“Summertime, and the living is easy.”
—George Gershwin, Ira Gershwin & DuBose Heyward, 1935
Ninety years on, the potential of easy summer living is much less than it once was, as global warming continues breaking temperature records, as happened here, here, here, and many other places this past weekend and earlier. And summer doesn’t even start for nearly two weeks. Over the past 12 months, according to a new study, climate change added 30 more days of extreme heat for 4 billion Earthlings. The general sense is that 2025 will only be the second-warmest year on record, although still ferociously hot. Last year will for a brief moment retain its No. 1 position. But even the short-term trend is ever upward, and a slight retreat offers no solace.
No solace either from the killer administration occupying the White House. Some readers might flinch at this vocabulary. Yes, how intemperate of me. But facts are facts. And Donald Trump and his Minions, his Gang, his Crew, his Posse, his whatever are determined to kill a bunch of us. If only this were mere lefty hyperbole.
Extreme heat is already upon us. Not just in the always-been-hot regions. We’re no longer looking at a future nationwide crisis, we’ve got one now. We’re talking soaring scores of billions of dollars in economic losses and more heat-related deaths. More deaths, in fact, than those caused by all the tornados, floods, and hurricanes combined. Meanwhile, the scorched-earth Trump administration has crippled the federal government’s capacity for doing anything to protect people from the existing and growing menace, having cast aside heat specialists in departments and agencies in the phony crusade for “efficiency.”
President Barack Obama recognized a decade ago that the heat was coming and set up the National Integrated Heat Health Information System. At ClimateWire, in a lengthy unpaywalled piece, Ariel Wittenberg writes:
NIHHIS was founded at the close of the Obama administration to consolidate the expertise of heat specialists from 20 agencies. Its structure and mission is modeled after efforts to address drought.
As former President Joe Biden emphasized a whole-of-government approach to climate change, NIHHIS worked to develop online tools like HeatRisk and the Heat Health Tracker — both of which explain how temperature forecasts can affect human health. Those tools are valuable for local emergency planners as they decide when to open cooling centers. Health care workers also use them to prepare for surges in heat-related illnesses.
Can you guess what happened? I bet you can. The slash-and-burn dopes from DOGE carried out their purge across the executive branch and sometimes beyond. Demands for mission changes plus voluntary and forced separations wiped out a bunch of federal heat experts just as ever more states and local communities are desperate for advice and assistance to deal with what is no longer a few heatwaves in a few of the usual places. Unfortunately, unlike the nuclear safety specialists they early on fired and then scrambled to rehire, the heat experts who aren’t out the door already soon will be.
Juli Trtanj, who was NIHHIS executive director until May [ ...] retired from [the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] NOAA. She co-chaired the task force with experts from the CDC, the Department of Health and Human Services, and FEMA. All of them are gone.
“What has been lost is the ability to actually help people understand what heat means for them and what to do about it,” Trtanj told POLITICO’s E&E News. “There is so much institutional knowledge that has just walked out the door.”
A year ago, NIHHIS set up two centers with big grants from NOAA to help communities map heat islands and identify ways to respond to extreme heat. Both gone under Trump. Typically, in the administration’s campaign to wipe out or hide data wherever possible, the first-ever National Heat Strategy published by the Joe Biden administration in July 2024 was removed from government websites last week, according to Wittenberg. It can still be found through the Internet Archive.
In addition to sending all that expertise out the door, the administration is very likely to follow industry “advice” and ax the heat rule proposed under President Biden. Business lobbies, including chambers of commerce, have fought heat protection legislation. Consequently, only five states — California, Colorado, Oregon, Minnesota, and Washington — have workplace rules for heat exposure. Over the past two years, Florida and Texas have gone the other direction, passing legislation that prohibits local governments from mandating heat protections for outdoor workers.
Just flat out, they don’t care if workers die or are made ill by heat exposure. Since 2017, 137 workers have died from heat and thousands more have been more hospitalized.
Work on a federal heat standard has been going on since 2021. And the same month as the National Heat Strategy was published last July, Biden announced the proposed rule. This was designed, the administration said, to protect 36 million workers from heat-related illness. As Michael Arria writes: “The purpose of this rule is simple,” an official told reporters at the time. “It is to significantly reduce the number of worker-related deaths, injuries, and illnesses suffered by workers exposed to excessive heat … while simply doing their jobs.”
Specifically, the rule would have mandated monitoring workers for heat stress, making sure they had plenty of water, and providing shaded, cool-down breaks. As the official said: Simple. Nothing radical. Most people would do as much for a dog. However, neglecting or mistreating workers has always been a problem for some of their bosses and the bosses of their bosses. At any rate, the rule was only proposed and never finalized, and you can be pretty darn sure it won’t see the light of day any time in the next three-and-a-half years.
Of course, it’s not just workers on the job who are harmed, sometimes lethally, by excessive heat. As usual the elderly, the very young, and people of color are most vulnerable. The latter are more likely to live in hotter, less shaded areas of many cities and are thus more likely to wind up in the ER or the mortuary in a heatwave.
Just before Trump took the oath of office, the Federation of American Scientists and a coalition of some 50 organizations developed the 2025 Heat Policy Agenda, a plan for the Trump administration and Congress to adopt. They’re optimists obviously. It’s an utterly reasonable plan no matter what the Chamber of Commerce or the American Petroleum Institute has to say about it. Here’s a summary of its core recommendations:
- Establish a clear, sustained federal governance structure for extreme heat. This will involve elevating, empowering, and dedicating funds to the National Interagency Heat Health Information System (NIHHIS), establishing a National Heat Executive Council, and designating a National Heat Coordinator in the White House.
- Amend the Stafford Act to explicitly define extreme heat as a “major disaster”, and expand the definition of damages to include non-infrastructure impacts.
- Direct the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) to consider declaring a Public Health Emergency in the event of exceptional, life-threatening heat waves, and fully fund critical HHS emergency-response programs and resilient healthcare infrastructure.
- Direct the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to include extreme heat as a core component of national preparedness capabilities and provide guidance on how extreme heat events or compounding hazards could qualify as major disasters.
- Finalize a strong rule to prevent heat injury and illness in the workplace, and establish Centers of Excellence to protect troops, transportation workers, farmworkers, and other essential personnel from extreme heat.
- Retain and expand home energy rebates, tax credits, LIHEAP, and the Weatherization Assistance Program, to enable deep retrofits that cut the costs of cooling for all Americans and prepare homes and other infrastructure against threats like power outages.
- Transform the built and landscaped environment through strategic investments in urban forestry and green infrastructure to cool communities, transportation systems to secure safe movement of people and goods, and power infrastructure to ready for greater load demand.
There’s just that one little problem that we started out with in terms of transforming that reasonable plan into reality. Trump and his Gang just don’t care who dies from the heat.
Cross-posted from The Journal of Uncharted Blue Places
You can also find me @meteorblades.bsky.social
