTER TURNER: If House Bill 2127 is allowed to stand and it prevents municipal units of government from saying to employers that under extreme weather conditions, like heat, that you can’t be mandated to provide water breaks, then can you imagine the number of workers who are out there in the heat, the construction workers, people working on buildings, developments, you name it, that are going to face heat strokes? Some people will even possibly lose their lives because they’re operating, working in very dangerous conditions. This bill is totally insensitive. It goes contrary to the health and well-being and welfare of workers, who are out there doing — working under conditions that many, if not most, folks would dare not work under.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, that’s the Houston mayor, Turner. Jeff, he was talking about the bill, hoping it wouldn’t be passed. It has been passed and is going to soon go into effect.

JEFF GOODELL: Yeah, it is. And, you know, Mayor Turner called it “insensitive,” and I would say that’s a gross understatement. It’s barbaric. I mean, I live here. I see what it’s like working outside. I see these workers working, building, you know, the buildings going up here in Austin. Austin is a boomtown, and there’s construction everywhere. And, you know, it’s hard for me during these heat waves to walk to my mailbox to check the mail. The idea that, you know, you’re working on a rooftop or laying asphalt outside in this heat and you’re forbidden from taking water and shade breaks, I mean, it’s just like back to kind of Sinclair Lewis’s The Jungle.

I mean, I don’t know how to explain this other than to talk about a kind of — you know, there’s a kind of racism to this. You know, many of the workers here that are keeping the state going are Mexican. They’re coming across the border. They’re working incredibly — work incredibly hard. You know, it’s just a kind of politics that’s rising here in Texas that I have no kind of good moral explanation for how this can be justified in any way. And in my book, I write about the death of an agricultural worker named Sebastian Perez, not in Texas, but in Oregon, who died in the fields because he was afraid that if he took a water break and shade break, he would lose his job. And so, this kind of — this law that the governor — this legislation that the governor has signed is going to directly result in the deaths of many Texans.

AMY GOODMAN: In your new book, The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet, Jeff Goodell, you write about what happens to our bodies as the heat rises above 107 degrees Fahrenheit. You say, “As the heat rises, the proteins unfold and the bonds that keep the structures together break. At the most fundamental level, your body unravels. … Your insides melt and disintegrate — you are hemorrhaging everywhere.” Take it from there, Jeff.

JEFF GOODELL: Well, that’s sort of the end. To begin, you know, our bodies are finely tuned machines that work in a very narrow temperature range. All of us understand that intuitively. If you have a temperature of 100 degrees, you know something’s going on in your body. If you have a temperature of 101 or 102, you’re calling the doctor. If you have a temperature of 105, you’re going to the hospital. We all know this in our lives. But we don’t understand the risks of that, you know, in an outdoor environment and in these kinds of extreme heat events.

What happens when your body gets hot is we only have one mechanism to cool down, and that is sweat, as we all know. When it gets hot, our heart starts pumping faster, and it’s pushing the blood away from our internal organs and away from our brains, which is one of the reasons why you get kind of dizzy or hallucinogenic or lightheaded when we are suffering from extreme heat. And as it pushes the blood away from the internal organs towards our skin to cool off through sweating, it puts an enormous strain on our heart. And so, a lot of the people who are the most vulnerable to heat are people who have heart conditions, circulatory issues, taking medications that are related to that. And your body is in this sort of desperate attempt to dissipate this heat.

And when you’re an outdoor worker and when you are in an environment that your body just can’t sweat enough, either because you’re not drinking enough water and it loses the ability to sweat, or you just simply can’t kind of dump enough heat out of your body to keep your internal body temperature from rising above 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, then the things start happening that you described, which is your — literally, the membrane of your cells begin to melt, the proteins that control the functions of those cellular structures begin to unfold, and your body kind of literally melts from the inside. And it’s a horrible way to go.

And it’s something — you know, most people who die of heat stroke don’t get that far. It’s usually a heart attack or something like that that is the cause of death. But it’s also one reason why heat mortality is dramatically underestimated in our accounting of it, because unlike a knife or a gunshot, there is no kind of heat wound when someone dies from extreme heat. So, a lot of people die of heart attacks or other circulatory problems, and they’re never diagnosed as heat deaths. So, these sort of mortality numbers that you were citing in the opening and that I cite in my book are widely understood to be grossly underestimated.

