Jeff Goodell Tells Us All About Extreme Heat

Transcript: Latest Pod of Writer's Voice

The latest episode of our podcast explores the ClimateCrisis: July 4, 2023 is marked as the hottest day on Earth. Are we crossing the habitable limit of our planet? We discuss this with climate journalist, Jeff Goodell, author of ‘THE HEAT WILL KILL YOU FIRST’. Plus, we rewind to our 2017 chat with Lynn Zinser on suing fossil fuel companies. Is this still relevant now? Find out!

This is Writer's Voice and I'm Francesca Rheannon.

July 4, 2023 was the hottest day ever recorded on Earth.

Are we exceeding the Goldilocks zone of a habitable planet?

All life on Earth has evolved in what amounts to a kind of Goldilocks zone that has enabled evolution to proceed. We are very finely tuned machines that exist very well in a sort of narrow temperature range.

I mean, you just think about it yourself with our own lives. If it's 72 degrees, that's great. Everybody loves it. And when it gets to 90, it starts to get uncomfortable. And if it gets to 110, it feels like it's difficult to be out in it very long. And if it gets to 120, you're in big trouble. So within the temperatures, it's a very narrow range.

And as our planet heats up, we're getting more and more pushing these boundaries more and more. And it becomes more and more complicated, more and more dangerous, more and more difficult to adapt.

And that is broadly what's happening with climate change.

That's Jeff Goodell.

We spend most of the hour talking with him about his new book, The Heat Will Kill You First, Life and Death on a Scorched Planet.

We also revisit a conversation about suing the fossil fuel companies for scorching our planet. We play an excerpt from our 2017 interview with Lynn Zinser of Climate Liability News that's still relevant now, five years later.

That's all coming up on today's Writers Voice, in-depth conversation with writers of all genres on the air since 2004.

Thanks for joining us this hour, on this station, and at writersvoice.net.

The last time we spoke with climate journalist Jeff Goodell, it was about his 2017 book, The Water Will Come, Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World.

Now, he's coming out with a sort of companion book, The Heat Will Kill You First, out July 11th from Little Brown.

It's about how the rise in global temperatures aren't just playing havoc with sea levels, but affecting us more directly in the form of extreme heat.

Reading The Heat Will Kill You First is like reading the latest headlines, from massive wildfires driven by scorched forests, to outside workers dying from heat stroke, to oceans hotter than ever recorded.

All this is becoming terrifyingly familiar to us all.

But despite the title, The Heat Will Kill You First isn't just about the threat that's cooking the planet, but also about what can be done about it, from holding the perpetrators of this crime accountable, the fossil fuel companies, to how we can adapt in a way that makes for a safer, more equitable world.

Jeff Goodell, welcome back to Writers Voice.

Jeff Goodell: Happy to be here.

FR We are talking to you on a day where there's an air quality alert in my area from the Canadian wildfires.

I'm on the east end of Long Island.

And I noticed as I read your book this week, The Heat Will Kill You First, that so many of the current headlines match your book with uncanny exactness.

The current headlines, so many, I was originally going to kind of read them to you, but they're just too many.

Basically, heat waves in Texas and the southeast, deaths have been reported, and articles on the health impacts, Americans will spend an extra $1 billion on health care each summer due to extreme heat.

This is just stuff that I read from the newspaper.

So you talk about something called the Goldilocks Zone, which you say that we are crossing the boundary of.

What does this mean for us?

And what is the Goldilocks Zone?

Jeff: That's a great question.

Because that is in the largest sense, what this book is about.

And I agree, it is kind of spooky right now, what's going on all around the country, early summer.

I'm in Austin, Texas right now with all these heat alerts.

And you know, it feels to me like I'm kind of living in the pages of my book that I have spent three years writing and all of a sudden, the same week the book is being published, the world is mimicking or it's, you know, that I'm living in what I wrote about.

The Goldilocks Zone is this idea that comes from scientists who look for life on other planets and it's the sort of not too hot, not too cold, just right idea about temperature that is one of the main indicators when they're using telescopes to explore the universe to find evidence of life out there is life goes along with the conditions where water is not frozen.

You know, there's a lot of planets out there that are balls of ice and it's not too hot like Venus where any water or sign of water would evaporate.

So the reason that's important for my book is that all life on Earth has evolved in, you know, what amounts to a kind of Goldilocks Zone that has enabled evolution to proceed.

You know, we are very finely tuned machines that exist very well in a sort of narrow temperature range.

I mean, you just think about it yourself with our own lives and, you know, if it's 72 degrees, that's great.

Everybody loves it.

And when it gets to like 90, it starts to get uncomfortable.

And if it gets to 110, it feels like it's difficult to be out in it very long.

And if it gets to 120, you're, you know, in big trouble.

So it's within the temperatures, it's a very narrow range.

And as our planet heats up, we're getting more and more pushing these boundaries more and more, and it becomes more and more complicated, more and more dangerous, more and more difficult to adapt.

