The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet by Jeff Goodell
ISBN: 978-0-316=49755-8 Paperback, 2024
Jeff Goodell’s latest book is a detailed examination of heat and its dangers on a warming planet. It deserves wide readership. Presented cogently and beautifully written in an accessible style, he powerfully examines his chosen subject from a myriad of angles. And from a global perspective. Ultimately, however, it is a very frustrating book.
The title basically makes his argument: of all the threats to human, animal, and plant well-being on the planet, as well as to the environment overall, “The Heat Will Kill You First.” He unequivocally states, “The Earth is getting hotter due to the burning of fossil fuels.” Further, “… global temperatures have risen 2.2 degrees [all temperatures in the book, unless otherwise noted, are on the Fahrenheit scale-KS] since the preindustrial era and are on track to warm to 6 degrees or more.”
But he wants you to understand that heat is more than an increase in temperature; he wants you to understand that “… heat is an active force, one that can bend railroad tracks and can kill you before you even understand that your life is at risk.” To explain what’s going on, he gives a powerful example: “… by one measure, the ocean absorbs the equivalent of the heat released from three nuclear bombs every second (emphasis added).” He sums it up clearly: this heat we are pumping into the sky is the prime mover of the climate crisis. The climate impacts you hear about most often, from sea-level rise to drought to wildfires, are all second-order effects of a hotter planet. The first-order effect is heat. It is the energy of planetary crisis….
He takes it a little further: “Extreme heat is remaking our planet into one in which large swaths may become inhospitable to human life.” And, not only important is the amount of increased heat but the rate of change beyond that normally experienced, especially by animals and plants: “… if the temperature they’re used to … changes too far, they die.”
With that beginning, Goodell tells a story about a family (which I assume he knew) who lived in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California, near Mariposa. The young couple and their daughter went out for a day hike. Tragically, all three never made it back home; they didn’t really consider the heat they might be facing
He travels the world to discuss various issues. One thing that grabbed my attention: in 2003, over 70,000 people died in Europe in over a few days because of the heat which, as Goodell notes correctly, is more than all of the US servicemen and women who were killed during the Vietnam War!
That same year—the warmest to date in human history—he points out “Nobody expected a 70 degree hump in temperature during the heat wave in Antarctica in 2023. Yet it happened. Nobody expected 121 degrees in British Columbia. And yet it happened. Nobody expected 104 degrees in London. As of 2023, the current record in Phoenix is 122 degrees.”
He examines the impact on agriculture in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, the warming of the oceans and the dangers to the global aquamarine food chain, the widening expansion of viruses around the globe, the dangers to those who must work outside in the heat, the importance of air conditioning, the introduction of naming heat waves so as to draw much greater attention to these killers before they strike, the importance of parks and greenspaces to urban landscapes, ending with his account of a skiing trip across Baffin Island in the Artic and his encounter with a mama polar bear and her two cubs.
By the end of the book, the reader will have a strong exposure to the issue of heat and the dangers therein. Written by someone who often writes for Rolling Stone, where I first came across his work, he utilizes as number of stories to convey the situation and the dangers of doing nothing. There is no doubt in my mind as to Goodell’s having nailed the issue of heat to the wall.
However, this is where he drops the ball: he doesn’t say anything beyond heat is bad and we need to do something about it.
Accordingly—and this is where my frustration comes in—is that he presents no solutions nor even system-wide analysis. Here’s a big problem, which he exquisitely details in much if not all of its complexity, but he fails to pull it together in a way that at least suggests possible ways forward: ok, it’s hot and it’s going to continue to get hotter if we do nothing, but …?
The fact is that continued expansion depends on increased energy use. Most of our energy utilized today is still derived from fossil fuels—again, the collective name for oil, methane (or natural gas), and coal—and when these fossil fuels are burned, they emit what are called “greenhouse gases.” These gases—carbon dioxide or CO2, methane or CH4, nitrous oxides or NXO, and water vaper—when emitted, attack the atmosphere that protects humans, animals, and most plants from solar heat and light. (The atmosphere—a chemical concoction that is approximately 78 percent Nitrogen and 21 percent Oxygen and held in place around the planet by Earth’s gravity—surrounds the planet and protects the Earth by reflecting most of the solar energy that strikes it into space, away from the planet, although it also allows a certain amount of heat and light to enter inside of the atmosphere.)