AMY GOODMAN: In your New York Times op-ed “if there is one thing we should understand about the risks of extreme heat, it is this: All living things, from humans to hummingbirds, share one simple fate. If the temperature they’re used to — what scientists sometimes call their Goldilocks Zone — rises too far, too fast, they die.” Talk about the Goldilocks Zone. And also talk about why you don’t like the term “global warming,” Jeff.

JEFF GOODELL: Yeah, the Goldilocks Zone is a phrase that scientists use when they’re — who are looking for life on other planets. What they’re looking for is planets that are not too cold, so that — what they’re looking for is liquid water. And if the planets are too cold, the water is ice. If it’s too hot, the water is vaporized, and it’s gone. So they’re looking for this sort of medium-temperature planets, this what they call the Goldilocks Zone.

And I use it in my book because all life on our planet has evolved under this relatively stable climate. Just as we are able to maintain our steady temperature in this sort of given climate zone that we’ve evolved into, so is it true with pine trees and lizards and polar bears and sharks in the ocean, and all living things have this sort of thermal range that we can deal with. And one of the profound things that’s happening as we heat up our planet is we’re moving out of that Goldilocks Zone, not just for us as humans, but for all living creatures. And so, that has profound implications in the sort of distribution of life on our planet. It means that people are going to move, animals are going to move, plants are going to move. They need to migrate to cooler places. And if they can’t migrate to cooler places, they die.

And it’s a very simple truth, and it’s one that has enormous consequences for politics. You talked in your intro about, you know, the refugees moving from various countries and the political consequences of that. We’re going to see more and more of that. We’re going to see more and more changes in disease patterns as animals carrying various microbes move into new places. You know, a simple example of this is mosquitoes, that are very sensitive to temperature, moving into hotter places, carrying diseases like dengue and Zika and malaria with them. We’re seeing this in the drying out of forests, that are causing these bigger and hotter wildfires, that are causing the smoke that has inundated the East Coast in recent weeks.

You know, changes in this sort of Goldilocks Zone are profoundly rearranging life on our planet. And that’s why heat is such an important force to understand, both in the way that it impacts our body but also in the way it impacts the sort of dynamics of life on our planet.

AMY GOODMAN: Have you been shocked by how fast this has happened? And what do you think needs to happen?

JEFF GOODELL: Yeah, I think anybody who’s been watching this, covering, talking about climate, journalists like myself and scientists who have been looking at this for a long time, are both shocked and — shocked by two things: one, by how rapid the changes are that we’re seeing, given the kind of levels of CO2 that we’re at, and also by the predictability of it, in a certain way. I mean, you know, we’ve known — ExxonMobil has known — for a very long time that as we burn fossil fuels and dump CO2 into the atmosphere, the temperature of the planet is going to rise. And broadly, you know, those predictions have held — been very accurate and held true. We’ve known for decades. And the fact that we’ve done essentially nothing to stop that rise is, you know, terribly disappointing and predictable and surprising at the same time.

And what do we need to do? We need to stop burning fossil fuels, because that is what’s driving the temperature change on the planet. And we also have to think differently about the risks that we are running. We have to understand something like heat. I think of my book as a sort of survival guide for the 21st century. We have to understand the risks of extreme heat and these extreme events, what to do, how to handle it, who’s vulnerable, who’s not, how to better address that, how to democratize air conditioning, how to build cities in a different way that incorporates shade, how to address events like extreme heat for the most vulnerable communities, cooling centers, things like that.

We have not at all come close to grasping the scale and scope of the crisis we’re facing. And that is not alarmist; that is just kind of the straightforward reality of where we are.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeff Goodell —

JEFF GOODELL: And I’m very hopeful in —

AMY GOODMAN: We have 10 seconds.

JEFF GOODELL: OK. I’m very hopeful that we can use this transformation to build a better and cleaner and more healthy world, but we need to really grasp what we’re doing.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeff Goodell’s new book is called The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet.

 

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