And that is broadly what's happening with climate change.

FR: And briefly tell us what actually happens when you get too hot.

Jeff: Well, our body works, everyone knows from the time you're a kid, you know, your body's ideal temperature is 98.6, although different people have that varies a little bit between different people and our body temperatures rise and fall during the day.

But, you know, everybody knows that if you have put a thermometer in your mouth and it's 101, that's a problem.

It's 102 or 103 or 104, you know, you start thinking about going to the emergency room.

So your body works really hard to, to cool itself off, to keep itself at this steady temperature.

And it's really important to all the functioning of your physiology, to your heart, to all of the functions of your brain, all the functions that, you know, keep us happy and alive.

And when it starts to get too hot, the only mechanism we have for cooling down, as most people I think know is sweating, right there.

That's how we cool down.

It's one of the things that makes humans unique is this ability to sweat.

We have a particular kind of sweat gland.

I think many people know that some animals have some capacity to sweat when a horse runs and it has that kind of lather on it.

That's a form of sweat, but it's not a very efficient mechanism.

So for us to get rid of heat, we sweat.

And what sweat does when it starts, when your body starts to get hot, your heart pumps, begins to pump harder because it's trying to get blood towards the surface of your skin so that when you sweat, that blood will be cooled by the evaporation of that sweat.

That is the cooling mechanism of it.

And as long as your body can move enough blood and there's, and your body can sweat to cool off, you can maintain your body temperature.

But if that mechanism starts to fail, if it's too hot outside or you get dehydrated and you don't have more liquid to sweat, or your heart doesn't have the capacity to push the blood out towards its skin fast enough, things start to go wrong in your body.

And when your internal body temperature rises above 101 or 102, you start to have, you know, blood moves away from your brain.

You have a possibility of passing out.

As it gets harder and harder, your heart starts pounding really fast because it's really desperate to get the blood to your skin.

So that's why a lot of people have heart attacks when the heat levels get too high.

And once you get to around 103 or 104 degrees, your body literally starts kind of unraveling from the inside.

The tubes in your kidneys begin collapsing.

The proteins that make up the sort of molecular structure of our bodies begin to kind of unfold and unravel.

The cell membranes start to melt.

You start hemorrhaging inside.

It's really not a pretty scenario.

FR: Basically we melt at those temperatures.

JG: Yeah, from the inside.

Yeah.

It's just interesting to think about.

I mean, you know, like I said, you know, our basic temperature is 99, by 105, so that's only six degrees.

By 105, you're in big, big trouble.

And so it just shows you how narrow the range that we have to maintain really is.

FR: Oh, and we should also mention something called wet bulb temperature, because the key here is the ability to sweat. Is that correct?

JG: Right.

So as I mentioned, the only mechanism that we humans have to cool down is sweat.

And it's actually a very efficient mechanism.

I write about the evolution of it in the book.

It was really important in human evolution because it allowed us to, you know, in the African savannah, to hunt much better.

We were able to run, you know, think about a dog or another animal.

Like if you have a dog on a hot day, you know, your dog will run around for a while and then he or she will like plop down on the grass in the shade and pant until he or she gets cooler.

And that's how it works, right?

They can't sweat, so they have to pant and stop doing whatever they're doing.

Humans can run for a very long time.

And as long as it's not too hot, you're not running too fast, you can dissipate heat through sweat while you're running.

And so that gave you, just think about that on the sort of African savannah, that gave humans a big advantage because it could chase an antelope or many other kinds of animals.

It wouldn't have to stop to take essentially rest breaks because it could deal with heat by sweating.

We can obviously, you know, run animals to heat exhaustion and that was a big advantage.

So it's worked very well for us.

But you know, it doesn't work so other animals don't have this advantage.

And it's one of the uniquely human capacities that we have, the ability to move and regulate our temperature at the same time.

Which shouldn't make us feel like we're okay because not only are we not okay if it gets too hot, but we depend on having biodiversity in order to live ourselves.

So if other animals can tolerate the heat even less than we are, what does that mean?

Well you know, that's one of the things I try to talk about in the book.

The book is called The Heat Will Kill You First.

And so I got the idea for the book like four or five years ago when I happened to be in Phoenix on a really hot day.

It was 117 degrees or something.

And I had to walk like 10 blocks down City Street to get to a meeting and I literally thought I was going to die.

I was like, I cannot believe how hot this is.

And partly because as most people know, hard surfaces like asphalt and things like that amplify heat.

So when you're in an urban area, if the air temperature is 117, the temperature on the ground where you're walking is much likely much higher than that.

So anyway, it became clear to me the risks to my life of heat.

But one of the things that I'm trying to capture in the book is that, as you said, it's not just us humans.

What does it mean for animals, for everything from cattle that we depend on for beef and things like that to the salmon that are swimming in the rivers as the water temperature rises, to marine life, also to plants and food crops.

One of the big issues with rising heat is that food, corn, for example, has fairly narrow limits.

