All right, the Bell. We can begin. Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for being here. Hope you had a nice lunch. My name is Liz Kreutz. I'm a correspondent at NBC News, reporting for The Today Show, Nightly News, MSNBC, our streaming platforms. I'm so excited to have this conversation because in this role, I've recently, just the past few weeks, been covering the extreme heat that we've been facing across the country. I know we all know that climate change is real and scary, and one of the ways it's manifesting itself is in rising temperatures and extreme heat. Parts of our country, like Las Vegas, saw the hottest start to June on record, and more people die from heat than any other weather-related event, which is stunning. Here to discuss all of this and solutions, our esteemed panelists and experts here. I'll introduce each of you. We have Jeff Goodell, contributing editor to Rolling Stone, a climate journalist who has covered these issues for more than two decades, and author of the New York Times bestselling book, The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet. In the middle here, we have Jane Gilbert, the Chief Heat Officer for Miami Dade County.

You're considered the world's first Chief Heat Officer. And Marta Segura, the Chief Heat Officer and Director for Climate Emergency Mobilization for the City of Los Angeles. So thank you guys for being here. So Jeff, I'm going to start with you, and I will say to you guys should feel free to jump in and have a conversation if there's at any point something you want to weigh in on, and we will leave time for questions at the end as well. Jeff, I mentioned It's been that heat kills more people than any other weather-related event here in the US. Talk to us about what the heat problem looks like globally. Just how bad is it?

Pretty bad. Let's start with the fundamental thing, that we've known for 100 years or more that burning fossil fuels put CO₂ into the atmosphere. That CO₂ in the atmosphere acts like an insulating blanket and is what is causing this gradual rise of temperatures. We've seen about a two-degree rise since the industrial age, which does not sound like much, but it is a lot. One of the things that is happening here is it's not just this gradual rise of temperature, it is also making our climate more extreme. We're seeing more extreme events of all kinds, rainfall, precipitation events, more bigger, more intense hurricanes. And heatwaves are one of the clearest manifestations of this rising CO₂ levels. We know from climate attribution studies and other things that these extreme heat waves that we've been seeing are caused by these higher levels of CO₂. What we're seeing is longer heat waves around the world. We're seeing them lasting longer, and we're seeing higher and hotter temperatures. Again, to put this in the biggest context is that we humans, like all living things, have thermal limits. Everything that lives, whether it's a cockroach or a redwood tree or a human being, has a zone that they can thrive in, hot and cold.

One of the things that's happening as our planet heats up, as these heat waves get more and more extreme, we're seeing 125 degrees in parts of Asia right now, is is that we're hitting these thermal limits for what our bodies can take. One of the things I talk about in my book is that... One of the things that motivated me to write my book actually was a 20-block run down when I missed an Uber in Phoenix in 2018 on a really hot day, I ran 20 blocks on a 115-degree day, and I felt like I was going to die. I got dizzy. I was out of breath. My heart was pounding. I realized that heat can kill you like a bug zapper. I really fast. That was the genesis of the book. This idea that we are hitting these zones where the bug zapper is coming for you is the reality of the world we live in now.

Yeah. Jane, I'd be curious because it's gotten so dire and people are starting to pay attention, now we actually have jobs like the ones you both have. We didn't, even just a few years ago, have a position of a chief heat officer. Can you just explain what this job is, what you do, and why it's so important that our cities have these jobs now in this role.

Yeah. I'm in Miami. We're known internationally for our risks, for sea-level rise, for hurricane risk. I came into this role after having served as the city of Miami's first Chief Resilience Officer, in part to address some of those risks for the city. But when a group of community-based organizations did a series of focus groups and surveys, particularly in our neighborhood neighborhoods where people are struggling to make ends meet, asking the question, what concerns you the most about climate change? It wasn't sea-level rise, and it wasn't even hurricanes, even though Hurricane Irma in 2017 hit those communities pretty hard. It was extreme heat because that's what they were living day in and day out. Their utility bills were getting less affordable. Their AC breaks down in July. They can't get it fixed for three weeks because there are no H-Factor missions because everybody's demanding them. We have over 300,000 people in Miami that work outside every day. I've had our medical officer saying that people who were waiting at a bus stop too long ended up calling 911 because it was just too dangerous. That's really the impetus. The mayor heard that and charged me with addressing the increasing health risks and economic burdens associated associated with extreme heat.

