By now, my regular readers (and I appreciate all of you) are accustomed to my essays that being with some variant of “I was listening to a podcast this week and . . .” but here I go again. I was listening to the podcast “Checks and Balance” this week and caught the episode called “The Heat is on.” Here’s how the podcast home page summarizes this episode:
It’s hot. Over the past month millions of Americans have been sweltering in fierce temperatures. Around a third of the population lives in places where the government has recently issued warnings about extreme heat. How can American cities prepare for an even hotter future?
'The Economist’s Oliver Morton tells us what causes heat waves. Jeff Goodell, author of ‘The Heat Will Kill You First’, charts how the invention of air conditioning changed the locus of political power in America. And David Hondula, Phoenix’s Chief Heat Officer, describes how his city is preparing for a future of scorching summers.
Here's the link to the episode if you’d like to listen. It’s about 45 minutes long.
When I was teaching high school, I was constantly on the lookout for new ways to engage my students in the history and government curriculum. For a couple of years, I taught modern American History by focusing on Oil – weaving the historical narrative around the growing need for oil to fuel industrial development and the resulting quest by the world's nations to gain control over the sources of oil. It’s not too much of a stretch to interpret much of modern international relations as a result of the desire for oil, nor is it too much of a stretch to understand much of modern American domestic policy as an effort to either appease or oppose the interests of the fossil fuel industry – coal, oil, natural gas, and so forth
This podcast suggested a new organizing theory to explain the past 60 years of so of history – the growing availability of air conditioning. The podcasters made some interesting points in support of this theory (And here’s my regular reminder about the purpose of theories in history: theories suggest new questions to ask without assuming answers. To test a theory, analysts bounce their theory off of their observations of the phenomena they are seeking to explain. If the theory seems to explain something important, it lives to be tested another day by other analysts against a different set of facts):
The strength of the GOP in the US rests in large part on its prominence in the American South, which, according to the podcast, has gained something around 50 electoral votes in the past 60 years. This would not have been possible without the increasing and now mandatory availability of air conditioning. The South became a desirable place to move to for people who wanted to escape the harsh winter weather in the North. The people who moved to the South fell into a couple of demographic groups:
affluent retirees who wanted to escape the high taxes in the northern states and embrace new planned communities that promised relief from the economic and social burdens of living in older communities in the north
industry giants who wanted to decrease the costs of doing business by moving to areas where land was cheaper, taxes were lower, and expected wages were lower
workers to man the new industrial capacity – many of them the highly educated tech workers new industries demanded, but more of then the lesser-educated support workforce that built the buildings and then staffed them with cafeteria workers, maintenance crews, landscapers, and clerical support staff that kept the operations going. Some of these workers undoubtedly came from the population that already lived in the South – including African-Americans and immigrants – but many of them were working-class individuals who saw the South as a place to get good jobs and escape the challenges of living in the North.
The GOP’s “Southern Strategy” – created by the party in the wake of the Civil Rights accomplishments of the 1950s and 960s – was a conscious effort to appeal to the increasingly disaffected Southern Democrats who were considerably more conservative than the northern liberals who seemed to be gaining control within the Democratic Party. This policy was possible only because the South was increasingly seen as a desirable place to live – and this was possible only because of air conditioning.
So we owe Senator Tommy Tuberville and representatives Matt Goetz and Marjorie Taylor Green to air conditioning. Lovely.
Because this podcast is sponsored by The Economist, a publication based in the UK, the discussion then went to the global implications of this development.
First, they did a little statistical comparison. Whereas something like 90% of American homes have air conditioning, less than 5% of the homes in the UK have this amenity. The stats in most countries in Europe are in the same ballpark. This means that rising global temperatures – no matter what you believe the cause might be – are challenging to the people who live there. I can attest to this to some degree. When we were in England last September, it was pretty warm – although not as hot as it had been a few weeks earlier – and most of the places we visited were not air-conditioned. When we were planning this trip, we stayed in places available through Airbnb; when we were searching for places to stay, placing “air conditioning” on our list of requirements usually limited our options to about ¼ of the number of places available without this restriction.
Nations in the Global South are thriving economically only because air conditioning is available. The “Asian Tigers” (South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore) have become economically significant in recent decades because air conditioning is widely available. In the 1960s, transnational companies sought new areas for their businesses because of lower labor costs. They focused on what became the Asian Tiger countries because of a combination of lower costs and governments eager to court international investors. Dubai, the largest city in the UAE, achieved rapid growth at the end of the 20th century and early 21st century only because air conditioning was available.
This podcast episode was not focused on the “why” of global warming. The participants acknowledged that understanding the “why” was important for people whose job it was to make long-range plans for national economies. However, the discussion focused on what increased temperatures meant in the short- and near-term as cities faced the challenges of rising temperatures. The insights from Phoenix’s Chief Heat Officer (who knew this job existed?) address the immediate needs facing city and state governments as they try to figure out ways to keep populations alive and healthy and businesses thriving in increasingly inhospitable conditions. He mentioned all sorts of ways localities can mitigate the threat posed by intractable heat waves – that are demonstrably more frequent and more intense than they have been in the past, no matter what our beliefs might be about the causes of these changing conditions.
And just to remind us of the humanitarian implications of policy decisions, Texas Governor Abbott continues to support the use of “drowning devices” on the southern border. I’m pretty sure Abbott would oppose the creation of a “Chief Heat Officer” for his state. That’ll own the libs, that’s for sure. The governor of Texas is an important player in national politics only because of air conditioning, just sayin’.
Two points in this wide-ranging discussion also interested me.
One was that increasingly volatile temperatures pose great threats to the power grid, the maintenance of which is essential to the literal viability of people and businesses in cities like Phoenix. Unaddressed power failures will kill hundreds of people in a few days, and thousands more if the power remains off for more than a couple of days. We are frequently reminded of the age and fragility of our power grid when major hurricanes or tornados strike; power failures that result from extended heat are also life-threatening but are not as likely to receive priority attention, as policymakers are often embroiled in the ”why” and ignore the immediacy of the threat.
The second point is the comparison of the power needs to maintain the economic viability of southern cities and the power needs of cities further north. The podcast cited the relative costs of air conditioning in the South and providing heat in Northern communities. I didn’t write down the exact comparisons, but the conclusion was that we should not point simply at the inadvisability of creating major urban developments in the arid and hot regions in the South; the costs of heating buildings and maintaining infrastructure in the depth of northern winters are still substantially greater than the costs of air conditioning the South.
And as the incomparable Ella Fitzgerald always lets us know, increasing temps present other problems as well. I’ll let Ella take us out today.
I’m with Ella!! 😂