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But even for the wealthy and privileged, adaptation to extreme heat has its limits. And the notion that eight billion people are going to thrive on a hotter planet by simply cranking up the air-conditioning or seeking refuge under a pine tree is a profound misunderstanding of the future we are creating for ourselves.
“We’re all in the storm, but we’re not in the same boat,” Heather McTeer Toney, the former mayor of Greenville, Mississippi, said during testimony before the US Congress. “Some of us are sitting on aircraft carriers while others are just bobbing along on a floatie.”
One metric ton of plastic enters the ocean every four seconds (at this rate, there will be more plastic than fish in the ocean by 2050). But the biggest problem is that the ocean is heating up fast.
In addition to the immediate risks of heat exposure such as heatstroke, there can be serious long-term health consequences. In El Salvador and Costa Rica, an epidemic of chronic kidney disease has hit farmworkers who work in hot sugarcane fields—twenty thousand workers have died since 2002 and thousands of others have had to go on kidney dialysis to survive. The disease has been rising among workers in hot climates around the world, including Florida and California. An editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine predicts that chronic kidney disease “is likely to be just one of many
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In the US, there are no federal rules related to heat exposure for workers—indoors or out. Farmworkers, who are excluded from national laws requiring overtime pay, as well as the right to collective bargaining, are particularly vulnerable.
The flood of conservative retirees to the South, once a Democratic stronghold, shifted the balance of power in American politics. Between 1940 and 1980, warm-climate states in the South gained twenty-nine electoral college votes, while the colder states of the Northeast and the Rust Belt lost thirty-one.