The job didn't exist, so I had to create my own job description. How did you do that? Well, first, you have to better understand who and where are people at risk. We did a few studies and found that the disparities were quite significant. We have some zip codes where people are ending up in the emergency room or being hospitalized for heat at rates four times the rates of other zip codes in Miami Bay County. It's low income, high land surface temperatures, our urban heat islands, high percentage of outdoor workers, high percentage of families with children that are the neighborhoods where people are ending up suffering the most. It's not just that they're suffering from heat, there's higher cardiac arrests, more pediatric asthma, and other respiratory diseases also exacerbated by heat. We worked in building, outreaching to our community-based organizations, many partners, the National Weather Service, our State Health Department, our municipalities. We have 34 municipalities in the county, and people with lived experience to together put together a heat action plan. That's really what I'm in the process of implementing. I'm happy to talk more about that, but if Marta wants to.

Yeah, Marta, why don't you jump in, and hopefully we We can get to all of that. Marta, how much do you all work together as these chief heat officers, and also then how is the heat crisis manifesting itself in LA?

First question, Jane and I talk a lot. We support each other a lot. We're basically pioneers in this area for municipalities. So her previous experience as a resilience officer, my experience in public health and environmental health really has helped quite a bit. I started off as a director of Climate Emergencies for the city of LA a year later. The President, Krikorian It was unacceptable to have all of these preventable deaths and preventable hospitalizations in Los Angeles because of a great story that LA Times did based on a UCLA study that demonstrated for the past 10 years, the vulnerabilities across Los Angeles and the higher risks in areas that had less air conditioning, more air pollution. That's something I'm going to talk about later, is like the health equity issues and the interaction between heat and air pollution and wildfires and smoke and pre-existing health conditions and the vulnerabilities of babies, children, and elders. But then you add any of these other conditions to it, you don't even have to have it be that hot. You don't even have to have a heat alert for injuries to begin to happen, for hospitalizations to begin to happen.

If you notice in your own neighborhoods, when the sirens of the ambulances start ringing more often during the summer, that's probably because somebody has succumbed to a heat injury. I want to say that risk communications is a big part of our job because if we don't communicate the changes in the climate, the changes in extreme heat, and how dangerous it is now versus 10 years ago, even versus five years ago, and how much hotter it's going to be, Then people don't understand why they need to change their health habits, their self-care, why they need to have a plan in advance of a heat wave. These are all things that all of us will have to change. We've We learn to change our diet and know how to eat healthier. We have to learn how to adapt and be really cognizant of extreme weather, particularly in LA, extreme heat, because it is the highest cause of preventable deaths and preventable injuries out of all the climate hazards. That's why I think our position exists. Chief heat officer in Los Angeles is in public works, but I report directly to the mayor. I think one thing that's been challenging for all heat officers is we have to then coordinate and collaborate across all departments, particularly the Emergency Management Department that has traditionally dealt with hazards, but in Los Angeles has not dealt with extreme heat.

I want to mention that FEMA for the first time has required that climate hazards be included in local hazard mitigation plans. But even so, very few cities have done that. La did that. We included extreme heat in our local hazard mitigation plans. It's critical because we want to start drawing down funding from the state and from the federal government. We We have to show them our data. We have to show them the vulnerabilities at the local level to protect our residents. So I'll stop there. There's a lot more because, as you know, political influence isn't easy. And if you have to have political influence across all departments, US, and with the mayor, and you're not the mayor, that in and of itself is a challenge for chief heat officers and resilience officers across the nation.

For sure. Jeff, I want to ask you, why is heat so deadly? Someone gave an example to me once where they said that they gave a PowerPoint about heat, and they showed a picture of a city before, during, and after a heatwave, and the joke is that the picture of the city looks exactly the same. Is that the problem, that you just can't see it? You can see damage from a tornado, a hurricane?

Yeah, that's part of it. You think about... I look at my window in my office, and I live in Austin, Texas, and I can't tell, looking out my window, whether it's 75 degrees or 125 degrees. There's no visual indicators. If there's a hurricane or a flood or something, you see the trees bending and everything, and it registers in your mind in a completely different way. We have no visual clues to this. When I was on that walk in Phoenix, or the run walk in Phoenix, there was the birth of the book. I didn't realize it was so hot until I ran out the front door and it was like hitting this wall of heat. But it's more complicated than that because we also think about how We talk about heat in our daily lives. If, not you personally, but in some people, you meet somebody who's attractive, you call them, They're hot. I just met this hot person. That's a good thing. Near where we live in Austin, there's a gym called Heat Boot Camp. It's like, Let's go pay money to overheat ourselves and get healthy. I was in the Austin Airport a couple of weeks ago.

