Climate change has made air conditioning a necessity

The planet just experienced the hottest week in recorded history — and the high temperatures aren’t letting up. When this heat season is over, we’ll have more evidence that America is ill-equipped for the patterns of extreme heat that are now regular occurrences. One of the most obvious gaps is the lack of air conditioning — a key intervention in times of extreme heat. 

Prisoners in Texas are clogging their toilets, causing them to overrun onto the concrete floor in order to have a cool, wet place to get reprieve. Such acts of desperation are necessary because prisoners can’t take cool showers at any time, have limited access to fans, and often have few water breaks due to shortages in prison staff.

A whopping 44 of the 50 states lack universal air conditioning in prisons. (In the Sunbelt, only Tennessee has universal air conditioning in prisons). In addition to heat’s better known physical effects on the human body, researchers have found links between heat exposure, mental health, and violence — a dangerous trio in a prison setting. It is time we view air conditioning not as a luxury but as a necessity — both to protect the health and well-being of incarcerated individuals and of prison staff. 

Meanwhile, public and low-income housing facilities are not designed to maximize cooling, some lack air conditioning, are inefficient, and have small windows. Many of the people living in these environments are especially vulnerable to heat’s health impacts: people over 65, people with disabilities, mothers with young children. With no federal standards requiring air conditioning, residents are often personally responsible for purchasing window or portable units to keep their homes livable. This means that people are making the choice between cooling their homes and buying food or medicine. 

But again, the point of view that air conditioning is a luxury has led to society’s tolerance of this situation. 

As climate change makes the heat season start earlier and last longer, the estimated 35,000 schools in the U.S. without adequate cooling will have to choose between exposing children to an unsafe learning environment or cutting instructional time. The evidence linking higher indoor temperatures with lower cognitive function is robust.

Most people are shocked to learn there is no federal regulation requiring air conditioning in nursing homes or assisted living facilities, although most states require that indoor temperatures must remain below 81 degrees. Even so, 81 degrees is far too high a threshold in a facility with large numbers of patients with chronic illnesses and on medications that increase the risk of heat illness.

In practice, inadequate cooling in these facilities means indoor temperatures frequently exceed 90 degrees and often approach or exceed triple digits during extreme heat events. In some parts of the Sunbelt, high humidity and persistently high overnight temperatures give people’s bodies no opportunity to recover from daytime exposures.

None of this is new. Nonprofit organizations have been advocating for better living conditions in prisons, public housing and care facilities for many years. But as extreme heat events increase in frequency, severity, and geographic spread, nature is showing us in spectacular fashion just how tolerant we are of the suffering of our neighbors, and how inadequate our systems of governance are at protecting us. 

Extreme heat is not only a meteorological event, and we need to stop defining it that way. As humans, we have contributed to this phenomenon via greenhouse gas emissions. But we have also utterly failed to protect one another — including the most vulnerable among us — against this threat.

In our quest for efficiency, we’ve outsourced important functions to private organizations that are not qualified to provide them. Meanwhile, we’ve accepted the characterization of protective interventions like air conditioning as luxuries of which some people are unworthy. We’ve failed in our public responsibility to provide basic resources to the most vulnerable among us. 

Heartbreaking stories about the deaths of mail carriers, food truck operators, the people who keep our cities clean, prisoners, and so many others tell us not just about the weather but about the society we’ve created. We are responsible for the conditions that make heat the deadliest natural phenomenon in the United States. This is on us.

Ashley Ward is the Director of the Heat Policy Innovation Hub at the Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability at Duke University.