The Sun Belt? No, Not Anymore - It's Likely To Be Know Going Forward As The Heat Belt
It was another sweltering day in Phoenix, and Tommy Espinoza, an Arizona native and president and CEO of Raza Development Fund, knew something was different. He was right. While Arizona’s summers have always been hot, August 2020 was the hottest month ever recorded in Phoenix, and the city’s temperatures topped 110 degrees for more than 50 days in 2020. “[T]here are times when they close the airports and ask people not to go out. We have offices downtown, and I’ve crossed the street when the black tar moves beneath you since it’s 119–20 degrees. You cannot ignore this anymore. I was not a big climate change believer—but now you’ve got to say, wait a minute, you really cannot ignore this,” Espinoza said.
Welcome to America’s Heat Belt, the southernmost part of the country and home to the fastest-growing and most diverse population in the country—as well as some of its highest temperatures and most costly disasters. While we can’t say that this week’s staggering cold temperatures in Texas and elsewhere in the South were caused by climate change, it is certainly a harbinger of the wild and unpredictable weather that altering the Earth’s climate will bring. The future has arrived early for this part of America, and despite the pandemic and other simultaneous crises, communities here are increasingly motivated to set aside partisan politics in order to implement a broad spectrum of climate policies. But the scope of the issues and the required scale of the response necessitate a decisive role for the federal government, one guided by the unique encounters and opportunities of those living on the front lines of change.
We spoke to Espinoza as part of a project to explore conditions related to federal climate policy in this part of the country. New America partnered with Arizona State University’s Ten Across initiative, which engages the U.S. Interstate 10 corridor, from Los Angeles to Jacksonville, Florida. (ASU and New America are partners with Slate in Future Tense.) Together, we convened community leaders in many of the cities within and adjacent to the Ten Across transect to discuss what it means to be on the forefront of the environmental, economic, and social changes imminent for the rest of the country.
Many interviewees told us they are particularly concerned about the increasing frequency and intensity of the various climate change threats—heat, drought, wildfire, hurricanes, flooding. These mounting threats force Heat Belt residents to take temporary refuge elsewhere or, in a growing number of cases, to retreat permanently from areas that were once relatively safe. Since 2016, Houston has had three 500-year rain events. In 2020 alone, Phoenix did not simply surpass days above 110 but did so by 40 percent. California’s 2020 wildfires scorched twice the number of acres as the previous record, and Louisiana experienced an unprecedented five hurricanes in a single season.
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https://slate.com/technology/2021/02/heat-belt-climate-change-local-action-interviews.html
