Who Will Stop the Heat: NYC Heatwave Crisis & We're to Blame??
- Kevin Lankes
- Jun 26
- 10 min read
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/-IrDz6hnNBY
It’s another heatwave in the Northeast and in New York City we’re being warned about conserving energy for the electrical grid. And I’m just really tired of this constant blaming of regular people, as if we could possibly do anything to stop any of this on our own. There’s a long tradition of this, and big corporations desperately need to pass on responsibility so that we don’t ever wake up and hold them accountable for their bullshit. Con Edison came out publicly to ask the whole city to try not to use a lot of energy at the exact moment when we need to. Which again, feels a lot like being chastised in advance for something we independently have no control over.
So who does have control over this, and what can be done about it? What’s going to stop these heatwaves, and what’s going to stop giant corporations and government authorities from blaming regular people for using electricity for their air conditioners so that they won’t die?
I’m Kevin Lankes, and I’m just goo at this point, I’m just human goo. I’m actually melting in front of your eyes and I don’t know if I’ll be conscious by the end of this because of the impending heat stroke, but if that happens, then someone please just come by and hit the upload button. Thanks.
Down in the digeridoodles I’ve put some links you can read through to learn how to increase the efficiency of air conditioning during heatwaves and other strategies that might help you. But long story short, you shouldn’t have to. Because here’s the rub: air conditioning accounts for just 7% of electricity use in the entire world, and just 3% of carbon emissions. Here in the city, large buildings are the biggest energy hogs, but that’s a bit misleading. Because again, everyday people are just doing what they need to do to live, and really can’t affect change in any of the areas where that energy use is coming from. There are lots of ways to stop heatwaves like this from happening, and none of them have anything to do with you or me. They do not involve effort on our parts. What we can do ourselves is just so stupidly trivial, so completely negligible compared to other systemic solutions that it’s just not even funny.
And as someone on Reddit just eloquently pointed out to Con Edison, quote, “you have one job.” I’m assuming the unsaid part of that statement is that their job is to give us electricity, and not like, I don’t know, to make frozen margaritas, which honestly might also help right now. But what is so hard about this? Because right now it’s 99 degrees and it feels like 101, and it’s only getting hotter throughout the day. Today, June 24th, might end up being the hottest day in a decade.
Con Edison is so serious about getting their customers to stop using their product that they’re reducing voltage in certain neighborhoods so that you just can’t use it. New York declared a state of emergency in preparation for this heatwave, so why can’t we haz electricity? Without proper air conditioning, people are definitely going to die. Extreme heat kills more people than any other weather-related cause of death. Death by heat claims just under 500,000 people each year. And the elderly are the most vulnerable. And because heatwaves are getting hotter and climate change is driving all this, there’s been an 85% increase in mortality from heat-related causes in people over 65 from 2000-2004 and 2017-2021. The trump administration is also considering blocking the first national heat protections for outdoor workers, so more people who can’t help it are going to die through absolutely no fault of their own, other than wanting to have a salary and be able to eat food. Those people just shouldn’t be doing that.
One viral term everyone is talking about these days that no one at all knew about before we started having these heatwaves is something called wet bulb temperature. This is going viral because it’s pretty important to keep track of now and it determines whether or not we might die in the heat. Normally, people sweat to cool off. It’s the body’s natural defense against the heat. The sweat takes some of that heat from the body and evaporates into the air, taking the heat along with it. But the air can only hold so much water. So at 100% humidity, there’s no more evaporating sweat, because the air won’t hold it. If the temperature is too high and there’s no breeze or air conditioning or any other external way of cooling off, then you could start to suffer heatstroke and possibly die. In 2023, researchers from Penn State University found that people could only tolerate 100% humidity at 88 degrees Fahrenheit, which is lower than previously thought.
This is why the supposed supply and demand of American capitalism gets in the way of reality and how life works. Increased energy use translates to limited supply, which makes the electricity rates skyrocket for regular people like you and me, and others who need it even more than we do, and they can’t afford to pay higher rates but they also don’t want to die. Capitalism is not a human system, especially when it comes to public health and safety. Prices are going through the roof around the country in the heat, but there’s a massive difference in costs depending on where you are. In Pennsylvania, for instance, PJM Interconnection, which serves 1 in 5 Americans their electricity, said that rates are up 430% to $211 per MWh. But here in NYC, prices are hitting $600 per MWh. On an average day, one MWh can power 800 homes, but not now. In conditions like this, that number falls drastically while everyone cranks up their AC, which, again, they need to do. This is not the time to blame regular people who just want to live.
And, because of the demands on the grid, many thousands of people in New York City were without power for at least a day or two during the start of this thing, and now it’s just a couple of households according to updates I’ve seen. Something like 6,200 homes and businesses didn’t have electricity at all. That means that those people would need to rely on traveling to public cooling centers in order to potentially survive. And guess what? The transit infrastructure uses a lot of electricity and certain subway stations are actual death traps during extreme heat events.
Here in NYC and other major cities we also have to deal with something called the urban heat island effect, which means temperatures are up to seven degrees hotter than surrounding areas because of all the buildings and roads. And they slowly release thermal energy overnight so we don’t even get as much of the cooling effect that most of the world sees later in the day when the sun goes down.