By attacking the atmosphere that surrounds the planet, more heat gets inside the atmosphere, and more of what gets in is trapped, further warming the planet. This, in turn, causes ice to melt (reducing its reflexivity of solar energy, allowing more heat to remain inside of the atmosphere), oceans to rise, the oceans to warm even more, etc., etc., in an extended positive feedback look, worsening everything, including the temperature.
We simply cannot live as we are today; continuing the growth model that we are on, our established production system, will endanger the survivability of large numbers of humans, animals, and many plants into the 22nd Century (see https://znetwork.org/zvideo/the-climate-crisis-capitalism-or-human-animal-most-plants-survival/: we are going to have to drastically reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and quickly. From the science I’m reading, there is no alternative.
As has been known for over 100 years, scientists have shown that adding carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere has raised the temperature of the Earth. We now know that for over 800,000 years—no misprint!—the amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere have never exceeded 300 parts per million (ppm). Yes, natural processes, such as exploding volcanoes have released CO2 into the atmosphere, causing heating to increase and decrease over time, but never in this time period has it ever exceeded 300 ppm. Until around the year 1911.
Today, according to NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), one of the most scientifically renown bodies in the world, it is 425 ppm (see NASA, 2025). This has warmed the planet approximately 1.5 degree Centigrade since the 1850-1900 period, roughly the beginning of widespread industrialization (see https://science.nasa.gov/climate-change/).
While that might not seem like much of a warming, nonetheless, it has caused myriad changes to our planet as was mentioned above.
To prevent this problem from escalating further, emissions must be stopped and, ideally, the CO2 and associated chemicals removed from the atmosphere; but in any case, stopped.
And not in the real-distant future: according to the best science available today, if we don’t make major changes by roughly 2030, we’re going to see the beginning of extermination of the human species by the turn of the 22nd Century, a mere 75 years from now. That’s within the lifetimes of many of us, and certainly within the lifetime of Gen Z’s children.
However, even at best, most writers ignore the issue of power and domination beyond the economic system. In other words, I argue that there is more to the world than economics; that there is also a political realm that is not limited by economic production, distribution, and consumption. [There are other realms as well—such as community and kinship—but I want to limit my comments here to the political aspect.] In other words, this political realm operates on its own dynamic—the striving for power and domination—that is not constrained by economics.
This is important in that it allows us to include the concept of “Empire” in our analysis. Basically, the idea of Empire incorporates much of human history, where those having power actively seek to dominate and control not only people and area of their own land, but also those of other lands, whether because of seeking economic resources (such as raw materials, natural resources, related production, and/or human beings for home-country development), geo-strategic advantages (such as naval base locations), or even social benefits [such as demonizing “others” (i.e., “minorities”)] so as to buy social acquiescence from the majority), or any other reason that those seeking this power can put forth; a capitalist analysis simply cannot encompass all of this without stretching itself all out of shape.
In other words, Empire allows us to understand how one capitalist—or usually, one group of capitalists—can either seek to dominate or protect itself from another group of capitalists: by mobilizing the productive capacity of multiple capitalists and converting some of their economic resources into military weaponry under military leadership of armies, navies, and air forces, as well as other forces such as the CIA and/or the NED (the so-called National Endowment for Democracy), they extend the reach of their power. Thus, capitalists within an empire are able to project their control and/or defend their land in ways simply unavailable through general capitalist production. And, when used offensively, an empire can secure more economic resources, geo-strategic advantages and/or social benefits for enhanced capitalist production and profitability not only in the “home” country but in the subjugated lands as well. This is known as imperialism
Goodell makes the same mistake that many leftists today make: they do not recognize that the United States of America is the homeland of the US Empire, the greatest, strongest, and most destructive empire (to date) that the world has ever seen. Accordingly, there is no discussion in this book of the US Empire seeking to maintain control over as much of the world as possible since at least 1945, if not earlier.