And so you have to deal with the thermal limits of corn and you can't just go kind of air conditioned corn and wheat fields.

And so it has big implications on our food system and where crops can grow.

FR: And just to put a point on it, when I asked about wet bulb temperature and sweating...

JG: Oh, sorry. So wet bulb temperature is really important because everyone knows that, I think most people know, that there's a difference between dry heat and wet heat.

So if it's 100 degrees in Palm Springs, it's very different than 100 degrees in Miami, right?

Because in the desert, the air is dry in Miami or the Philippines or anywhere near the equator, the air is much more humid.

And because the way we dissipate heat is by sweating and then allowing that sweat to evaporate, it's much easier to do that in dry conditions.

So if you're in the desert and you sweat because there's very little water in the air, water vapor in the air, it dissipates immediately and it cools you off very well.

But if you're in a humid place, which is what wet bulb temperatures are, wet bulb means it's a kind of complicated equation about measuring the kind of humidity in the air and the ability of human sweat to deal with that.

The sweat is nowhere near as efficient.

And in fact, if it's humid enough, your body, the sweat will not evaporate at all.

And so basically, your cooling system doesn't work when it's really humid and really hot.

And that's when things get really dangerous because essentially, the only cooling system we have then is broken or it doesn't work.

And if you are moving around much and generating a lot of heat within your body and conditions like that, you get into trouble very quickly.

I mean, within literally within an hour or two, you can have a heat stroke.

FR: And Jeff Goodell, in The Heat Will Kill You First, you talk about something that you call temperature apartheid, basically unequal access to coolness.

And Texas Governor Abbott has just signed a bill that is taking the right to shade breaks away for outdoor workers.

And there's no federal heat standard from OSHA.

So tell us about the story of Sebastian Perez, who wasn't in Texas, but this is a cautionary tale for any places experiencing excessive heat.

JG: Yeah, Sebastian Perez was a worker who lived in Guatemala and had family who had crossed the border into the United States, as many farm workers do, to get jobs to make better money here in the United States.

He was married, living in Guatemala and wanted to build a house and start a family.

And there was no real chance of him getting a job that could make enough money to do that in Guatemala.

So he decided to come across the border.

He came across the border in Texas here and made his way up to Oregon, where he got a job working in a nursery.

And he had uncles and other family there.

And basically, he was only there for a few months and was working and very happy, saving money, living with his cousin, and was working in the fields, tending to some boxwood plants during the Pacific Northwest heat wave in 2021, which many people have probably heard about when the temperatures got extraordinarily high in the Pacific Northwest for a week or so.

And even though he was experienced dealing with heat and things from living in Guatemala, he underestimated the risk and the impact.

And at 4 o'clock one afternoon, his colleagues, workers, came to look for him because he was working in a particular part of the field by himself.

And they found him essentially dead in the field from heat stroke.

And it was a very compelling story for me to write about because a lot of the...

You mentioned this heat apartheid thing, and one of the hard things about thinking about heat and this is this sense that I'm talking to you right now from an air-conditioned house, that we're all going to be OK. It's just a matter of turning up the air conditioning.

We forget that there are a lot of people who don't have the luxury of living in that way and that our lives depend on the work of people who are working outside and things.

And these people, whether they're farm workers or construction workers or working on road crews or postal carriers or FedEx drivers, all kinds of people are out there in this heat and have to deal with it.

And it's really, really dangerous.

And one of the roles of government is to keep people safe, whether it's from nuclear attacks or from diseases or from unfair and brutal and dangerous labor practices.

That's why we don't allow children to work in factories and this long history of labor rights that have saved many, many, many lives.

But we don't have that with heat.

The industries have fought really hard to keep any kind of heat safety rules off the books.

What you mentioned, Governor Abbott, here in Texas, literally in the middle of this heat wave when it's 115 degrees here in Texas and people are dying here in Texas right now.

He signs legislation prohibiting the mandate of water and shade breaks for outdoor workers, which is just mind boggling to me, outrageous.

And that was true in the case of Sebastian Perez.

The reason he died was because the nursery he worked at forbid them from taking breaks.

And he was out there and he valued his job.

He was afraid that if he took a break and stopped working and went into the shade and drank water, he would be fired.

So instead of being fired, he kept working and he died.

FR: Yes. And you talk about, you have other characters in the book as well who are really compelling. We've been talking about the United States here, but some of the most vulnerable, I mean, although really the whole earth is vulnerable, but some of the more, even more vulnerable areas are places like India and you go to Chennai in India. Tell us about Anjali, a woman you met there.

JG: Yeah.

So, you know, India is one of the hottest places on the planet.

The heat there is quite extreme.

Chennai is in the Southern part of India where it's not only very hot, but also very humid.

And so it's one of the places where heat is, you know, the biggest risk.

I wanted to visit India for a lot of reasons because heat is so much a part of the culture there also.

And living, I wanted to understand how people live with heat.