I was in the bookstore, I picked up this book that says Austin is Cool. It's all about the great tacos and the music. Then I walk out carrying this book, and there's a banner on the wall that says Austin is Hot. Hot music, hot food, hot whatever. There's a lot of confusion just in how we communicate about that. Also, there has been a lot of ignorance about the risks of of heat. When I took that walk in Phoenix and had this little epiphany that caused me to write this book, I hadn't written about climate change for 15 years. The phrase global warming gives you some hint that heat's involved. But I, being an expert in the field, even I didn't understand the risks because it had just never occurred to me. We think about climate change and global warming as these things that happen Off in the distance that future generations have to worry about, or glaciers are melting somewhere far away, or whatever. That's one of the reasons why I called my book The Heat Will Kill You First, which was not exactly a huge hit when I proposed it to my publisher. They're like, Are you nuts?

No one's ever going to buy this book. This is a terrible idea. But I really wanted it to make it visceral, to make this about you, about us. Take it away from talking about climate change and heat risk as a distant thing and make it about what happens to you. This is why, Jamie, you're talking about people are dying right now during heatwaves. This is not some future risk. This is something that is happening right now.

I got a call from my nephew through marriage on Wednesday. His aunt and uncle were found deceased in their home in Texas. Their 8FAC system had gone out, and they're 70 years old. The temperature of the home was 104. It does hurt some more vulnerable. This is a middle-class family, isolated. It does hurt some more vulnerable, but it's really all of us. If we had a widespread and extended power outage in Miami, It would be very serious to a lot of people during a heatwave.

Something that Miami and LA do have in common is we have a large Latino population. I want to also reiterate it's very important to convey risk and convey the safety nets and safety solutions for heat in multiple languages and municipalities. We created these great flyers with the iconic artist Lalo Alcaraz, who was an advisor for Coco and all kinds of other Disney films. He donated basically his time to do the art to make a very colorful very culturally relevant, and we have it in 15 different languages. I often go to communications on climate discussions, and more often than not, people fail to talk about how important it is to have a culturally relevant, linguistically relevant communication strategy for every city because these people work in our cities. These people go to school in our cities. We're all part of the same fabric, and we have to be part of the same safety net to protect one another. I'm really proud of the work that Los Angeles has done, and I've seen your work too much in Miami. We're here to hopefully model the best of what can be done so that other cities don't have to reinvent the wheel.

If there are materials that we have, I just want to convey out there that you want to use Please use them and just let us know, and we'll be happy to share them with you. But it is a dire situation. The thing that I want to emphasize most is these are preventable deaths. Even if you have pre-existing conditions, you can You can protect yourself. You can protect your family. Those are the things that we try to teach on a daily basis with our risk communications. It's not just about teaching the public. We have to reeducate cities. We have to reeducate government because this is a multifaceted issue. It's about health. It's about equity. It's about equity, it's about weather, it's about climate, it's about government resources, it's about emergency response, it's about public safety. All of these various departments actually have to have their own communications and their own strategy on how they're going to now manage the risks from extreme heat. It also affects our rail system. It also affects our infrastructure. The costs are in the trillions. The other thing I want to mention that I think is really important is if we continue to cut the tax rates of billionaires and corporations, and we have less FEMA money, we have less EPA money, we have less money for health and education, then we're pushing our communities at the local level at further risk because cities depend on those federal dollars to have big infrastructure investments, to have offices like mine.

It's a luxury for Los Angeles to have my office for other cities. Other cities can't afford it. They're going to have to duplicate their climate person to do all of these jobs and politically empower them to have the influence they need in order to have any significant change. I'm fortunate that I report to the mayor and the deputy mayor, Suttley. I'm part of their Climate cabinet, and they It's been extremely supportive and encouraging for me to continue with this work, but I can't say the same for every city, and I'm concerned about the application nationwide of these types of policies and investments.

Jane, was there something you wanted to weigh in on?

