This is Democracy Now! democracynow.org. I'm Amy Goodman. As we turn now to the record-breaking heat wave that scorched the northeastern United States over July 4th weekend. At least 25 people are dead in New Jersey due to extreme heat and humidity after a massive heat dome settled over the eastern half of the US, bringing triple-digit temperatures, disrupting travel and prompting emergency measures for millions of people. Many of those who died were found in homes with no air conditioning, on the street, and in parked cars.
According to officials in New Jersey, more than 185 million people — more than half of US residents — were under heat alerts over the weekend, with extreme weather forcing the cancellation of Independence Day events in states from Alabama to Connecticut. Severe weather forced the cancellation of the Great American State Fair, a two-hour evacuation of the National Mall in Washington, DC, and delayed President Trump's Fourth of July speech. Here in the New York area, the heat wave shattered records dating back nearly 60 years. Central Park reached 100 degrees. Subway stations registered even higher temperatures, while 17,000 customers lost power. This weekend's North American heat wave follows a record-shattering European heat wave that's already been blamed for thousands of heat-related deaths across Spain, France, and Germany. Climate scientists say the burning of fossil fuels by humans is the primary cause of global warming and the reason why heat waves are becoming longer, hotter, and more frequent. On Friday, a team of scientists explained the recent heat wave would have been, quote, 'virtually impossible,' unquote, before humans began warming the planet. This is Theo Keeping, a climate scientist at Imperial College London who worked on the analysis.
We found that in the last 50 years since a previous heat wave affected Europe in 1976, that the chance of a heat wave like this has gone from almost impossible to something that we'd expect to see every couple of decades. And as the climate continues to warm, we will see events like this increasingly frequently. And in a future climate, this may be something that we expect to be commonplace.
For more on the extreme weather here and around the world, we're joined in studio by David Wallace-Wells, New York Times opinion writer, columnist for The New York Times Magazine. His recent piece headlined, 'We Need to Retrofit the Planet. The Heat Wave Proves It.' He's also author of the book The Uninhabitable Earth. Welcome back to Democracy Now! It's great to have you with us, David. Start off by talking about what's happening here and, if you can, put it in the context of climate change.
Well, the planet is now warmer than it has ever been in modern human history. Basically, since the agricultural revolution 10 or 12 thousand years ago, we're already outside the window of temperatures that enclose the entire history of human civilization. And we are warming more rapidly than the planet has ever warmed in its history, including periods where warming produced deaths of 50 to 90 percent of all life on Earth. So, we're running a pretty radical experiment and things are changing pretty rapidly. Just over the last couple of decades, we've seen the pace of warming accelerate and we've seen the chances of heat waves like the one that we saw in Europe grow as much as 100-fold more likely. So just since the 2003 heat wave which killed tens of thousands of people in Europe, a heat wave like the one that we just saw in Europe has gone a hundred times more likely. There are a lot of questions about why we haven't prepared adequately for these heat waves and we should be asking them and doing more to protect ourselves in the future. But I think the baseline observation that we have to make is that things are moving incredibly quickly and that makes it incredibly hard for us to change our ways.
I think Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1776 at the signing of the Declaration of Independence that it was 76 degrees. On July 4th, of course, in this area it was over 100 degrees, triple digits. Your piece is headlined, 'We Need to Retrofit the Planet. The Heat Wave Proves It.' I was upstate New York, and there was a kind of — I called it a torrential tornado. It took down trees in the Catskill area all over, and yet it was hardly talked about afterwards, and yet it was in the midst of this heat wave that happened over like 30 minutes. How do you retrofit the planet?
Well, I mean, there are a lot of pieces to it, but unfortunately a lot of the natural world, like the tree landscape that you're talking about, it's going to be quite difficult. The human-built environment is a little bit easier, but it still requires something like, you know, take the European heat wave: building in air conditioning for 300, 400 million people who don't have it today, reimagining the way that buildings are built so that they don't retain heat, which is what they were designed to do, but actually repel heat, which is what Europe's going to need in the decades ahead. It also involves different kinds of urban planning. I think about the way that LA has been rebuilding in the aftermath of its fires, resisting a lot of fire codes that might help future — might help neighborhoods, you know, be more resilient in the face of fire in future decades. And instead, the local communities are fighting those restrictions. So, you know, we have an enormous landscape of the built environment the world over which was designed and erected to survive climate conditions which we've left behind. And we basically need to reimagine all of that to survive new climate conditions which are going to get considerably hotter even just in the decades ahead.
Can you compare the US and Europe's approach to climate change to China?
Well, you know, China is kind of a complicated story. They're both the world's biggest emitter, responsible for almost one-third of all carbon emissions at present, and also the source of the greatest hope for climate change because they are producing something like 70 to 90 percent of all the world's EVs, solar panels, batteries. So they're both contributing the most to the problem and contributing the most to the solution. In the US, we're not producing nearly as much of that technology. We are building out our green energy infrastructure relatively quickly, but we're not doing nearly enough to bring emissions down into line with our targets. And that means that we're heading up against some really terrifying climate thresholds.
What has the Trump administration done?
They've gone to war with clean energy and tried to undermine it everywhere that they could. They've literally bought off wind projects so that those will not go forward. They've taken an axe to Biden's Inflation Reduction Act, which was essentially a climate bill, and tried to undo all of the tax incentives that were in it to subsidize clean energy. And they've done very little to help the problem of interconnection and the grid, which are so essential to the build-out of clean energy in America. They haven't totally succeeded. Last year, 90-plus percent of new energy infrastructure was green. But they're doing everything they can to put their hand on the needle and change the direction of policy and make America more like a petro-state and less like the electro-state that China is trying to be.
So how can the US be a leader on green energy?