And I, through various ways, was introduced to Anjali, who was a teacher at a small school in Chennai, and I spent some time following her and understanding how she makes it through the day and living in the kind of slums of Chennai that she lives in and riding her bike or sometimes taking a bus to school where she teaches and just how heat is a just constant force and presence in her life and how vulnerable she is and all of millions of people are who live in those kinds of conditions to small changes in temperature.

She's concerned about her husband who has, you know, in his 60s and has a heart condition and whether he will be okay while she is off teaching.

They trying to make extra money so she cleans houses, but the difficulty of that during the heat is, you know, extraordinary, puts her own life at risk.

So it's this constant for workers like that and people like that who do not have the luxury of just, you know, sitting at a computer terminal or something in an air conditioned office.

There's a constant calculation of, can I deal with this heat?

Is it too dangerous?

Can I go out?

Can I do this thing?

You know, do I need to wait until dark to go home and ride my bike home because it's too hot now?

Will I survive the, you know, two or three mile trip home?

Not unlike the story I mentioned in the very beginning of how this book started.

It's like I walked just for me, it was just walking 10 or 12 blocks in downtown Phoenix and thinking, am I going to survive?

And for hundreds of millions of people, this is a daily calculation.

FR: And what this really then brings to mind, and I think you're very clear in the book, that it means that enormous swaths of our only home, this planet Earth, are going to become uninhabitable. Talk about what does that mean for us? I mean, can we kind of say to ourselves, well, we'll be okay because we're Northern enough? What are the consequences of a world like that?

JG: Well, that is the big question, right?

And you know, it's not just places like India or Pakistan, which I also write about in the book, or the Middle East.

It's right here in Texas.

I mean, this week has been extraordinarily brutal here.

One can imagine a few more degrees of heat and it will literally be impossible to go outside for anything more than a few minutes without putting your life at risk.

And we have this idea, I think a lot of readers of my book and a lot of people who are probably listening to us talk right now, that, okay, yeah, it's going to be hard for some people who have to work outside and I'm sorry about what happened to Sebastian Perez and this farm worker and all that.

But you know what?

We are living in a modern world now where you have air conditioning, you have ways of dealing with this heat and we'll sort of be okay.

And that's such a fantasy and I understand that because I have felt that too before I kind of really dug into this book.

But first of all, heat is going to impact us in all kinds of ways.

Like I mentioned earlier, crop failure, trees dying, animals, all kinds of, it's not just us.

It's not just the human world.

It's the world around us.

We cannot air condition the cornfields.

We can't air condition the forests.

We can't air condition the rivers.

Lots of things are going to die as they get hot because everything has these sort of thermal windows or thresholds that they, when it gets too hot, they die.

I mean, that's just a rule of life.

Look at Venus.

Venus is a very hot place.

There's nothing alive there.

So there's going to be a lot of loss as these temperatures start to go up.

But also I'm sitting here in my house in Texas, it's 106 right now outside.

I'm comfortable.

I'm fine.

But I'm dependent upon this whole infrastructure for this to continue, right?

It's the electric grid, the air conditioning.

I mean, in my book, I write about an urban planner in Phoenix who talks about what he calls a heat apocalypse, which is a major city like Austin or Dallas or Houston or Phoenix or Las Vegas or any of these places that are Miami that are really, really hot places where we can see temperatures that are really high and where lives will be in danger if you don't have access to air conditioning.

Well, what if there's a blackout?

I mean, what if we had a blackout here in Austin in the winter two years ago that lasted, I think our house was out of power for three days.

And many people, their houses were out of power even longer.

And that was the winter.

That was a different kind of thing.

People still died from that.

But if you had something like that happen here right now, we lost power here in Austin for three days.

There would be not just hundreds, but thousands of people cooked literally in their apartments and in their houses and who would not survive that.

So the myth that we're just going to be okay because we've got AC and we'll deal with it really doesn't grasp the scale of the problem that we face.

FR: You know, migration will be the only solution for many people who face this, but people are actually moving to places with the highest climate impacts, including yourself.

You moved to Austin. I just wanted to ask you, you know, what is kind of your thinking about having done that and how do you see the whole issue of migration in larger terms as well?

JG: Well, to start with me, you know, I moved from upstate New York.

I lived in Saratoga Springs, a very beautiful town, which, you know, no place is a safe zone from climate change.

It's going to affect all of us in different ways, but some places are certainly better than others.

And, you know, Saratoga is pretty high on the list of a kind of place where plenty of water, trees, cool, you know, it's a pretty good place.

And I moved to Texas and to Austin to the kind of belly of the beast on climate impacts.

Heat and Gulf Coast is very vulnerable to hurricanes and flooding.

And we have the oil and gas industry here.

But I moved here because I fell in love with a woman and we got married and her job was not transportable and mine was.

And so here I am.

And it kind of turned out to be great for the book, actually.

I didn't move here because of that.