Nonetheless, the cost of the US Empire has been great on the world’s peoples, with the costs escalating dramatically since 1981, with the Reagan Administration but continuing under both subsequent Democratic and Republican administrations. Its military is the single largest polluter in the world, and each invasion involves much killing and destruction, and is an environmental nightmare that continues for decades if not longer: Vietnam is still suffering from Agent Orange and unexploded ordinance utilized in the American war, which ended in 1975, 50 years ago, and Iraq and Afghanistan are suffering as well, along with the other countries bombed by the US Empire but not invaded (Libya, Syria, Yemen, Palestine, and former Yugoslavia come immediately to mind although the list is much longer.)
Over $18 trillion dollars of US taxpayer money has been spent on the Empire’s war machine alone—I refuse to call it “defense”—over the past forty years, (1981-2021, before the Russian invasion of Ukraine), and these are resources stolen from the American people or other good people around the world that could have been utilized for advancing education, providing health care, improving the infrastructure, addressing social inequities, aiding environmental recovery, addressing homelessness, and mitigating against climate change here at home. Somehow, this was not mentioned, much less addressed, by Goodell. [While I am commenting specifically on Goodell’s positions, I do not mean to demonize him; most leftists still do not understand the US Empire, and I am arguing it is way past time that each of us incorporate this understanding into our respective analysis.]
However, an Empire cannot depend solely on its economic and military power alone; it must gain acquiescence if not active support from its “home” population; after all, this home population is where it has got to obtain “soldiers,” the cannon fodder, for the imperial armies. Thus, there needs to be a cultural apparatus to tell the population that basically—and traditionally—“war is good business; invest your sons” (and more recently, daughters), and encourage them to do so. This gets projected in many ways, starting with the education system, and this usually includes the religious system, but this is where plays, novels, TV, radio, film, and much of social media come into importance; seize the imagination, seize the acquiescence!
If you think I’m exaggerating, think about all of the cultural energy in the United States that goes into sports (local high school and college, as well as professional, not to mention the Super Bowl in and of itself); explicit sexual material (“pornography” and all things related); celebrity gossip; beauty, fashion, and modeling; and news production; each intended to draw attention away from problems such as hunger, poverty, and inequality, much less capitalism, war, empire, and the climate crisis.And these “diversions” are not “small” things; each of these areas require overall investments in the multiple billions of dollars, seeking even greater profits.
And we on the left have generally failed to include the mainstream corporate media and their role in “setting the agenda” in our analysis as to what people should focus upon. During late 2023 and most of 2024, an incredible amount of attention was paid to Donald Trump’s attempted coup on January 6, 2021—as it should have been—but there was so much focus on the details of this that the climate crisis had all but disappeared from US news reporting. Then, after October 7, 2023, when Hamas launched its military attack on Israel, almost all coverage was of Israel as “victim,” and for a long time, was the only perspective seriously reported; it was only after massive protests across the US that some news from a Palestinian perspective or even from critical Israeli sources even was shown.
At the same time, despite all of the extravaganza, our political elections are generally devoid of providing substantive information and addressing real issues, usually only providing to audiences of Americans the “thinking” of those who have been able to raise the most money from the rich. Money buys further attention which, in turn, attracts further financial contributions, which allows the successful candidate to represent the interests of contributors, not constituents. And much of the political “debate” is in-fighting among political candidates; and almost as soon as one election cycle is completed, other candidates emerge and start the diversionary process anew, always seeking money, time, and attention.
At the same time, however, even these people are constrained by the interests of the “news” producers, who do not allow candidates to address issues inimical to their’s, or to go beyond their limited parameters; think how little time has been devoted to the climate crisis in contemporary mainstream political discussion/debate, such as last year’s presidential election. And yet, the consequences of such elections can have profound impacts on people around the globe, both abroad and at home. They behoove those of us who are politically aware to participate, at least to certain extents.