Yeah, I just wanted to add that all the communications is a really big piece of our work and improving our emergency response. But another piece is our cities are getting They're hotter, not just because of climate change, it's how they're developing as cities. We're also, in addition to working with our emergency management, our communications department, on working with our public works, our parks, our planning on how we design cities to be cooler, our cooler neighborhoods. The neighborhoods where we have the highest risk have the lowest tree canopy. We know tree planting is a piece. We know by having more cool roofs we can bring down, buy less waste heat from vehicles, from cars, from buildings. If we make our buildings more efficient, if we have more electric vehicles, all of this will bring down the temperatures in our neighborhoods. We have some neighborhoods that are 10 degrees hotter than others in Miami. We now have two months more a year than we did in 1970 with days over 90 degrees. We're going to have to three months a year with a heat index of 105 or more by mid-century. That is significant. Then if you add another 10 degrees onto that, it's quite oppressive.

We're doubling down on our tree planting. We've doubled our tree planting, formed partnerships with the school district, with our faith-based community. Actually, collectively, our faith-based community owns more land than the county in the areas where we need to plant the most trees. Communities. That's been a great new partnership that we've done. Thankfully, our federal government has been a leader in infrastructure investments. We both have gotten tree planting grants from the US Forest Service, $10 million over the next five years for street trees in our areas that need it the most. That's a big piece, but you can't go anywhere in Miami without getting messaging about our heat season campaign. My husband actually texted me this morning with We do the bus wrap that was there, but we do bus wraps and bus shelter. We do radio. With social media, we can really target it. We do targeted messages for pregnant people. Also in OB/GYN offices, we do targeted messages for employers and employees. All of this, you need a different message for a proud 40-year-old man versus a young woman. It's a different message versus an elderly person.

Well, Jeff, do you want to weigh in on some solutions? I know you said you don't believe in band-aid solutions. You want to get to the root of the problem. What do you mean by that?

Well, the root of the problem is burning fossil fuels and our plant getting hotter and hotter. One thing I think it's really important to make clear, when we talk about solutions with climate, heat, or any other climate part of this, I think there's this notion that climate change or heat is like a broken leg. We're just going to do the right. We're all going to get and recycle our bottles, and then everything's going to go back to the way it was, and we'll be fine. That's not what's happening. What's happening is the climate that we all grew up in is gone. We're never going back to that. We're living in a new climate era that is completely different. Our temperatures will continue to rise as long as we continue putting CO₂ in the atmosphere. Until we get to zero emissions, none, which in some dream state will happen by 2050, I I don't think that's going to happen, but maybe it will, hopefully it will. But until we get to there, it's going to continue to get hotter. All these weather extremes we're talking about are going to continue to increase. Even then, it just stops where that is.

That's where we lock in. We are not going back to the old world. We're not going back to the world that we grew up in. The implications of this are enormous. The work that Jane and Marta are doing is so important, messaging, trees, all that stuff. But we are only at the beginning of the beginning of the beginning of the beginning of this. Cities, especially hot cities like LA and Miami, are going to have to be completely reimagined. They are going to be completely different because you can't live in a city where you have 130 degrees heatwaves by having more shade trees and better messaging. You're going to have a lot of people dying. All this stuff is really important, but I just want to really We underscore that until we really get a handle on what is causing this, until we really take seriously eliminating CO₂ and stopping the warming, this is a rapidly unfolding catastrophe for a lot of people that is not going to be solved. These moves that we're talking about are heroic and fantastic, but they're just the beginning.

Yeah, and I want to build on that. I think adaptation is a local because it's very location-specific in terms of how you need to respond, particularly infrastructure-related to sea level rise or what we're doing in terms of housing retrofits, et cetera. That's a very local. But the solutions to get to the scale we need to in terms of drawing down emissions. Those are national international policies. Those are certainly our mayors have committed to having our emissions by 2030 and by net zero by 2050. But they can't get there without state policies to support our utilities to help us get there. They can't get there without national policies to help move the economy. We're looking as much as we can. We can't AC our way out of this problem. We're looking as much as we can, but we have to keep people cool, safely. How do we make sure that we're helping people bring down the cost of their utilities as much as possible, but also give them access to affordable cooling? Same with the tree green infrastructure that will sequester carbon. It's not at the scale that Jeff's talking about what we need. That's national international policy.

Well, Marja, if you could talk about some of the socioeconomic parts of this when we're talking about AC. There are parts of the country right now, you need to blast your AC 24/7. Without it, you will die. The cost of that is astronomical. How are elderly people on a fixed income supposed It's not supposed to afford it.

In an old leaky building, it can be $800 a month.