But, you know, it has given me a new lens to think about what it's like to live in daily heat.

But I write about this in my book that, you know, heat is a migration force.

You know, people and animals, plants, they move to keep in their sort of Goldilocks zone.

So when it's heat from being in a place that's not too hot, not too cold.

So we see that, you know, in the simplest ways with birds and things like that, who are very good at migrating, obviously, and can relatively easily move to different zones.

And then you see things like forests, which are also moving northward, but they move, obviously, much more slowly.

And so heat is going to rearrange everything on the planet, in the oceans, on land, and as people and things, living things, seek out their, you know, essentially their comfort zones.

And, you know, there's a lot of implications that go with that from, you know, on the human part of the story of politics, you know, cultural changes, disease patterns.

I mean, one of the big issues, and I have a whole chapter about this in the book is something as simple as mosquitoes, right?

Mosquitoes are very, very sensitive to temperature.

And as certain regions warm, a great example is Mexico City, which is where my wife is from.

And I've spent a lot of time there.

And it had this sort of perfect climate where there was never any problems with mosquitoes in Mexico City. 30 million people live there, so a huge number of largest or second largest city in the world.

It had never had any of the mosquito-borne diseases like malaria or dengue fever, Zika, or anything like that, that just didn't exist because there was no mosquitoes.

But now, just a temperature change of a few degrees, and Mexico City is starting to see it's become a comfortable habitat for the kinds of mosquitoes that carry these diseases.

And that has enormous public health implications for Mexico City.

And a similar thing is happening in Nepal.

We just had the first transmission of malaria here in the United States since it was, you know, wiped out here several decades ago.

And part of it has to do with the changing migration patterns of mosquitoes.

So this is one of the hard things about the climate crisis in general to wrap our minds around is these kind of cascading effects, how small, even small changes can have enormous implications for us, the world we live in.

FR: Jeff Goodell in The Heat Will Kill You First, you also talk about extreme event attribution, and you mentioned the Northwest heat wave before. I mean, the absolutely shocking temperatures. You point out that the temperature jumped from a normal 76 degrees to 114 degrees Fahrenheit. Remind us what happened there, not just the human deaths, but the marine deaths and other wildlife.

And then it was the first event that was actually directly attributed to climate change. So talk about that climate change attribution that came about with that heat wave.

JG: Yeah, so, you know, people always ask, as I mentioned earlier, you know, where is the safe place to be from climate change, or where should I move, where should I go?

And, you know, when people ask me that before, the Pacific Northwest was always a place that, you know, I would mention that there's no safe place, but there's better and worse places.

And it always seemed to many people to be a really safe place to be.

And the idea of a heat wave like the one that you just described hit the Pacific Northwest for a week in 2021 was about as imaginable as sort of snow in the Sahara.

I mean, it was no climate models predicted it, nobody thought it could happen.

And yet it did.

And, you know, these temperatures skyrocketed to levels that no one had seen in that region before.

No one was prepared for it.

There's virtually nobody has air conditioning in that region of the country because they've never needed it.

And it just shows you how vulnerable our civilization is to these rapid changes.

And also how, you know, people talk often about climate change bringing in a kind of new normal, but it's not really a new normal.

It's an abnormal.

We don't really know how our climate is going to react as the climate is such a chaotic system as we push it hotter and hotter, what it means, you know, and nobody would have imagined you could have 121 degrees in British Columbia in 2021.

And you know, you had a town that essentially spontaneously combusted, you know, it was so hot, one little spark and the entire town went up in flames.

A number of people died there.

So these kinds of things, you know, are one of the sort of scarier aspects of climate change.

How hot can it get here in Texas?

You know, it's been 112, 115. Can it get 125 in Texas?

Well, nobody knows for sure.

But we know that as the climate gets hotter and hotter, we're pushing more and more into these unexpected zones.

And that's why nobody, when we talk about climate change, nobody knows what the sort of new rules are about what can happen, how big a hurricane can get, how big a wildfire can get, the kind of wildfire that you're seeing with the smoke in the East Coast now has to do with the hotter, drier forests that are, when they combust, whether the spark is from lightning or, you know, from chainsaw or from a passing muffler, a car with a muffler or something, it doesn't matter.

What matters is when it burns, it burns much bigger and hotter and you have these events like the one you're having now on the East Coast.

But one of the most interesting things that's happening in climate science right now and that I write about in the book is for a long time, it's been like, well, yeah, there's always been heat waves and yes, there's always been forest fires and yes, there's always been hurricanes and, you know, we can't really say this was caused by climate change.

Then scientists would always be very careful about, you know, what they call attribution, about saying what caused this.

Well, climate models have gotten so sophisticated now and we understand the physics of the climate system so much better now that climate scientists like Frederica Otto, who I write about in my book and is just one of many scientists, she's sort of on the forefront of this, they have been able to look at an event like the Pacific Northwest heat wave and they essentially can have enough data and stuff that they can run a model that shows that, you know, that puts in all the real information that happened and then they can take certain things out like the CO2 levels and things like that.

