Shortly after Jessica Witzel collapsed and died on a Five Points area sidewalk her body temperature was logged at a dizzying 126 degrees Fahrenheit. The sidewalk on that 100-plus-degree day was almost certainly even hotter than that. Though disputed by the local medical examiner—who steadfastly refuses to label essentially any deaths unattended by an ER doctor as heat-related—Witzel died in the heat and from the heat.
Just the day before during this hottest rush of summer a nearby neighbor called the police when they found Witzel, who was living unhoused in the area, trying to cool down with their garden hose.
As a paper published just this month by a leading Texas-based climate scientist makes clear: the body count of heat-related deaths are rising. Increasing, even across Texas, more public health officials are watching and marking heat-related deaths.
Such concerns are rising with global air and oceans temps, which have been pushing upward for decades as the world bakes under heat the planet hasn’t seen since humankind first began to emerge from the African continent over 100,000 years ago.
We were supposed to be moving toward another ice age with glaciers again advancing across North America instead of jettisoning into unprecendented life-threatening heat. But guess what?
The Ice Age was cancelled. And at root of that is the pump jack, the frack site, the data center, and all the fossil fuel pollution thickening the greenhouse layer, no longer swaddling the planet like a baby in the crib, but choking it like a python.
More than 100 years after the discovery of the greenhouse effect and the relationship of gases like carbon dioxide to that warming, they were finally added to the umbrella of the Clean Air Act in 1990 and roughly 16 years ago integrated into our regulatory system.
The Clean Air Act is celebrated as an Earth Day feat. A big national pachanga in denim and love beads. The largest day of mass activism in U.S. history (until Trump’s authoritarian lurch and mounting attacks on fundamental liberties shook millions to get out into the street with a belated “No Kings” fervor).
But deeply bipartisan concerns over the poisoning of the nation's lands and waters and people had taken root earlier than that. The post-World War Two building boom and “white flight” from city centers into seas of unrolling suburbs contributed to deepening unease of the unintended (or willfully neglected) consequence of all this productivity—particularly when it came to fears over what exploding automobile transportation, energy generation, and deepening industrialization were all doing to the air.
In 1963, the Clean Air Act’s original legislation passed as Public Law 88-206 with a charge to “improve, strengthen, and accelerate programs for the prevention and abatement of air pollution.” Air pollution was of special concern because what comes out of those tailpipes and smokestacks doesn’t travel obediently by road or cross checkpoints at county lines. Poisons were hitching a ride on the wind and dropping like the rain, just where they damn well liked.
This anarchy of the commons presented challenges.
“The growth in the amount and complexity of air pollution brought about by urbanization, industrial development, and the increasing use of motor vehicles, has resulted in mounting dangers to the public health and welfare, including injury to agricultural crops and livestock, damage to and the deterioration of property, and hazards to air,” the legislation states.
Without unified federal rules and coordination among local governments, a company could shake off its toxic tailings in any community that challenged them and plop down across a county or state line to avoid reforming its behavior.
Which is what makes President Trump’s argument in favor of abolishing of the “endangerment finding” that added greenhouse gases to the roster of pollutants in 2009 so pathetic. He and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin stepped forward with straight faces to assert that only local poisons matter. That pollution that does its dirty work after traveling a few hours from home can’t be regulated in the same way as pollution that asphyxiates a neighbor's cow or melts the paint off their car or gives them cancer.
They overlook that this problem of proximity was the very point of the Clean Air Act as far back as the 1960s.
PL88-206 sought to protect the public health, speed research into new air pollution technologies (particularly in motor vehicles), and clean up fuels, while helping state and local governments collectively organize to solve the problem of pollution that by its aerial nature transcends political borders.
The cognitive dissonance underlying Trump’s attack on this root of climate regulation is one reason some environmental attorneys are like…yup…this blatant chicanery is toast. We'll see you in court. (In fact, the first of likely a round of lawsuits have already been filed.)
Others holding less regard for the current Supreme Court, though, worry that cognitive dissonance is just the air that we are all forced to breathe now. The rule of law has been effectively overthrown. That power is what decides now, not logic or reason or justice.
They likely are seeing matters more clearly.
Trump's longstanding complaint of a “green scam” plays because it overlies legitimate grievances around globalization or offshoring of so-called “dirty” jobs while paving over the penalties of a failure to innovate. Its claims are so insulting (or should be) to human intelligence that it's hard to even respond.
