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“This is really a story about… the people who are causing the pollution, harming the people who basically did nothing and are suffering the damages. And do those people who cause the harm owe the people who suffer the damages anything?”
Jeff Goodell, contributing writer at Rolling Stone and author of “The Heat Will Kill You First”
July 2026 was the hottest month ever recorded in the contiguous United States, and Europe came through its hottest June-to-July period on record. At least 35,000 excess deaths have been counted across the continent’s summer heatwaves — a figure produced by statistical modeling rather than by death certificates, and one that is still incomplete. Here in the Ten Across region, where extreme heat is not new, Maricopa County confirmed 645 heat deaths in 2023 and counts them one by one.
A September 2025 report from the Government Accountability Office describes extreme heat as the leading weather-related cause of death in the United States. Nonetheless, extreme heat has never met the criteria for a federal disaster declaration. Federal assistance is largely built around damage to physical infrastructure, while extreme heat mainly damages people. Mayors from this corridor, who have been managing heat longer than anyone, have been pressing to change that. Meanwhile there is still no federal heat standard protecting outdoor workers, and Texas and Florida — among the hottest states in the country — have passed laws barring their own cities from requiring employers to provide water breaks and shade.
The heat is also moving. In June 2021 a heat dome settled over the Pacific Northwest, a region built for nothing like it. Among the hundreds who died was Sebastian Perez, a 38-year-old farmworker from Guatemala, two months into a job at an Oregon nursery. Within two weeks, scientists at World Weather Attribution announced the event would have been “virtually impossible” without human-caused climate change. In the five years since, the field has advanced to counting the deaths a heat wave would not otherwise have caused, and to tracing heat damage to the emissions of individual companies. That science now underpins lawsuits against fossil fuel producers, new laws in Vermont and New York, and a fight over the climate chapter in the reference manual federal judges consult.
In this episode, climate journalist Jeff Goodell returns to the podcast to discuss the summer behind us, the divide he has described between “the cooled and the cooked,” and his current project on the rise of attribution science.
Relevant Articles and Resources
- “Framework for a Heat-Ready Nation” (Federation of American Scientists & Ten Across, July 2025)
- “The New American Inequality: The Cooled vs. the Cooked” (The New York Times, August 2025)
- Copernicus Climate Change Service monthly climate bulletins (European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, 2026)
- Maricopa County Heat Surveillance (Maricopa County Department of Public Health)
Relevant Ten Across Conversations Podcasts
- Finding Optimism Amid the Climate Crisis with Jeff Goodell
- Covering Climate Change as It Unfolds with Jeff Goodell
- Building Heat Resilience with Kathy Baughman McLeod & David Hondula
Credits
Host: Duke Reiter
Producer and editor: Bryce Cristiano
Research and support provided by: Kate Carefoot, Rae Ulrich, and Sabine Butler
Guest Speaker
Jeff Goodell’s latest book is the New York Times bestseller The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet. He is the author of six previous books, including The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World, which was a New York Times Critics Top Book of 2017. He has covered climate change for more than two decades at Rolling Stone, The New York Times Magazine, and many other publications. As a commentator on climate and energy issues, he has appeared on NPR, MSNBC, CNN, CNBC, ABC, NBC, Fox News and The Oprah Winfrey Show. He is a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow.
