Faine Greenwood: “Scorching summer temperatures have pushed extreme heat to the front of the nation’s collective consciousness. There’s just one problem: It’s hard to get politicians to care about it.” www.politico.com/news/2023/08...

“Scorching summer temperatures have pushed extreme heat to the front of the nation’s collective consciousness. There’s just one problem: It’s hard to get politicians to care about it.” www.politico.com/news/2023/08...

Extreme heat is on everyone's lips. Too bad it can't get political traction.www.politico.com Extreme heat funding is a tiny fraction of California's climate budget, despite killing more residents than all other weather events combined.

Florida legislators have joined the War on Extreme Heat Hazards (on the side of extreme heat hazards)

Florida passes ‘cruel’ bill curbing water and shade protections for workerswww.theguardian.com Industry pressure has led state to prevent any city, county or municipality from adopting laborer protections amid extreme heat

Employers said it would cost them money. Employees said it would kill them. So Florida laughed and went with the employers.

With Republicans, the cruelty is always the point.

I’d say make politicians go on a week-long camping trip two hours outside any desert city but I know they still wouldn’t do shit

Or just walk a mile on city sidewalks in July

We have a continuous mile of sidewalks? 😬🫠

😅

There could still be some charming consequences

I recommend we try Death Valley instead

A Vermont far in July

When I was reading about this last summer, one of the big issues in gaining traction is the economic divide - higher-income families have higher electric bills, but they literally don’t feel the heat.

What I wonder is at what constant temperature do roads, bridges, the materials that hold up buildings, when do they fail? Like if your roads are being torn up because they're melting and wheels are carving into them, what do you do? If bridges start to sag? If crews can only repair at night?

i dunno numbers but there have been increasing issues with rails/overhead wires getting so hot that trains have to slow down significantly because everything's getting all bendy

Every system from biological to industrial has an ideal operating temperature with more or less wiggle room but limits at the top and bottom of any given spectrum. When they're exceeded failure is inevitable, then what?

A manhole repair just about 50 feet from my front door literally melted just hours after it was poured and set early one morning last August. They realized it was going to simply be too hot for it to take for several weeks, so they just put up a barrier and waited til early October to finish it.

I was surprised to see a recent Pew survey put it* as practically last as a major priority the next election should be about. Obviously there was a huge partisan split.

* the phrasing was the impact of Climate Change

Off topic, but only 31% of GOP care about poor people??? Damn, my mom’s explanation to 7-year-old me about the difference between democrats and republicans hold up 36 years later. “Democrats want to pay for schools, roads, medicine, and helping poor people, and republicans want to pay for war.”

This is going to sound grim AF, but I genuinely think some of the more horrifying GOP politicians see it as a solution to homelessness.

Love* how politicians actively ignore the people who they’re supposed to represent. That’s definitely how that job is supposed to work. *I do not love this

This is why I moved out of Texas (that and the looming water shortage). It’s only going to get hotter and the rickety grid there was already straining over the last 2 summers. My company has also revised our summer work policies to account for increased heat illnesses.

It's super fun because our power grid already can't handle what it's being asked to do

The thing is, though, some politicians *do* care about it: They’re busy writing laws nixing locally required rest and water breaks for workers…

And they're going to be re-elected in landslides come Guy Fawkes Day.

It's simple, don't vote for them....

📌

I figure we need a really bad heat dome and power grid failure that kills rich and poor alike. Unbelievably horrible, but I don't see anything less doing it soon enough.

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