Late June 2021 will remain in my memory as one of the worst few days of my life. A four-day heat wave hit the Pacific Northwest. Temperatures soared above 110 degrees—ironic, given that escaping D.C. heat was one of the reasons I chose to spend summer at home in Seattle. The first day was bearable, the second I spent soaked in sweat and unable to sleep, and by the third, I thought I'd gotten the hang of surviving in extreme heat. After dinner, my family fled to the air-conditioned hypermarket superstore Fred Meyer to push through the last few hours. Just when we were about to go home, we received a distressing notification: our power was out.
We lingered at Fred Meyer for another hour, but the Puget Sound Energy outage map showed that they still hadn't started to assess the cause of the outage. During the heat wave, thousands of homes throughout the Puget Sound lost power. That meant no air-conditioning or fans, no Wi-Fi even though many worked remotely, and a lot of food that could potentially spoil.
We—my family, local governments, utility companies—were wholly unprepared. Although the percentage of Seattle homes with air-conditioning has jumped from 31% to 44.3% from 2013 to 2019, Seattle is still the least air-conditioned metropolitan areas. This statistic makes intuitive sense: Seattle is one of the U.S. metropolitan areas with the least estimated heat-attributable deaths per summer according to the EPA's Excessive Heat Events Guidebook. But the EPA drew from past data, and if we know anything about global warming, its the unpredictability of its effects.
Before the heat wave, Vox published an article explaining the science behind heat waves and how climate change makes them longer, more intense, and more frequent. The article lists a litany of effects such as sleep disruption (something I experienced) and infrastructure failure:
The tools used to cope with heat are also stressed by it: Power plants, which provide electricity for everything from fridges to air conditioners, themselves need to be cooled, and they become less efficient as the weather warms. Power lines have lower capacities under extreme heat, and hardware like transformers experience more failures. If enough stress builds up, the power grid can collapse just when people need cooling the most. Power disruptions then ripple through other infrastructure, like water sanitation, fuel pumps, and public transit.
But even Vox's warning did not measure up to the true damage to infrastructure caused by the heat. In Portland, the heat literally melted the power cables, suspending light rail and streetcar service. Some roads in Seattle were impassable because asphalt buckled under such high temperatures. For the Puget Sound, the issue was not excessive energy consumption, but heat-related equipment failures, according to Charles Woodman, a field editor for local news platform Patch. Woodman ends the article with a lighthearted tone:
Fortunately, the problems are likely to die down as the temperature does: The excessive heat warning has been extended through Tuesday evening, but temperatures are expected to cool back into the mid-80s by Wednesday. Until then, residents should stay out of the sun, keep the AC running — and maybe unplug the toaster if you're feeling toasty enough already.
Again, reporters continue to dismiss the heat wave as a one-time event. While that may be true for Seattle, other extreme weather cases are bound to happen. Woodman takes the blame off Puget Sound Energy, does not address the problem of insufficient infrastructure, and suggests methods individuals can take to protect themselves against the heat.
Many Pacific Northwest residents will likely install air-conditioning. Like Woodman, Constantine Samaras, an engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University, views this mass adoption as a "worthy form of climate adaptation." Unfortunately, traditional air-conditioning actually makes the heat worse. They release millions of tons of carbon dioxide each year, leak hydrofluorocarbons, which have a global warming potential 1000 to 3000 times that of carbon dioxide, and pump hot refrigerant gas outdoors. They also devour energy. In 2013, the South Korean government disabled air-conditioning in public buildings to keep the country's power on.
The question of responsibility inevitability arises: For unpredictable events, should individuals make all the precautions, or should companies design their products and services to be energy efficient and climate resilient? Are Pacific Northwest residents to blame for not installing air-conditioning? Are those with air-conditioning accountable for the subsequent greenhouse gas emissions, or is it the fault of bad design? When my mother's melatonin degraded because of the heat, should she have stored it in a cooler location, or should the manufacturer have made it more heat-resistant?
Though we all want someone to criticize for undesirable situations, the truth is that it's impossible to pinpoint a single responsible actor. In the case of the Pacific Northwest heat wave, we are all culpable—though to varying degrees. Nevertheless, tackling future weather emergencies requires public, private, and individual action that address both the causes and effects of climate change.
On the public side, Biden's Infrastructure Framework is a $1.2 trillion infrastructure spending plan which includes $579 billion of new spending and a baseline over eight years. The White House's fact sheet emphasizes equity, such as closing the digital divide through $65 billion dedicated to broadband infrastructure, and sustainability, attaching "clean" before infrastructure projects. Most notably, the Framework is "the largest investment in the resilience of physical and natural systems in American history" with $47 billion allocated to preparing against the impacts of climate change, cyber attacks, and extreme weather events.
Undoubtedly, infrastructure investment is much needed. However, researchers at Rice University's Kinder Institute for Urban Research advocate for a bottom-up strategy centered around a consultative process in which local officials set infrastructure projects for local, state, and federal funding. They view the American economy as a "network of regional and metropolitan economies" with cities and metropolitan areas being the "true engines of American prosperity." By aligning metropolitan infrastructure projects with federal ones, they believe we can better address problems regarding accessibility, racial and geographic equity, and the digital and urban-rural divides.
I appreciated the contemporary quality of the Kinder Institute's analysis. Published in February 2021, the authors identify economic recovery from the pandemic as a major challenge our nation faces and argue that COVID-19 has highlighted the urgency of the other pre-pandemic challenges, such as digital transformation:
New technology has opened the nation to new possibilities. But an infrastructure strategy must embrace technological change to transform our cities and communities, not just expand capacity. For example, instead of simply building additional highway lanes, we should also embed congestion management sensors and communication systems into those roadways. At the same time, as the pandemic showed in critical areas such as schools and medical care, the growing “digital divide” has made it difficult for many Americans, in both urban and rural areas, to benefit from these advances. An infrastructure plan must address these inequities as well.
Given the authors' focus on technologically-integrated cities and local infrastructure projects, they seem to support the development of smart cities. On climate resilience, the report recognizes the wide range of climate-related effects and the necessity of emission reduction through renewable energy and public transit projects. But like other reports that address climate change, Kinder Institute's report mostly focuses on past and current trends, highlighting our collective myopia of the unprecedented nature of climate disasters. The Climate Change Mitigation/Resilience section only dives into examples of water supply, wastewater, and flood control projects. While it's true that water management is a priority for many metropolitan areas, a nation of truly smart cities must also make action plans for the least historically precedented extreme weather events.