To address the disparities, I think it's really important to understand that it's no coincidence or accident that the Biden administration announced Justice40. There has been a lot of historical data demonstrating that the historically disinvested communities all across the nation have been the sacrifice zones. And what we need to understand is that if we accelerate solutions in those communities within our cities, we're actually accelerating solutions for the entire city because it's a social fabric. It's a climate fabric, and it's a heat fabric. All of these solutions of decarbonizing our Department of Transportation, decarbonizing our buildings, getting heat pumps instead of regular ACs that release free-ons. All of these solutions are actually being given tax credits by the IHRA. We need to take advantage of those wonderful policies while they're still here. I don't want to think about the future right now. That's a totally different conversation. But yes, the disparities definitely are much higher in these low-income communities that if they don't already lack AC, they don't use it because they have to pay the bills or they have to buy food. I think almost every city might be similar. In our city, it's like 40% of the population does not have AC because California is known for its temperate climate.

Buildings weren't built for this very hot weather. Now, cities are reconsidering thresholds for maximum temperatures and asking landlords to consider ACs for all of their rental units. I mean, those are costs that we still don't know how to compensate. Going back to what is the root solution? I think we need to fix our tax system. We need to make sure that we go back to the taxes of 1960s, '70s, and '80s so that we can afford to come with these national infrastructure projects that will solve the solution for everyone, not just the middle income, but everyone.Go.

For it, Jeff.Well, I was just going to say about this adaptation thing. I think another big picture thing that's easily confused is that there's a lot of money to be made on reducing emissions. I live in Texas. We have tons of solar entrepreneurs, wind entrepreneurs. 70% of our grid now is coming from renewable energy. Texas is not a tree hugger state. The reason that renewable energy is moving so fast in Texas is because people can make a lot of money off of it. It's very straightforward. The problem is all these adaptation things we're talking about, nobody's making money off cooler bus stops. If you're an entrepreneur, you're like, Hey, I have an idea for a cooler bus stop. I'm going to get rich. That is not how it works. All this adaptation stuff requires government, good government. To To bring this to today, right now, this moment, the most important adaptation policy right now, today, is to make sure Donald Trump does not get reelected.Thank you.Right? Because if he does, then all the money, all the thinking about this is gone. Absolutely, right?

We have never had so much support at the local level for doing the work that we need to do, not just adaptation, but also decarbonization. It And helping people to cool their homes affordably, to improve our neighborhoods, all of that has been just remarkable, and that will go away.

And I just want to say, the Republicans have been I don't mean this to make this partisan. I mean, Republicans are responsible for Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act. They've been amazing. They've done the most important legislation in the country. Yeah.

I was told by the federal government that 90% of the DOE funds went to the south. Republicans, even though they voted against it, received the main benefits of manufacturing for the infrastructure that we need to create renewable energy systems across the nation. It's not a partisan issue. It's for everyone. We can't survive in this world without accelerating those solutions, accelerating them in every community, and acknowledging that those solutions need to be even stronger for the areas that have been sacrificed. It will help everyone.

Yeah, the increased cost of disasters across the country has just made insurance rates, whether it's flood or fire or wind insurance, just go through the roof. That makes it much less affordable for people.if.

We're going to make-Absolutely. Martin and I live in California, where basically all the insurance companies are pulling out because of all the natural disasters. You can't get your home insured. What happens? Are we just going to have mass migration, Jeff, of people trying to move to different parts of the country to escape the heat?

Well, migration is a complicated thing. I moved from a cool place in the northeast to a very hot place in Austin, Texas, which makes no sense from a climate point of view. But I fell in love. My wife lives in Austin, Texas. Has a job in Austin, Texas. It is not portable, so I live in Austin. As a journalist covering climate change, it's living in the belly of the beast, and it's great. But I think the question about what's going to happen to these cities in these hot places is people often ask me, Oh, is Phoenix going to become uninhabitable?Look at the middle east.Depends. But it depends on uninhabitable for who? It's not going to be uninhabitable for a hedge fund dude who's got a $20 million home with a microgrid on his house and backup battery power and 14 air conditioners and an ICE vest if he needs it. He's going to be fine. The question is, a person who is living on minimum wage, who maybe has a broken air conditioner, can't afford to fix it, it is not going to in a habitable floor. Then there's the question of, do you want to live that way?

I feel that in Austin, we had 42 days above 105 degrees last summer.Yeah.

So did we.Yeah..

