Heat: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet is Rolling Stone contributing editor Jeff Goodell’s fourth book about climate. The book explores how emissions-related warming will disproportionately impact the vulnerable at every scale: from people to countries, nobody is immune. While Heat’s release has been powerfully underscored by unprecedented wildfires in the northern hemisphere, Goodell hints there can be justice of sorts. SGA contributing writer Kurt Johnson spoke with him at Melbourne’s Wheeler Centre.
KURT JOHNSON: Welcome back to Australia, Jeff. Over the past decade I have begun to feel the limitations of words on climate – hopeful prose seems hollow and insistent demands for change are ignored. Why did you write about heat and what do you hope the book will do?
JEFF GOODELL: I'd been writing about climate change for more than a decade but didn't understand heat, what it was literally. I took a walk in Phoenix, Arizona, and I felt my heart pounding and lightheaded and I realised it was dangerous. I think a lot of the writing about climate change is very distant, about things that will happen in the future. It's not connected to our immediate lives and it became very clear to me that writing about heat was a way to make it about our lives right now with a kind of urgency. Heat can kill you if you're not smart about it. It's about trying to bring the conversation about climate into people's lives in a very direct way.
There are many references to Australia in the book. How will heat impact life here?
Hugely. Australia is one of the places that will be most impacted by heat – because of the fires that you've had here, the link between heat and fire is straightforward. I love the Barrier Reef so much. I'm not a doomer at all – I think we can use this as an opportunity to build a better world but we're going to lose a lot of things and one of them is the Great Barrier Reef and I'm very sad about that. It's one of the reasons I wanted to focus some on Australia.
You wrote in reference to Phoenix (Arizona, USA), “Temperature is a signifier of class, wealth and often race.” Can that be applied at larger scales?
I think it holds true for everywhere. I talk about heat as a predatory force that preys on vulnerable people who are left out: people who don't have the protection of wealth and air conditioning.
And it scales all the way up to the Global North and the Global South?
Totally.
At a city scale, you talk about Melbourne, in the wealthy centre there's tree cover but in the outer suburbs, it's hot as hell.
Right.
You speak about extreme event attribution. Modelling whether extreme weather was caused by climate change or not has huge legal implications for polluters. Is there justice at the end of this story?
I think about the climate crisis as a crime story – about the looting of our world by these incredibly wealthy, incredibly powerful oil and gas and coal companies who have known for decades what the consequences will be. Who have deliberately spread misinformation and lies and knowingly put us in this situation. We're not absolved from our participation in it but the analogy to tobacco is not wrong. Because you have very powerful interests who have deliberately lied and misled and continued consumption of a product that they know was going to have enormous consequences, not just for the individual person but for the entire planet. How could there ever be justice for that? There will never be justice but there will be more justice than there is now. There are lawsuits developing around the world for damages and equity. There are also climate negotiations, which are about the global south saying to the global north, “You guys caused this problem, you got rich dumping this shit into the atmosphere. It's obvious, it's clear. You owe us!”
You travel to Pakistan to meet New York Times photographer Saiyna Bashir. There's a scene in the book – and I'll call it a scene – of a man dumping cold water over himself, which provides momentary relief from the 46 degree heat. How important is this human scale when thinking and writing about climate?
It's hugely important because a lot of writing about climate is data driven, it's ideological, very activist-oriented. I don't think of myself as an activist; I don't do solutions journalism. I don't pretend that I have the answers. I'm motivated by storytelling and I'm trying to translate science and the politics of this into human form. I work hard to give it a narrative – both in the smaller scale with the story with this photographer from Pakistan and what she went through to get this photo and this family that died on the hike in the opening chapter, and the story of my encounter with the polar bear.
And also Sebastian Perez, the immigrant worker who died in the field. You find his jug and the hat lying in the field he had died in – that's heart-breaking.
It was heart-breaking. It was really heart-breaking. And seeing his little room where he was in his cousin who came in and started crying – that was moving and difficult for me.
On the other side there’s the story about the proliferation of air conditioners, the promise of comfort - a great American export. Is climate change the bill arriving from unrealistic expectations of comfort?
I don't know if I would be that literal about it, but I do think that comfort has caused us to be maladapted. It has fed this illusion that we are in control, that we are masters of the universe and heat is just a thermostat. Climate change is showing us: you are not in control. There are a lot bigger forces out there than you with your beer and your thermostat. So I think it's about a humbling. Yes, you can put a man on the moon but there's a lot of shit you don't understand and you're fucking around in ways you don't think about. The forces we're messing with are big and powerful and profound.
You finish Heat in the cold. You travel to Baffin Island, where Paul Nicklen took the famous photograph of the starving polar bear. The outpouring of grief received by the photograph was baulked at by some scientists who said we should be focusing on the human cost of climate. The 2020 fires impacted six billion animals here. You encountered polar bears marginalised by this expanding heat zone. You say the bears are us in the future. Why does it always have to be about us? Why can't animals be characterised and mourned as victims in their own right?
Everyone can choose to interpret this how they want. If you're asking me why I didn't mourn the fate of the polar bear more, what I felt with that encounter with the bear was the profound connection. When I looked the bear in the eye, in what is completely anthropomorphising, I had this very powerful feeling. She's in trouble too, and she's suffering and trying to survive and keep her cubs alive and I understand that. I felt this great commonality. For me, that was a more powerful idea. The sense of togetherness and we're all united in our struggle and suffering was a profound feeling which was unexpected and wasn't something I thought about. It was almost a gift from this bear.
Some answers have been shortened for readability.