And they can say with real certainty that in this case, the heat wave would have been virtually impossible without the elevated levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.

And you know, it's really a powerful tool because it enables scientists to say with real certainty, this heat wave was caused by higher levels of CO2, which means this heat wave was caused by the burning of oil and gas, which means this heat wave was caused by people and companies that we can name, BP, ExxonMobil, and then it opens up a whole new window of legal responsibility.

It's not dissimilar from proving that if you smoke a cigarette, you got lung cancer.

That allowed this whole bunch of litigation around the tobacco industry, of course, that most people know about.

It had a transformative effect on the industry and on public health and things.

And so scientists are able to do that now with climate events and it's going to be a very powerful political and legal tool.

And just let me add one last thing to this, is that the powerful thing about this is that they can say not every event is caused by climate change.

So they can say that the Pacific Northwest heat wave would not have been possible without the higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.

But on other events, like there was a recent huge flooding and rainstorms and precipitation, you know, deluges in Pakistan that caused huge amounts of problems.

And they did a similar study on that and they said, no, this was not CO2 caused.

So this was not driven by that.

And this being able to sort of winnow this out, not only makes the science, shows it to be sort of much more credible, but also gives us a much more vivid picture of exactly what these elevated levels of CO2 are doing to our world.

FR: Yes, and right now, recently a trial, I think just last week, concluded from a suit that was brought by a group of young people in Montana against the fossil fuel companies and also against the McKinsey Consulting Firm, which is a major consulter with oil and gas.

The judge hasn't yet ruled on the case, but it occurred to me as you were talking, the tobacco example is really important because one of the things I was afraid of was, you know, yes, you can attribute it to maybe the 88 companies, oil and gas companies that are, you know, responsible for 90% of these carbon emissions, but don't quote me on that, you know, a lot. But you can't say which company.

But as you point out, in the tobacco example, it was a tobacco industry as a whole. So I wonder if you could weigh in on what you feel might be possible with these legal suits.

JG: Well, first of all, let me just say, you know, I'm not a legal expert on that.

I've researched it for the book and, you know, I've talked to a lot of people, but it's still a very new field, but it doesn't take, you know, you don't have to be a legal expert to see where this can be heading.

And let's just take Exxon Mobil because they're the most famous example and they're the best documented in many ways.

You know, it's been shown that just as in the tobacco cases that they knew that their product oil and gas was causing the planet to warm and their projections of the amount of warming and everything that would happen were very accurate.

And they knew this in the 70s and, you know, they've continued, of course, to drill and mine for gas and oil.

And they have continued to contribute to this, to the warming of our planet.

And one of the things about burning fossil fuels, creating carbon dioxide is that carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for thousands of years.

So it's not like air pollution that goes away.

You know, when I was a kid in L.A., I mean, in California, Northern California, I couldn't see the mountains from my house because there was so much smog.

And then catalytic converters came in and air was cleaned up various ways, EPA, different actions.

And now you can see the mountains easily and the smog went away.

CO2 is not like that.

It stays up there for thousands of years.

So for a company like Exxon Mobil, if you're a lawyer looking at this, you can say, OK, so Exxon Mobil over the last 50 years, 60 years since they've known about this has contributed X billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere.

And let's just say, and I think this is roughly accurate, that it's like 4% of CO2, additional CO2 in the atmosphere has come from Exxon Mobil.

So you can imagine that if you're a lawyer saying, OK, you know, here is a major event in the Pacific Northwest or could be anywhere, India, anywhere.

Is Exxon Mobil responsible for 4% of the damages of that? Is that fair? They knew what they were doing. We can show how much they've contributed. We don't have to show, you know, which molecule of CO2 went where. We can just say it's 4%.

And if you start thinking about it that way, and especially if you're working for Exxon Mobil, that's a very terrifying notion because there's been trillions, depending on how you count it, there are trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars of liability here in the events driven by these higher levels of CO2.

And so if you take even 4% of that, that's a huge, huge, huge number.

And I will tell you, again, I'm not a legal expert, but I will tell you that this is something that is being very actively explored, and it is something that the fossil fuel industry in general is terrified about and really does not want to talk about, but is nevertheless moving forward very quickly.

And this case in Montana that you mentioned is one example of that.

This attribute of science we're talking about is another example of that.

And I actually think it's going to be escalating quite rapidly and going to be a very powerful political tool, if nothing else.

FR: Yes, and for a community like mine, we have an estimate that we are going to become an archipelago.

Right now, we're a peninsula on Long Island, but we're going to become an archipelago sometime in the next 50 years.

So that's going to mean just billions and billions and billions of dollars worth of damage, the destruction of a community.

And I know other communities are looking at this, but there is, it's only a few studies, but I have kind of texted with Michael Mann about this, the climate scientist.

There is some hopeful indication that CO2 will begin to drop significantly out of the atmosphere if we get to basically zero emissions within a decade.

