Marble Falls “Heat domes” are likely to become one of the words of the year for 2024. It seems every time we turn around, we’re hearing about another record heat wave in countries around the world, as well as regions within the United States. The standard advice consisting of sunscreen, hydration, wearing a hat, and perhaps just plain, staying indoors, if that is cooler, doesn’t meet the demands of the time or, for many, the necessity and peril of work.
Living in New Orleans where the old saying has been “it’s not the heat, but the humidity,” people there are shaking their heads when midsummer temperatures of 85 degrees Fahrenheit seem cooler in comparison. When the local paper said the average annual temperature in the city was in the mid-60s, it was greeted with incredulity – could this be possible, that seems cool? In the climate crisis, the city already has air conditioning in most buildings and many homes, but soaring utility bills also mean that there are cooling stations for those pushed to the limit. Recently, the Times highlighted a couple of programs here and abroad which try to mitigate the problems, even if it seems like we’re fighting climate change without a full arsenal.
Some five states, Washington, Colorado, California, Minnesota, and Oregon have now implemented workplace standards dealing with heat, although Texas and Florida, perhaps predictably, have gone the other way and sought to ban heat regulations for workers. The Biden administration may preempt this problem with a proposed new OSHA rule that would mandate “At 80 degrees Fahrenheit, employers would have to provide drinking water and break areas. At 90 degrees, workers would have mandatory 15-minute breaks every two hours and be monitored for signs of heat illness.” In Canada, we have won an ordinance in Hamilton, Ontario, which will soon establish requirements for landlords to provide cooling at different temperatures, and ACORN is trying to extend this to other cities as well.
An atmospheric scientist in Greece developed an application there called Extrema Global, which crunches the data on temperature, air quality, and heat risk. “Tell the app where you want to go…and it will offer three options: the fastest route, the coolest route, and the coolest route with place to rest.” After its development in Athens in 2018, the app is now available in Paris, Milan, and Rotterdam. “Other cities have spawned similar apps, Melbourne, Australia, has an app that maps shaded routes for walkers and cyclists, and Barcelona, Spain, has a mobile app that maps the city’s fountains.” We need to all get our cities on the app developers lists!
The article also touts an insurance policy in India for informal workers developed by the nonprofit, Climate Resilience for All, that raised the money to subsidize an affordable insurance program which triggers payments to workers to supplement their income when it is too hot to work. Some 50,000 women have already signed on, paying 200 rupees for the year, to be covered by the program.
All of these are interesting initiatives. Whether they are sustainable is an important question, of course? All of them, sadly, are workarounds for the heat and more like survival tools than anything else, because none of them really deal with the heat. There’s no “app for that.” That’s a political and economic problem all of us have to demand that we confront directly, no matter how creative some might be in making do in the meantime.