You live this weird Summer becomes this summer. It used to be when I was a kid in California, summer was like, I love summer. You're out running around hunting, fishing for me. I was doing a lot of hunting and fishing when I was a kid and playing sports and stuff. Now I get calls from moms of kids who are like, Should I let my son play football? Because they're doing football practice and it's 105, and I don't want my son to die. You live these vampire lives.

We do need safety trainings for summer camp providers now.

It's a question of, do you want to live that way? I I think these cities are going to see people who decide, No, I don't want to live that way. I don't want to have my children's life or my life at risk. It's going to have an inevitable effect on the future of these places.

You mentioned the wealthy and how they'll survive. But none of us can survive without each other. We can't survive without farmworkers. We can't survive without janitors. We can't survive with the outdoor workers, without construction workers. All of these outdoor workers are essential during During the pandemic, we learned what essential workers were. We don't want to go through that with extreme heat on a constant basis and have unwalkable streets, not be able to use our public transportation, because then the local economy will begin to suffer as well. All of these storefront opportunities that we have in Los Angeles will begin to wither if we don't have walkable cities. Those are all the kinds of cascading effects that cities and federal government need to consider if we want to live something like the life that we live now, and we want that life for our children and for our grandchildren. But policy change, I'll say again, is extremely difficult, especially in difficult times like now when everything is extremely expensive. We're still recovering from the pandemic, and every construction and infrastructure investment goes into the trillions sometimes. We really need to figure out how we're going to pay for all of this.

Jane, I know you wanted to jump in on this as well. Also, I'm curious what the economic impact is.

I just wanted to point to the economic burden associated with outdoor workers. The Atlantic Council, two years ago, did a study of cities across the globe on what the economic impact is of extreme heat on labor productivity alone. In Miami, Metropolitan Miami, 10 billion a year due to labor productivity losses, workman's comp claims, health costs, lost time work. That's like getting a direct hurricane hit every single year. It's projected to double by mid-century. The thing is that if we work with employers on better heat health safety protocols, we can at least sustain productivity. We can reduce those health care costs. But that takes investment in that research in order to have that economic impact. We need to have a better analysis of the broader economic impacts, whether it's on insurance or health in order to justify investments in our public realm, investments in housing, in order to get where we need to go.

I'll mention along those That's one of the things that right now, FEMA seems to be crippled. If we were to add heat as a disaster to FEMA right now, I don't know if they could afford paying for the disaster and the recovery from extreme heat. We really need to reframe the way, not just what we call a disaster, but we frame how we pay for the recovery and for the prevention of these disasters. Because if we're not thinking 5, 10 years ahead right now, then we may not be able to afford it when we actually get there.

Jeff, do you think that at some point we are going to change and our tolerance for heat will change, and 120 in a certain amount of years will feel like what 100 feels to us now?

Well, if you mean that from a evolutionary point of view, no. Our bodies are not going to adapt that quickly over hundreds of generations, perhaps, but evolution works very slowly. But connected to that, one of the things that I'm most worried about in this whole, not just heat, but climate in general, is we talk a lot about adaptation, about technological adaptation, But also about... We don't talk enough about our psychological adaptation. One of the things that I'm really concerned about with climate change and heat is this idea of shifting baselines. That kids growing up now just think that 125 degrees, 130 degrees summers are the way it is. And that Maricopa County had 700 people die of extreme heat. Maybe next, maybe this summer, who knows? Hopefully, it'll be way less, but maybe it'll be a thousand. That's just the way it is. And that we just live in this world where we have extreme temperature events, chaotic world, driven by this CO₂ levels in our atmosphere. That's just the way it is. We did that with COVID. It was like we all freaked out about it at first, and then a certain level, the death tolls and everything just became background noise.

I'm very concerned about that adaptation that we just think, Oh, well, a thousand people died in Miami this summer. That's really unfortunate, but that's what it is now. That's a adaptation that, to me, is very terrifying because this climate that we have, this the new climate that I was mentioning earlier is a human artifact. It is something we have created. It is something we have built. We will forget that and we'll think this nature is just crazy and chaotic. You never know what's going to happen. That's because of what we've done to it.

Before we take questions, if each of you could just give your final thoughts on what you think the most pressing part of this challenge is and what the next few years ahead of us have in store, and maybe a positive, something you think is working briefly. That's a lot, but briefly. Sorry. I wish you another hour.