And yet, y'all. OK. The basic understanding of the greenhouse layer and greenhouse effect follow. For you believing types: god in Her infinite wisdom established life on the planet, life that breathed, and through that process of breathe, generated a special atmospheric hug that wrapped the planet in a swaddling blanket to ensure the planet remained in Goldilocks temperature status: cycles of cold and heat would come and retreat, but always remain basically amenable to biological life.
You can see this in action in an actual greenhouse or home terrariam, with glass letting in that incoming heat and light and then containing the moisture and warmth for the plants inside, keeping it from overly dispersing into the broader universe. A stable environment.
May we introduce you to one of the “lost women of science” Eunice Newton Foote, who discovered the greenhouse effort years before the official greenhouse discoverer John Tyndall a few years later.
Yep. 1850s. Not the 1950s. This is old stuff.
That's why Popular Mechanics boasted about covering global warming for 100 years.
On March 1, 1912, in fact, they published a story—probably the first to be picked up by media around the world—describing how burning massive amounts of coal would impact the planet's temperature:
“It is perhaps somewhat hazardous to make conjectures for centuries yet to come, but in the light of all that is known it is reasonable to conclude that not only has the brain of man contrived machines by means of which he can travel faster than the wind, navigate the ocean depths, fly above the clouds, and do the work of a hundred, but also that indirectly by these very things [emissions of burning coal and gas], which change the constitution of the atmosphere, have his activities reached beyond the near at hand and the immediate present and modified the cosmic processes themselves.”
Scientists have understood these “cosmic processes” for a long ass time: the link between carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases for decades (if not more than a century, as in the case of carbon dioxide). And now it's been felt by all of us.
Of course we also know that political action doesn't get underway until the real blisters of the thing began to pop. So it was with the original Clean Air Act when substances like tetraethyl lead were still being intentionally added to gasoline. A potent neurotoxin, lead is a key culprit fingered in the fall of Rome. And it was pouring out of tailpipes and blanketing the nation’s cities and countryside, ultimately prompting health warnings for fish consumption in virtually every lake in the United States.
The 1970s Clean Air Act reboot took on lead and the air (and waters) improved because of it. It wouldn’t be until 1990’s, after the expanding heat and storm and drought they were causing became inescapably obvious, that greenhouse gases were included inside the legislation.
The attack on the so-called “endangerment finding” the advanced climate concerns into national regulatory policy put us on the path to reductions, even if emissions in most sectors continued to rise.
Trans-boundary challenges remain with efforts to respond to the climate crisis. But we've faced these before—and won.
Reducing sulfur dioxide emissions with Clean Air Act updates in 1990 got a handle on acid rain, a major concern in the 1980s. And in spite of trust issues and nationalist animosities, we also somehow worked out international deals to keep the ozone hole gobbling us all up.
The problem with climate progress is the death grip the fossil fuel industry holds on profits. So beings of the Earth who wish to inhabit a planet with regulated tempatures amenable to survival: Put your claims on hold because the wealthiest and most subsidized industry on the planet isn't done profiting.
Trump can crow about green scams all he wants, but basic facts remain that shoiuld put a Texas sized kink in oil and gas's pisser (and not in a good way): Coal is literally just carbon. Gas is methane. They are the culprits behind this heat. Meanwhile, the world is rich in solar, wind, water, and fully capable of doing things differently. We can have MRI machines and good food and safe homes and reliable power. And we can have all that while correcting the bad actors among us.
Christofascist billionaires are funny creatures. They don't just want their wealth and sustained polical influence over the lives of the rest of us—but they want all that untroubled by conscience. They just can't stand being seen as villains, even unwitting ones.
Their political henchmen (and, yeah, they are mostly men) seek to make it illegal to divest from fossil fuels the same way they made it illegal in Texas to boycott Israel. And yet they are not only coallapsing life on Earth but (we learned this last week thanks to Forrest Wilder at Texas Monthly) funding the campaigns of candidates who are committed to purging the United States of all non-white citizens.
(But god forbid you call any of them planet-destroying Christofascists hellbent on murderous plunder with a churchly smiles.)
As our friend Rose Jones wrote recently on LinkedIn: The obliteration of the so-called 'endangerment finding' resting on more than a century of science, is a decision that “carries a body count.”
It's a body count, I would add, that is measured in the billions.
Each of us now must choose now where our loyalty lies: With the billions of lives that emerged together on this beautiful and fragile planet or the billions lining the pockets of the guilty petro elite.
The Earth literally cannot sustain both.