And when we look at a breakdown of the data, we can see that big buildings here use a lot of energy. But we can break that down further and understand why they use a lot of energy and what could possibly change about that situation for the better. For example, steam heat distribution is still the most common mode of heating buildings in New York City. This is a technology developed in the 1780s. I mean this is the equivalent of just going outside and poopin’ in a hole for your plumbing system. We have much more advanced heating options nowadays that are way more efficient, but what we do not have is the political will or the budget allocation to switch to those en masse. And then adding to this, a lot of these buildings are kind of in trouble. The average age of buildings in New York City is about a hundred. And we have a bunch that were built in the early 1800s. They’re collapsing in various ways, infested with various things, and they’re all leaky as hell. We know this because the law requires reporting on this stuff, so we can see how energy-efficient buildings are in the city. When a Bronx building collapsed last year, the resulting lawsuit found 133 violations dating back five years and they involved things like illegal partitioning of units, crumbling ceilings, and broken windows. All of this, of course, contributes to energy efficiency or a lack thereof.
And yes, solutions are coming. New York State specifically is getting better. We’re currently third out of all U.S. states in renewable energy production and we emit less carbon dioxide than almost every other state, too. The majority of electricity in New York City does come from natural gas still, but after that it’s hydroelectric power and nuclear power, both around the low 20-ish percents, with other renewable sources to even out the bottom, and a small percentage of biomass and oil-fired electric power.
The real solutions have to be systemic. I can’t independently go out and decide where my energy comes from. I tried to use one of those companies that ships electricity from renewable sources elsewhere in the country through your provider so that you can feel morally good about yourself, but that’s expensive. Installing solar panels, digging up your own geothermal thingamajigs, I mean these are great solutions but simply impractical for the vast majority of people here, either through their cost or simply their logistics. I don’t have a roof on my apartment or an underground to dig into. I can’t just build my own green roof on the building I live in, even though that would help a lot with heat and cooling and also with climate change and these worsening heatwaves. We have 40,000 acres of roof in this city, and they’re just sucking up heat and radiating it out. There are recent laws that require new construction to build in green roofs or solar panels, but ya know, there are of course exceptions to those rules. Until we get 100% buy-in, including retrofitting, and we get programs where the city does this for us and covers the costs then we’re not going to really make a dent in the problem. And we need to demand that the so-called adults in the room focus on these issues because the city, the state, the country, the world leadership has a giant vested interest in protecting public health. From a capitalist standpoint, you can argue that businesses should be all over this because they should want to keep their customers alive. Politicians are probably going to be a little upset when all their voters die off.
Importantly, and damningly, NYC is an energy anomaly. We have too many people, and that means big buildings full of bodies that are using a lot of energy. But in the rest of the country, that’s not the case. The biggest consumer of electricity in America overall is the industrial sector. We’re talking things like manufacturing, mining, and industrial farming. The biggest culprits there are the fossil fuel industry, paper manufacturing, food production, metalworking, and chemical production, which ranks number 1. 15% of the world’s chemicals are made inside the U.S. and then exported elsewhere.
Now, if you guys have watched like one single video I’ve ever done then you know I’m not the most corporate-friendly doodles. I think I’m probably not a fan really at all, honestly. Especially when we know they for instance, use the most energy and then Con Edison comes out and tells us to stop using our air conditioners in a heatwave. And I’m just like, there are so many systemic ways to get us out of this madness, but they’d cost money and there’s just no way that companies are going to front the costs for that. They barely front the money for their own operating costs, and rely on government subsidies for the basic operations they’re supposed to perform, because lest we forget, corporations are the actual real-life welfare queens.
There’s a whole history of deliberate marketing campaigns crafted by the same people for industry after industry in order to shift the blame from them to us. This has happened with the environment in the 70s. That’s where the term carbon footprint came from, when british petroleum wanted to find a way to make regular people feel guilty instead of taking responsibility for the data researchers at the company were finding out about the devastation of climate change, and that really worked because it’s a term we still use today to make each other feel bad about not turning the lights off when we leave the room, when that does absolutely nothing compared to the energy use of gigantic corporations. It happened again with the defense industry and the military industrial complex that uses so much energy across the world. And these people started spreading their propaganda against science when the tobacco industry paid them to way back in the 1950s. If you want to learn more about that you can read all about it in the book Merchants of Doubt, and there’s also a movie adaptation so you can just stream that if you want.
I am despared. I am so despared. I don’t know what it will take to get buy in from the top down, because that’s what we need. We don’t need Greta Thunberg yelling at the UN and having them all applaud like performatively even though this like, their fault, and she’s like yelling at them. I don’t know. We don’t really need that. To clarify, we need Greta and the work that she does, but she shouldn’t have to be doing it. It should be the people she was yelling at making a fix happen.
And I mean, if we don’t fix this then the Earth is going to become uninhabitable. And we’re gonna have to trust this idiot (Elon Musk) to get us to Mars, which is, in reality, an inhospitable murderous landscape that we just can’t survive in, and it’s never going to not be that. But the Earth is gonna be that, too. So, I don’t know if you know this, but we will then be gone. And personally I was planning on making it all the way to the inevitable heat death of the universe, but if we can’t make it past the point of self-destructing our own home, then I guess we definitely don’t deserve to see what else is out there. Cuz we’ll just probably shit all over that, too.
But don’t all the way lose your minds. I mean we still kind of live in a somewhat democracy. More in our local politics than our national politics now. But we can still vote people in who can initiate more real solutions. I just vote for Paperboy Love Prince in the NYC mayoral election. We have ranked choice voting and I put him number 5. But yeah, I do feel like he’d be way better our current solidly corrupt political hellscape at fixing the existential problems of our time. But until we can get big money out of politics and make political life a public service again, I guess you’re just going to have to not use your air conditioner while trump gives more tax breaks to giant corporations and CEOs. Cool, cool, cool. Let’s be good to each other until we make this right. Let’s do some f*cking good wherever we personally can right now, and help whoever needs it it whatever way they need if it’s within our ability to do so. We really have to stick together in situations like this until we can force the people who actually fix it to do so. But don’t stick too much, because in this heat you may actually fuse together and become a meat popsicle. I’ll see you in the next one.
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