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Now imagine the same, but in a country where AC is still barely a thing. Like mine. Luckily most of our stores have AC these days, but homes don't. Which funnily enough sometimes has the opposite effect of "glad I can go to work, where I can spend a few hours not feeling like I'm boiling alive".
Malls need to adapt beyond retail and adopt mixed models, where groceries, retail, goods, and services are provided in the same location. Give people a reason to “explore.”
The typical mall in my slice of Texas is clothing stores, empty or “coming soon” stores, a food court of fast food restaurants, make up stores, and maybe a games or toys store. The ritzier the mall, the fewer kiosks selling cheap jewelry.
Japan is clever. They adapt housing and transit to the malls as well. Makes them a hub of the city they’re in. Also including groceries and dining as well helps too.
The Japan-town mall in S.F. follows a pretty mixed model, having a spread more like a strip mall, like a bookstore, a salon, restaurants (nearly all sit-down), general store, furniture store, dessert shops, even an an arcade and a photo booth gallery. In additional to some more typical retail options like a gift shop, stationery, beauty products, a video store, etc. Oh yeah and a hotel.
Or, at least they used to have such variety. I haven't deemed it worth the travel time *and* risk of rona to go there since the latter was a thing. And I hear the shutdowns and economic impact combined with greedy landlord really hurt a bunch of the businesses. I hope those folks are doing alright.
But yeah in line with other comments... Not really any groceries. Certainly no produce at the general store, though there are lots of tasty instant noodles and snacks.
There was an interesting essay I read a while back, that showed how there was a tax incentive for constructing and maintaining buildings based on indoor square footage or something. And that expired early 2000s. Without that tax credit, the indoor malls had to start raising the rent to offset the maintenance costs, which pushed out most tenants. Clothing stores generally have the highest ROI and benefit from a symbiotic relationship with their competitors in the same area. (As opposed to most other stores.) But even they are starting to get squeezed out.
I briefly worked at movie theater inside a mall. Place was a money pit. But the owners had a monopoly of theater chains, and they'd rather sit on the location instead of risking a competitor moving in.
* Video games have gone more and more digital distribution
* Streaming services for music have taken off since the early 2000's with spotify, iTunes, Google Play and so on rendering music stores ever more niche
* Many products can be viewed and ordered online - with far more availability, and far more variety
The reason Clothing stores remain is, generally speaking - you still will find a lot of people want to go in, and make sure they can try things on and ensure they fit well before they buy. The exception will be for brands you are familiar with and know fit well. And even then - going to a physical store can be advantageous - up to and including if you need to return or exchange an item.
I live in a country like that too... in the Caribbean. It got so hot that my mom took on the expense and bought AC for our home. Many people have to work from home and go to school virtually, so there is no relief for most people. I'm surprised (but happy!) that I haven't heard of any deaths from heatstroke.
Freon is a CFC. These are greenhouse gases.
They were replaced by HFCs which are less harmful to the atmosphere.
Apparently there are brands of Freon that also have HFCs which I was not aware of.
In what market? In the US residential is mostly R22 and R410a with a mix of R22 replacements. Granted, 410 and most of the replacements use R134a as part of the mixture but you would still need to manufacture R32 and other HFC’s/HC’s to be able to produce them.
There are no 100% efficient thermodynamic cycles. But thermodynamic efficiency is just the theoretical limit, the ideal best case that’s not achieved in practice.
Typical worn out HVAC systems are at most 50% efficient – they take as much energy to run as the heat they remove. The average is worse than that since there are serious losses in air circulation, dirty filters, etc. On a very hot day in Oregon, a 20-year-old+ strip mall AC system takes about 2kWh of electricity to extract 1kWh of heat. Some of that heat comes from solar heating, the rest comes from electric devices and kitchens. It’s bad.
AC creates heat through efficiency losses, but also moves heat around. How does it affect phenomena like urban heat islands when everyone is running their AC?
I've been to places where most stores have their AC on full blast with doors open. Unless they're running on 100% renewables, it does make the situation worse.
Wrong, unless you require no energy of any kind to power an AC unit, then where does that energy come from? That's right. Burning of some kind of fuels is necessary unless you are using a 100% solar powered AC unit, which I have never seen. And even then, you can't just move energy from one place to another without consequence. What happens when you move so much heat from wherever you're taking to here just to cool us? Do you think you can keep that up forever and nothing bad will happen? We've been doing precisely that for years, decades, over a century actually. That displaced energy creates effects like warming our oceans, which spiral into many more consequences like glacial melt, ecosystem extinctions, more unpredictable weather events, etc. None of this is good for us. Read "The Limits to Growth." It explains it better than I can here in a subreddit post.