I guess I'll start. I think there definitely is an opportunity for cities to plan and prepare now, even if they don't have a chief heat officer. But we do have to have plan alignment with the state and with the federal government. Fema is finally on board, requiring climate hazards and extreme heat to be included in local hazard mitigation plans, but we have to take that much further. I want cities to know that Jane and myself and other Chief Heat Officers want to provide our heat action frameworks and our heat action plans so you don't have to reinvent the wheel. I just say there's hope and there's opportunity. We need to have more dialogs like this one. It's really about being on the same page. If all of the people in this room are on the same page with us and you go back to your communities and ask for these kinds of solutions, that alone will help. Everybody can make a difference. I know that sounds cliché, but it's so very true. I think, thank you for having us here and helping us convey. But don't forget about addressing the disparities as well.Yeah.Right. Yeah.

Just building on something Marta said earlier, heat-related illnesses and deaths are largely preventable. There are things we can do by informing and preparing people, having a more resilient grid, by helping people stay cool affordably at home, by cooling our neighborhoods. These are things, real things, and that's what's in both of our plans and others. Heat. Gov was a effort at the national level to bring multiple departments together for health, urban heat island, environmental information together. They are building more resources for other communities to assess their risks, to do their plans. We've been both contributing to that effort and as well as other cities. There are solutions out there. We want solutions. Again, we can't AC our way out of this problem. We want solutions that are also going to address the root cause of the problem.

I guess I'll end with the inevitable word hope, which I have a very problematic relationship with. People often ask me, even when my climate change for 20 years, why you're not living in your basement with a bottle of bourbon, scrolling on the wall with crayons? I'm tempted often. But the reason I'm not is because as big as this crisis is, and let me be very clear, I think there's going to be tremendous loss in suffering in the coming years that we don't even understand the scope and scale of, really. But I also think that the scale of the opportunity is so enormous right now. Whether we like it or not, however you vote, we're going to change everything about how we live because of the climate crisis. We're going to change. I just listened to the CEO of Ford a few minutes ago talking about the transition away from internal combustion engines to electric vehicles. This enormous bet on the future of this company, this great American company. But that's going to happen because he knows the movement towards electric vehicles is inevitable. We are going to change how our cities are designed. That is inevitable.

That is going to happen. We're going to change where our food grows and what food we eat because of the climate crisis. All this is inevitable. If we get smart about it, if we understand the risk, if we don't put our head in the sand and think that this is not happening, if we understand these decisions and get educated about them, we can make smarter decisions, build a better world, more just world, more equitable world.

All right, well, thank you. On that note, we're going to open it up for questions right here. We have a mic coming around, too.

Thanks. Thank you all. I don't have hope. I have kids. When it's stage 4 cancer, I'd like to hear the solution to stage 4 cancer. It seems to me with the IPCC report, as Jeff said, we got to get off of our addiction to oil. That means that we have to get our federal government to write legislation that outlaws fossil fuel. We have to get our Congress to stop subsidizing oil and gas. And that has to be our first effort Because if we don't do a full-court press on Congress, because I've been lobbying Congress for many years as a former county commissioner, and it's just like dinosaurs standing in puddles of water. So I would just implore you to be giving that message out. And if you'd like to echo that or you have a different solution. But we're seeing carrot, not stick.

I would just say, rather than banning oil and I guess, just to your other point of taking away the subsidies, maybe add a fee, use that revenue to help vulnerable communities adapt to the shift in our economy. That is the policy that we really need? Let the markets figure it out. That's what policy is for.

I think we have Congresswoman Katie Porter here with a question.

I actually carry the House Bill on eliminating fossil fuel subsidies. I have had a very hard time getting Democrats to sign on. The Republican roadblocks are hard to overstate, but there are Democratic roadblocks, too. I just want to say to everybody, you also need to really push your Democratic representatives on this. My question is this, OSHA promulgated a heat standard for workers in May. I've heard you talk about a lot of this from the family standpoint, like educating people, what they can do. What is the role of corporate America and workers, both in the climate crisis, but really in protecting workers? Because I think a lot of the deaths we see, yes, they're seniors, so those usually aren't workers, but in younger people, they're almost always affected by work.

Yeah. I actually was recently appointed the National Commission on Climate and Workforce Health, and a big piece is focusing on heat health. Osha did come out with recommended, but we don't have standards yet. There's a lot to be learned on what are good standards. We're not sure what they've come out with is the best yet. There's a lot to be learned. Absolutely. It's part of our heat season campaign. We're messaging to both employers and employees all the time about what they need to do. Even in lieu of having the most optimal protocols, we know that water, electrolytes, shaded rest breaks, all of this will actually preserve your workforce's health as well as maintain productivity.

