Jeff Goodell writes:

Summer is not what it used to be. On a hot August day, an outdoor concert can feel like a picnic in Death Valley. A trip to Disney World is a roller-coaster ride through unshaded hell. The Beach Boys’ “All Summer Long” sounds like a love letter from another planet.

In the hottest regions of the country, such as Texas, where I live, the climate crisis is not only changing our world; it is also dividing it. When the heat spikes during the summer, we morph into a two-party state: the cooled and the cooked. On one side, there is water, shade and air-conditioning. On the other, there is sweat, suffering and even, in the worst cases, death. And it means that no matter where we live, we have to update our conception of heat as a disruptive and punishing force.

The cooled are people like me, who work mostly indoors, bathed in the soothing breeze of manufactured air. We live hidden from the brutality of summer, except when we run out to the mailbox or the grocery store. There we hit a wall of heat that feels like an alien force field and burn our hands on the car’s steering wheel.

We live vampire lives, out early for a walk or to run errands, retreating indoors to our comfy caves during the afternoon, then out again after sundown to hang out with friends and complain about the heat and plot a getaway to the beach or the mountains. For the cooled, heat is an inconvenience, an intrusion into our lifestyles and a reason to finally pull the trigger on a loan to build a backyard swimming pool.

The cooked are people like Matthew Sanchez, the pit manager at Terry Black’s BBQ in Austin. On a busy Saturday, he and his co-workers might grill about 2,000 pounds of brisket in five long steel wood-fired BBQ pits. In the summer, the pit gets so hot it breaks thermometers that hang on the wall. “Sometimes it feels like we are rendering ourselves,” Mr. Sanchez told me.

I also met a delivery driver in Austin who had been hospitalized with heat exhaustion. Though he’s recovered, on hot days the muscles in his back tingle and his kidneys hurt. I met a former emergency medical technician who described the disturbing number of calls she responded to from workers at an Amazon warehouse in Texas, many of them related to heat stress.

I met oil field workers who service rigs in the blazing heat with no shade for miles around. One roofer told me he had twice fainted from heat, once tumbling off the roof and breaking his wrist. A farmworker I talked to in the Rio Grande Valley who had been diagnosed with chronic kidney disease (a common consequence of working long hours in the heat) said he kept working because he had no other way to care for his family. [Continue reading…]