In 2023, at least 2,300 people were killed by extreme heat. Because deaths to exposure are notoriously hard to capture, that’s likely an undercount. A Texas A&M study reported those deaths at closer to 11,000. That number has been continuously rising. On Tuesday, June 18, 2024, decades-old records across the U.S. were broken by the beginning of an extended heat-wave that swept across the central and eastern United States. This is following on the heels of the world’s warmest March on record which, according to the European Union’s climate change monitoring service, capped off a ten-month streak in which each month set a new temperature record.
Along with death by exposure to cold, which some studies report taking the lives of around 1,330 people a year, the climate has become a weapon wielded by the capitalists against the working class. The heat dome over the eastern United States continues to intensify, marking record high temperatures from Ohio to Maine, including in Boston, Cleveland, Buffalo and Caribou Maine. Temperatures continued to climb well into the 90s and approach 100 degrees Fahrenheit in many areas. Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine are in the center of the most intense portion of the heat-wave, posting temperatures higher than South Florida.
Worse, the humidity is punishing. This contributes to what is known as the wet bulb temperature, measuring the effects of heat and humidity combined. The more saturated the air is with water, the less the human body can sweat to cool off. At 95 degrees Fahrenheit, even people without sensitivity to heat will begin to overheat and potentially die within six hours of continuous exposure. Even with fans and shade, at a 95-degree wet bulb rating, only air conditioning (and electricity) can protect you. In the morning on Thursday, June 20, the wet bulb temperature in New York City was 81 degrees Fahrenheit.
Climate change, the natural result of the West’s industrial revolution and the discharge of around 35 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year, threatens organized human society. You can trust the capitalists, however, to turn any evil to their advantage. They have leveraged climate change into a weapon in the class war.
Notice: there are no work suspensions, no statewide efforts to reduce heat-related deaths, nothing to stop those most vulnerable to heat exhaustion from being forced to work outside or spend the day on the street. Just like the beginning of the COVID pandemic when efforts were taken to protect the petit-bourgeois, labor aristocrats, and white-collar workers who work in office buildings but no efforts were taken to help the “essential workers,” this heat wave is being used as a killing tool against the lowest and most precarious ranks of the working classes.
Not only did the capitalists do this to the world with their excesses, but now they’re making the working people pay the bill. We must remember to whom the debt is owed — and not forget that our time is coming to collect.
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