In short, this larger “ideological apparatus” is as important to the Empire as is the economic system or the war machine although perhaps not as immediately noticeable.And, once established, cultural norms become especially important because of the dominative power they project over subjects; questioning established norms, and especially challenging them individually, risks making oneself vulnerable to counterattack, however defined, but covering the range from denigration, mockery, to being made to feel vulnerable and, ultimately, physical violence.
Thus, central for effective cultural domination is the establishment of individualism as desirable; “I don’t want to be with anyone else; they’ll betray me, they’ll cheat on me, they’ll make me limit my desires.” And they may persuade me to look at things differently than I would on my own.
Yet—and this is the key point—individualism precludes resistance at much of any level. And this is illustrated by the old saying, “You can’t fight City Hall,” a warning, if there ever was one, of the futility of challenging power, whether structurally, culturally, or even normatively. However, that saying and all it suggests can be easily undermined by simply adding one word, which illuminates the power of collectivity: “You can’t fight City Hall alone!” Add that one word, and you change everything: broadscale social change, while perhaps extremely difficult it might still be, is now possible when you seek others to join you in the same project.
This is where we come back to capitalism, which is essential to confront. The fact is that capitalism is killing us. And it’s killing us through growth; an essential requirement of capitalism is that it must grow to survive; i.e., it is a growth machine. And it is so much of a growth machine that it must grow beyond what is needed for survival or even living at a sustainable level by every human being on the planet; it must create the demand for growth beyond what is naturally there. In other words, to put it in terms perhaps more metaphorically understandable, it is like a cancer that must continue to grow even if it destroys the host, ultimately causing its own destruction and demise.
In plain language, we either kill the cancer or we kill the host: there is no alternative.
—
As I finish this review essay of Jeff Goodell’s excellent, albeit limited book, in the aftermath of the fires in LA and 9 inches of snow in Florida and New Orleans during January 2025, and Hurricane Helene striking western North Carolina last Fall, it is clear that the cumulative assaults on our atmosphere are having detrimental effects on our environment and life of humans, animals and most plants. You cannot claim you were not warned. As I titled a previous essay, “It’s Time to Organize or Die!”
Additional References:
Aron, Adam. 2023. The Climate Crisis: Science, Impacts, Policy, Psychology, Justice, Social Movements. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Chu, Jennifer. 2023. “Explained: The 1.5 C Climate Benchmark.” MIT News, August 27. On-line at https://news.mit.edu/2023/explained-climate-benchmark-rising-temperatures-0827.
Hickel, Jason. 2020. Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World. UK: Penguin Books.
NASA. 2025. Evidence as to climate change: on-line at https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/.
Scipes, Kim.
— 2017. “Addressing Seriously the Environmental Crisis: A Bold, ‘Outside of the Box’ Suggestion for Addressing Climate Change and Other Forms of Environmental Destruction.” Class, Race and Corporate Power. On-line at http://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/classracecorporatepower/vol5/iss1/2.
— 2023. “Forty Years of the United States in the World.” Z Network, April 23. On-line at https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/special-history-series-40-years-of-the-united-states-in-the-world-1981-2023/.
— 2023. “Organizing to Save the World: Building Organizations from the Group-up.” Green Social Thought. October 16. On-line at http://www.greensocialthought.org/content/organizing-save-world-building-organizations-ground.
— 2023. “Review of Adam Aron’s The Climate Crisis: Science, Impacts, Policy, Psychology, Justice, Social Movements by Kim Scipes.” Z Network, December 26. On-line at https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/review-of-adam-arons-the-climate-crisis-science-impacts-policy-psychology-justice-social-movements/.
— 2024. “Review of Jason Hickel’s Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World.” Z Network, March 21.
— 2024. “It’s Time to Organize or Die.” Countercurrents.org, August 5. On-line at https://countercurrents.org/2024/08/its-time-to-organize-or-die/.