Was New York City’s Blackout a Forecast of More Heat Waves and Inequality Wars?

While Americans spent several days trying to beat the latest massive heat wave, some in New York City had to finally succumb to the record-breaking temperatures. Like others in heat-strangled cities, thousands of Manhattanites and Brooklynites from mostly diverse and low-income neighborhoods were forced to endure the last 12 hottest years on record. In other words, switching on an air conditioner or fan was not an option since their electricity had been cutoff.

Reported by Justine Calma in “Grist,” New York’s Con Edison ultimately decided to cut power to “high-risk neighborhoods” that were filled with the economically disadvantaged and those who had already suffered the strains of a broken infrastructure. This includes a lack of public health care and transportation and social services. Thanks to low wages and higher jobless rates, neither did it matter these communities were more susceptible to crime and violence

New York City’s Urban Refugees
Although many see the upswing in massive heatwaves as a moral and economic debt, accumulated since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and now come due after several centuries, few understand them to be especially hard on the disadvantaged. But make no mistake, some think New York city’s poorest ranks in the same category as the one million Syrian refugees who were unleashed on Europe by a civil war inflamed by climate change and drought.

This goes for other “expendable” people, like those in Central America fleeing their own drought-stricken countries. By 2050, the U.N. projects 200 million climate refugees. For others it’s worse: “a billion or more vulnerable poor people with little choice but to fight or flee.” (1) As thousands flooded into the streets to try and breath the night air, Manhattan and Brooklyn’s disadvantaged minorities consequently faced their own urban refugee crisis-only without war and drought.

The Other Half of the Story
But this is only half of the story. The other is the impact heat waves have on physical and mental health. Outages affecting 50,000 Con Ed customers were among the city’s most at-risk for heat-related deaths. Since humans, like all mammals, are heat engines surviving means having to continually cool off. For that, the temperature needs to be low enough for the air to act as a kind of refrigerant, drawing heat off the skin so the engine (human heart) can keep pumping. (2)

Heat related deaths like heart attacks therefore spiked among New York City’s disadvantaged. So did heat exhaustion and heat stroke. Known as the wet-bulb temperature, cities like New York where the world overwhelmingly lives become death traps. Especially since asphalt and concrete and everything else that makes a city dense, including human flesh, absorb ambient heat. It’s a slow-release poison pill, freely available from the surrounding environment but with a price.

Deadly New York City Nights
Ambient heat becomes even more deadly since massive heatwaves don’t allow vital reprieves for bodies to recover. What this means is that these reprieves will become shorter, and shallower. Human flesh and cells will simply continue to simmer. In fact, concrete and asphalt of cities absorb so much heat during the day that it can raise the temperature 22 degrees. (3) Bearable nights become deadly ones-as in the Chicago heatwave of 1995 that killed 739 people.

Others suffer permanent brain damage. (Scientists call this the “heat island” effect-each city its own enclosed space, and hotter the more crowded it is.) One must wonder how many of New York City’s homeless are homeless due to this sometimes human-induced condition. Considering 255,000 are expected to die globally by 2050 from direct heat effects, and as many as 1 billion are at risk for heat stress, climate and inequality wars are expected to increase dramatically.

Climate Apocalypse
Another thing that’s expected to increase are massive heat waves. Indeed, and in a matter of years, New York City is scheduled to be hotter than the temperature in Bahrain or Iran. This includes an increase of induced hyperthermia in even sleeping humans. Should the world continue down its current emissions path, the unthinkable will occur. It entails wildfires burning sixteen times as much land in the American West and hundreds of drowned cities. (4)

Climatologists claim this kind of “business as usual approach” should be met with a moral responsibility towards the environment. For human rights advocates, it must be me with moral outrage to ensure justice and equality for all instead of just a few. One option to turn back the haunting uncertainty of the Earth’s existence may be the Green New Deal. Not only is it a bold plan to help solve the coming climate apocalypse but it will provide clean energy jobs.

Inequality Apocalypse
The Green New Deal also solves how the direct-heat effect made worse by ruined infrastructures targets the economically disadvantaged. Heat-related deaths consequently don’t account for the many thousands who visit hospitals during a heat wave and power failure or the almost half who will die within the year. (4) Since they’re forced into an “immediate” or long-term deathtrap, one can only expect more resentment, more retaliation, more violence, and more inequality wars.

Stanly Henriquez expressed these feelings when he asked the Brooklyn Daily Eagle: “I have one question for Con Ed. Why’d they choose us?” He then added, “Why are we the ones that have to suffer for the bigger power grid? We pay like everybody us.” Even Governor Cuomo admitted New York could have been better prepared. Con Ed said the “preemptive” power outage was necessary to prevent a larger blackout. But again, why did it target only the diverse and poor?

Climate Injustices Lowers Life Expectancy
Something else that can’t be dismissed are the inequality wars against those most at-risk of heat-related deaths or other type of weather-related disasters. Like Con Ed, does America mirror the same kind of climate and environmental racism where the life expectancy of the poor and diverse aren’t as important as the wealthiest? If the answer is based on who lives in toxic environments and who suffers the most during natural or man-made disasters, then the answer is yes.

Senator Bernie Sanders, who is originally from Brooklyn, said, “A nation will not survive morally or economically when so few have so much and so many have so little.” The same goes for those in Central American and Syria or other parts of the world. In fact, some are starting to think you can no more escape the massive heatwaves and their wars of inequality than you can your skin. Just like the rest of the United States, it evidently includes New York City.

Dallas Darling is the author of Politics 501: An A-Z Reading on Conscientious Political Thought and Action, Some Nations Above God: 52 Weekly Reflections On Modern-Day Imperialism, Militarism, And Consumerism in the Context of John’s Apocalyptic Vision, and The Other Side Of Christianity: Reflections on Faith, Politics, Spirituality, History, and Peace. He is a correspondent for www.WN.com. You can read more of Dallas’ writings at www.beverlydarling.com and www.WN.com/dallasdarling.

(1) Wallace-Wells, David. The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future. New York, New York: Penguin Books, 2019., p. 8.

(2) Ibid., p. 40.

(3) Ibid., p. 47.

(4) Ibid., p. 46.