I know it was always talked about as thousands of years, but there are some indications, and hopefully they're true because a couple of studies is never enough, that if we can do something about it, we might actually be able to save ourselves.

JG: Well, yeah, I mean, I'm very optimistic that despite all the stuff we've been talking about, I'm very optimistic about our future and that there's going to, obviously, there's going to be a lot of suffering and loss and the changes that are coming.

But I also think that we can use this opportunity to build a much better world, a safer world, more fair world, more equitable world.

That's bringing to the forefront a lot of issues that we're being forced to confront.

And to go back to heat for a moment, I mean, I really think of my book as a kind of, not a gloom and doom story at all, but a kind of handbook for how to think about our lives now and how to deal with this and how to keep safe in the future.

And earlier in the beginning of our talk, I mentioned that I almost had a heat stroke while I was hiking in Nicaragua and I had no idea what was happening to me and our ignorance about these risks that we face, whether it's from heat or from other aspects of air pollution from wildfires like you're having now and particulates and how to protect yourself from that.

And there's a lot we have to learn that we can learn to protect ourselves, but also to build a better world.

I mean, we build, just again with the heat stuff, we build all these buildings now that are these sealed air conditioned boxes that are catastrophic in any kind of situation where you would lose power.

So we can build buildings in ways that our windows can open again.

And we can imagine here in Texas, there's dogtrot houses where they, these old fashioned ways where they would let the breeze come through and planting more trees in urban areas so that there's more shade for people.

Public libraries thinking differently about their role during the heat and keeping themselves open for people to go into.

I mean, there's lots of ways of changing our world to make us safer, better, more equitable.

And I think that that to me is what's really hopeful and powerful.

And on heat, that's I think the simplest one to deal with it.

Unlike—you mentioned sea level rise, which my last book was about and the turning Long Island into an archipelago. That's a whole different story than trying to keep people safe from heat and checking in on them and making sure that outdoor workers aren't out there, you know, working in the fields at two o'clock in the afternoon when the heat is at the highest, you know, it's not that hard to put in shade breaks and water breaks and, you know, keep people safe if we only have the will and interest in doing it.

FR: That's right. And plant trees.

And yeah, the sea level rise is not going to stop probably for thousands of years, even if we stop putting CO2 into the atmosphere. Once the Arctic starts melting, it's very hard to stop it.

JG: Well, it's already melting. And yes, it is very hard to stop it.

I mean, one of the, you know, one of the things we didn't kind of talk about much, but it connects with this is, you know, the warming of the ocean, which is right now the North Atlantic is significantly warmer than has ever been measured by humans before.

And that's driving a lot of the kind of atmospheric changes that we're seeing.

And it has a lot of implications for you, you know, where you live.

I mean, as you know, in my book, I have a chapter about going to Antarctica.

I went to Antarctica to, with a group of scientists who were studying the melt of some of the big glaciers there and how they're getting destabilized.

And they're getting destabilized and risking a kind of large scale collapse because the Southern Ocean has warmed by simply one degree Fahrenheit.

One degree Fahrenheit, tiny amount, has changed the dynamics on the underside of where the ocean meets these big ice sheets and causing them to melt from below, which is causing them to crack, which is causing them to topple in into the sea.

And that toppling into the sea is what is, it ultimately means that Long Island will be an archipelago, that that is what's going to drive sea level rise.

And so, you know, these small changes have huge implications as we think about this over time.

And that's why, you know, I think people, everybody knows about climate change in a way, it's sort of this background thing in a lot of people's lives.

And one of the things that I'm really trying to communicate with this book is the urgency of this, because once this stuff gets in motion, once the, you know, the ocean gets hotter, it takes a long time to cool off.

And once the CO2 is in the atmosphere, it stays up there for a very long time.

And once this collapsing of the ice sheets is underway as it is now, it will just accelerate.

And there's enormous thermal inertia in our world, in the natural world.

And so we really need to stop that now before we push this system in ways that will echo for generations of our children.

FR: Jeff Goodell, this book is absolutely terrific and so important. It's also a really fascinating read. I mean, this is hard stuff to contemplate, but your book was really a page turner for me and I want to thank you so much for talking with us here about it.

JG: Well, thank you so much for having me. And I really appreciate this opportunity to have a sort of in-depth discussion with you about it. I'm really grateful to have the platform to do that. So thank you.

FR: Jeff Goodell is the author of six previous books. He's covered climate change for more than two decades at Rolling Stone and is a senior fellow at the Adrian Arsht Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center.

Back in 2017, we spoke with Lynn Zinser of Climate Liability News about the efforts to hold the fossil fuel companies legally responsible for scorching our planet.

Some of the cases we spoke about then have seen important developments.

Within the past year, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of states' ability to sue under public nuisance laws, something that had been challenged by the polluters.

And the landmark suit brought by a group of young people against the federal government under the public trust doctrine, Juliana versus U.S., just got the green light to head to trial.

