82 | Rolling Stone | September 2019
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media campaign to alert people to the risks of
extreme heat.
But mostly what you see in Phoenix is asphalt
and concrete, cars and malls, and big, crowded
highways. In this sense, it is like virtually every
other city in America, except with a few more
palm trees (which are purely decorative — they
provide zero shade) and a heavy dependence
on air conditioning. As Hondula says one after-
noon as we drive through Encan-
to Village, a historic middle-class
neighborhood in Phoenix, “The
number-one heat adaptation here
is forking over money for the elec-
tric bill.”I
N RESEARCH LABS around
the country, you can find
experiments with walls en-
gineered to suck heat out
of buildings, and wood
that’s altered to be stron-
ger, cooler, and better for insula-
tion. But right now, the only tech-
nology deployed at scale against
extreme heat is air conditioning.
Nearly 90 percent of the homes in
America have it — it’s as necessary
as running water and a toilet.
Without air conditioning, the
world as we know it today wouldn’t
exist. It’s inconceivable that there
would be a city of 4.5 million peo-
ple living in the middle of the
Southwestern desert — much less
20 million people living in Florida
— without air conditioning. After
World War II, Americans flocked
from chilly Northern states to
sunny Southern states. It was one
of the great demographic shifts of
the 20th century, and it precisely mirrored the
proliferation of air conditioners. “Air condition-
ing was essential to the development of the Sun
Belt,” historian Gary Mormino has argued. “It
was unquestionably the most significant factor.”
Air conditioning is one of those paradoxical
modern technologies that creates just as many
problems as it solves. For one thing, it requiresstricted new buildings from going up on certain
hillsides in order to keep the air moving.
Many urban centers are trying to combat heat
the old-fashioned way: by planting shade trees.
Since 2011, Louisville, Kentucky, has planted
about 100,000 trees. Paris Mayor Anne Hidal-
go has plans to create “urban forests” in the cen-
ter of the city. In May, I visited Singapore, a trop-
ical city that is far more densely developed than
Phoenix. It’s hard to find a single inch of Sin-
gapore that is in any way “natural,” but since
the 1960s, there has been a deliberate govern-
ment-led effort to green the city. The highways
are canopied with lush trees, urban parks have
been expanded, and thousands of sidewalk trees
have been planted. Wandering downtown, I felt
like I was in a jungle, there were so many vines
and plants hanging from windows.
“There used to be a lot of nice big shade trees
in Phoenix, but they cut them all down in the
1960s because they were worried about how
much water they used,” Mark Hartman, Phoe-
nix’s chief sustainability officer, says with a bit
of an eye roll. (In fact, climate-appropriate trees
like mesquite or ash only require extra water for
the first year or two after they’re planted — when
they get bigger, the increased shade often in-
creases soil moisture by reducing evaporation.)
In 2010, as the problems of extreme heat became
more obvious, Phoenix officials set a goal of dou-
bling the percentage of the city covered with tree
canopy from 12 to 25 percent. Then came the in-
evitable budget cuts and layoffs after the reces-
sion. According to Hartman, “Tree planting was
cut back to stay only slightly ahead of those lost
to storms and drought.” Today, the tree-canopy
cover in Phoenix remains virtually unchanged
from what it was a decade ago.
But if you look closely, you can find signs that
a few people in Phoenix are starting to think dif-
ferently about life in a rapidly warming world.
You will hear about plans for “walkable shade
corridors.” Most commercial buildings are now
constructed with white roofs. At one light-rail
stop, you can push a button and get sprayed with
a cool mist of water while you wait for the train.
One Phoenix city official has been known to walk
around downtown passing out umbrellas on hot
days. And the city launched an aggressive social
a lot of energy, most of which comes from fossil
fuels. AC and fans already account for 10 percent
of the world’s energy consumption. Globally,
the number of air-conditioning units is expect-
ed to quadruple by 2050. Even accounting for
modest growth in renewable power, the carbon
emissions from all this new AC would result in a
more than 0.9°F increase in global temperature
by the year 2100.
Cheap air conditioning is like crack cocaine
for modern civilization, keeping us addicted and
putting off serious thinking about more creative
(and less fossil-fuel-intensive) solutions. Air con-
ditioning also creates a kind of extreme heat
apartheid. If you’re rich, you have a big house
with enough air conditioning to chill a marti-
ni. And if you are poor, like Leonor Juarez, a
46-year-old single mother whom I met on a re-
cent July afternoon when the temperature was
hovering around 115°F, you live in South Phoe-
nix, where sidewalks are dirt and trees are few,
and you hope you can squeeze enough money
out of your paycheck to run the AC for a few
hours on hot summer nights.
On hot days, Juarez’s small apartment feels
like a cave. She has heavy purple curtains on
the windows to block the sun. “I could not live
here without air conditioning,” she tells me. Be-
cause she has poor credit, she doesn’t quali-
fy for the usual monthly billing from Salt River
Project, her utility. Instead, to pay for electrici-
ty and keep her AC running, SRP has given her
a card reader that plugs into an outlet that she
has to feed like a jukebox to keep the power on.
Juarez turns on her AC only a few hours a day
— still, her electric bill can run $500 a month
during the summer, which is more than she pays
for rent. To Juarez, who takes a bus five miles to
a laundromat in the middle of the night because
washing machines are discounted to 50 cents a
load after 1 a.m., $500 is a tremendous amount
of money.
She shows me the meter on the card read-
er: She has $49 worth of credit on it, enough for
a few more days of power. And when that runs
out? “I am in trouble,” she says bluntly. Juarez,
who works as an in-home caretaker for the elder-
ly, says she knows of several people who lived
alone and died when they failed to pay their elec-
tric bills and tried to live without AC.
One such woman was named Stephanie Pull-
man, a 72-year-old retiree who lived alone on a
fixed income of less than $1,000 a month in a
small house in Sun City West, a development
north of downtown Phoenix. Last summer, she
was late to pay her electric bill and owed $176.84.
On September 5th, 2018, Pullman paid $125,
leaving $51.84 unpaid. Two days later, when the
temperature hit 107°F, her electric company, Ar-
izona Public Service, cut off her power. A week
later, Pullman’s daughter became worried when
she hadn’t heard from her mother, who had a
heart condition, so she alerted locals. A Marico-
pa County Sheriff ’s officer entered the house and
found Pullman dead in her bed. Cause of death:
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12.5
Billions of tons of ice
melted in Greenland
on August 1st, 2019,
the single largest
loss since scientists
began tracking
in 195010 %
Percentage of
global energy
consumption used
for air conditioning
and fans250
Average number of
large wildfires (1,000
acres or bigger) a
year in the Western
United States, a 78
percent increase
from 1989