I'll just add that Kalosha board just passed some indoor heat standards for workers. They'd been working on it for 10 years, and this is California, but they were finally passed to the Kalosha board. Those are really critical steps so that other cities and states can follow, but it is not easy.

I work in a state that just banned our local governments from being able to do this, which Texas did also, which is why we're really focusing on how do we demonstrate to employers the economic benefits of good protocols. It's like an athlete with HIIT training. They know to take breaks and rest and then get back out there and their performance is higher. Same with making sure they have water and electrolytes. It's just good protocols.

This is the hardest part of my job is picking the questions. I probably have two more, so make them good. I'll deal right here because I know you've really...

Hi. So quick question from the Coke building, of all places, to be having this discussion. I noticed that. But I'm hearing about regional or actually city solutions, but these are regional and national issues. Marta, you're wonderful. You're in the city of LA, 2 million people, in a county that's 11 million people. A lot of the people who are at greatest risk are in the county and a lot actually in the city. What is the coordination, both locally? Then think about the inland empire where none of those cities could ever have afford a heat officer. Those are some of the people who are most at risk.

Yeah, like I said we're pioneers, but we are working very closely with LA County. I have some really great colleagues there. I think between the county and the city, we provide over 200 libraries as cooling centers. We're a brain trust on solutions that we're promoting and piloting and seeing if they work so that we can put them in our heat action plans. Those heat action plans, we plan to share with all 88 cities in LA County. Then the state of California does have an extreme heat program, and it has four tracks. La just modeled that, but added an additional track on accountability so that we can not only have these wonderful plans, but we have a dashboard that shares with the public and shares with the government leaders what is actually working, what investments are helping, and what investments maybe are not so wonderful. That's another thing. We really have to ground truth these technologies that are being proposed because it's not always about the latest technology that is being lobbied to the federal government. It's about what is tried and true and what is ground truth and what is actually going to accelerate the solutions for all this.

But I appreciate the question because collaboration across agencies, particularly now, is key so that we don't reinvent the wheel. We maximize those dollars, we maximize existing wonderful plans that have worked, and we build on those best practices.

Right here.

Hi. You probably follow what other countries do about their climate policies and what they do about heating.

Who do you think best deals with that so far?

And also who America should follow?

Jeff, do you want to take that?

Sure. Everybody is just beginning on all this, right? This is something that is, as I said earlier, the beginning of the beginning of the beginning. I think if I had to think about a city or a place that is doing the most and been most aggressive about this is Paris, partly because of the Olympics has been a motivation, partly because they have a governor, I mean, a mayor who is very, very visionary and very outspoken. So they've done a lot of things like trees and shutting off roads to cars in the inner city, making the sand in the river that runs through the city swimmable, so it becomes a cooling center. The idea of remaking this ancient city for the 21st century is a very explicit goal of the mayor, and she's really put a lot of skin in the game on this. I would point to Paris as one of the places that has been most aggressive in in reinventing itself.

I think Bogotá, Colombia, has been planting trees and funding their maintenance. We also learned about Siclavia from them. Does everybody know what that is? When the city shuts down and it opens it up to cyclists and pedestrians and people on their skateboards. I think if we look at individual cities across Latin America, Mexico City, it had a tree nursery 100 years ago. Basically, it has a forest at the edge of the city with large mature that it doesn't have to pay for. When a tree goes down in the city, it just replaces it with this urban forest that they've been planting for over 100 years. I wish city of Los Angeles had something like that. It's amazing. I think different cities have different assets, but also different issues. If we had a whole hour, I'd love to talk to you about those different assets that those wonderful cities in other countries have.

I think we're at time, but Jane, is there a city you want to mention really fast, or you think Paris and Bogotá? Is there another one?

Those are good. I mean, Medellín, Green is another one in Colombia that's done some great work. But what I like about Paris is the 15-minute city, is the idea of making everything walkable, bikeable, transit-oriented. These are the cities that I think we all want green. We want to live in. Singapore has done amazing work on greening. To Jeff's point, by crawling out of this crisis, we have the opportunity to build a better world, and that's where we should be focusing.

Well, thank you all for this enlightening conversation. Thank you all. I'm sorry I couldn't get to all your questions, but thank you. Thanks so much.

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