And a similar case brought by the same law firm just concluded its trial in Montana June 20th and is waiting for the judge to rule.

But this five-year-old conversation with Zinser is still relevant today. She tells us how the public is seeking to hold the climate criminals to account.

HOST INTRO: Only 90 companies are responsible for half of all climate change. How long will it take before the world starts holding them accountable in court? Well, it's already happening.

No suits have yet been won, but it took a long while before big tobacco started losing big in court, and many predict big dirty energy will follow suit.

Climate Liability News is the website to go to for reporting on the intersection of climate change impacts and the law.

Like Inside Climate News, ProPublica, and Tarbell, it's a non-profit journalism site, and I'm very pleased to welcome its founding editor, Lynn Zinser, to Writer's Voice.

LZ: Thanks for having me.

FR: So how much climate change litigation is happening in the U.S. and around the world now?

LZ: Well, it's still a relatively small group of suits, but it is certainly growing, and I think that a lot of people foresee more things on the horizon.

Many of the cases that were filed by California communities this summer are very much a bellwether event, because what is going to be happening is, as climate impacts become much harder to pay for as time goes along, they're getting more expensive, getting more common, communities are having trouble figuring out how on earth this is going to get paid for, and the more cities that file suits such as that trying to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable, that certainly has to get attention of more communities across the country and around the world.

So I would say it's still a relatively limited field, but it could change very quickly, because as these costs escalate, there become fewer and fewer places to turn for how to pay for them.

FR: And what are some of the legal doctrines being used for these suits?I mean, we'll go into some particular ones, but maybe just give us a brief overview before we go into some examples.

LZ: Well, the one that gets the most attention right now is certainly the doctrine being pursued by Juliana versus the United States.

The 21 kids suing the federal government for promoting fossil fuel policies that aggravate climate change, which they argue violates their right to life, liberty, and property in the future, and also a constitutional right.

They would like to see a constitutional right to a safe climate.

That is based on a public trust doctrine, whereas in a truly illegal doctrine, that's not new.

It's actually very, very old, that a government is responsible for preserving resources for future generations' use, and in this case, resources being a livable climate and a safe environment.

So that is the basis of that case. That is used in a lot of places around the world, and in many countries, they actually have constitutions that guarantee the health of their citizenry. Our constitution does not explicitly delineate that, so they're trying to sort of create a new little niche.

Based on a doctrine, though, it is a legal doctrine that is old and well-respected, the public trust doctrine. They’re trying to use it in a kind of a novel way.

And then there's just a much more straightforward liability claim, the fact that science is now proving how much of global warming has been driven by the burning of fossil fuels over the course of the industrial time, and as they get the science more and more specific about how much and exactly how much has been driven, the fact that climate change impacts are costly, they are just using a direct cause and effect.

Well, if these companies caused these impacts, they should pay for the damages.

So that's just much more along the line of just a strict cause and effect climate liability claim.

We do have some states that are taking some pretty active action, well, states and localities.

FR: Well, first, you've mentioned the California cases a couple of times.These seem to involve the public nuisance law, usually applied to things like, you know, loitering.Tell us about these cases and why they're so important.

LZ: Well, they're very important because it's a demonstrated legal avenue, the same legal avenue where California, for instance, holding companies accountable for lead content in paint.

That was a public health problem that was brought in California court to address the lead content in paint and the fact that it was harming people and children.

Along those lines, using the same line of thinking, if a company is producing a dangerous product, knows it's dangerous, and continues to sell it and contribute to the public health threat, then that company should be held accountable.

So it's along the same lines.

It's the community saying the fossil fuel industry has known for decades that their products contribute to global warming in a significant fashion, continue to sell them.

And not only just continue to sell them, they have worked pretty publicly to cast doubt on the science of climate science and that their products do contribute to global warming, have worked actively against any kind of climate policy to decrease fossil fuel emissions.

So that's part of their argument, too, is not just that they sell these products, but that they've known the dangers and have actually worked against any solutions to those dangers and actually worked against those solutions.

So that's, again, using that same harm and effect line of thinking like you would use for any public health threat, including tobacco, like I said, and lead paint and those kinds of things.

So that's certainly the line of thinking of those suits.

And there is more and more science that can tie each company or set of companies to how much global warming they have produced.

So that's sort of what is helping these cases.

Because before, it's like, well, yeah, it's happening, but how much is Exxon responsible?

You can't really tell, can you?

But now that there's science that actually is, you can tie their products and how much has been burned over the years to the global warming that that has caused.

So that is some of the basis for some of these suits.

Now they feel like they have much more scientific basis to base these claims on.

FR: That was Lynn Zinsser of Climate Liability News, talking with us in 2017.To hear the full interview, go to writersvoice.net.

That's it this week for Writer's Voice.

Listen again for free, read book excerpts, and sign up for the podcast at writersvoice.net.

I'm Francesca Rheannon.