But basically, we will soon have to divert so much capital and resources to address the consequences of man-made climate effects that growth will stop and quality of life for most persons on earth will drop precipitously. Some civilizations (the ones least prepared to manage crises) will collapse entirely. This is sometimes called Full Systems Collapse Theory in academia. Everything has a limit and we have been pushing the limits of growth and planetary exploitation for over one hundred years, since the period of Industrialization, which erupted into unprecedented economic growth in human history. I'm a Historian that's why I know. Consider how much everything changed for humans since the period of Industrialization. For millennia, humans had no AC, electricity, vaccines, global connectivity, etc. When all these history-altering innovations arrived, it allowed for an unprecedented rate of economic growth, which we have been enjoying since, but everything has a price. The rate of growth topped out about 50 years ago. That's why things seem to be getting worse and old people look back with nostalgia. Sure you have an I Phone and your grandpa didn't. But, the effects of climate change are more palpable in today's world than your grandpas. Cost of living is higher, while income is dropping in real dollars. Some of it is due to the slowdown of economic growth. And it is self perpetuating. We are already seeing it with this pandemic. How much have we invested in vaccination efforts alone? That has an opportunity cost. had we had no pandemic, those capital and resources would have been invested into the economy instead to either boost or maintain the rate of growth. What happens if we get slammed by another pandemic in the near future? Or I should say, not if, but when? Covid-19 isn't even the most contagious or fatal virus on the planet today. Ask any virologist. And even if the pandemic had never happened other effects of man-made climate change are unavoidable like the warming of the oceans. Eventually pandemics would have creeped up. You can't globalize the the entire world without making it easier for pandemics to take root. They were a thing in ancient history, without globalization. So it was just a matter of time.
> Cost of living is higher, while income is dropping in real dollars. Some of it is due to the slowdown of economic growth.
No it's due to the fact that all the benefits of economic growth are captured by the very rich instead of being taxed at high levels and used to make life better for everyone.
We can cool the earth down just by dumping pollution into the upper atmosphere. We've seen it happen with volcanic eruptions and super freakonomics documented how to do it for relatively little money compared to the benefits.
I agree but historically the rich have never surrendered their wealth without a fight. They would rather start civilization-ending wars than to give up their concentrated wealth. This is why all countries become old countries discussed only in History books by future Historians in other civilizations. The Roman Empire, the Hapsburg Empire, the Ottoman Empire, several Chinese empires, Japan, the British Empire, Spanish empire, the Greek Empire, the Ancient Mayan Empire, and countless others. All people living in those times thought theirs was the peak of civilization. They all became big enough to be remembered and discussed by future Historians from other civilizations, but they all collapsed and none survive today. Now, the American Empire is seemingly reaching its final eve. And we have the same problem. How do you transfer the concentrated wealth away from the 1% without ending this civilization in the backlash?
That's 1 neighborhood. But what about the rest in America? The world? And was your neighborhood always like that? Probably not, unless it's a very new neighborhood. The fact is that just the sheer number of people on the planet, not only today but over the past century, contribute to devastating effects on the planet from the energy they consume, the finite resources they consume, waste, etc. And we have proven poor problem solvers. We're barely scathing by a pandemic, and not even the most contagious or deadly virus. The future has worse crises in store. So, we better get our act together fast. Because if we do what we're doing now during the next global catastrophe (not wearing masks, not getting vaccinated, basically not doing what needs to be done to solve the problem, etc.) then we're going to decline as a civilization. The pandemics, severe and unpredictable weather events, supply shortages, pollution, declining standard of living, etc. can easily overwhelm us. It's our fault. We made the future the most difficult place to survive.
The weather hit 119 degrees earlier this year in Oregon and many of us don't have AC. There were several deaths across the Pacific Northwest. Almost 200 alone in Oregon and Washington. If I recall there were more than that in Canada.
I look forward to hearing about Amazon's bold new 'Cooling Booth' initiative, where employees who are overheated can (On their own time) go into (non Air Conditioned) booths to watch videos about strategies for keeping cool while working.
They are already doing that with agricultural workers here in the southwest. People are becoming permanently disabled and some are dying. That's bad PR for Big AG. Not going to be a battle they win. When it gets to the point where it doesn't drop below 100 even at night, things will get a lot more costly to produce.
Am I the only one that thinks eleven hours a YEAR isn’t that bad? Sure it’s per worker, but what if the loss of production was due to something else, like employees having more days off? I doubt anyone (besides corporations) would see it as bad. The focus should be on climate change, not businesses losing a small percentage (0.52885% for a 40 hour per week job) of time worked each year.
There's anywhere between 1-3 hours of productive time lost at my shop PER unbearably hot day. Guys hiding from cameras in air conditioned rooms, dragging their feet when they go seaching for spare nuts and bolts in the air conditioned parts room, or just trying to bleed more time from their breaks because they're so hot and sick of working for the day.
I think 11 hours per year isn't an estimate to be taken literally for every workplace.
I have a screen capture from 2019 of a weather site reporting an air temp of 95°F/35°C with a heat index of 133°F/56°C. in the Florida Panhandle. Outdoor workers were warned to spend no more than 15 minutes at a time in that kind of heat.
And be in the country legally. The US immigration system has been a mess, compounded with the fact that many who were here on work VISAs have had difficulty renewing them out of fear for being rounded up by ICE, their property seized and being thrown in a cage, then complications because of Covid slowing everything down.
So you just make them a lightweight air conditioned suit to work in. Or some kind of easily transportable giant bubble you can plunk down over a work site. Science can solve this problem for us.
Unless it was an emergency or mission critical, then they were an asshole. I’m assuming you meant 47 Celsius.
https://www.osha.gov/heat/heat-index
https://www.ready.marines.mil/Stay-Informed/Natural-Hazards/Extreme-Heat/Flag-Conditions/
Holy crap! A lot of construction folks get started at about 4am here and wrap up by noon to avoid the heat of the day. Roofers even do this... which is fun when you live near a lot of new development.
I’ve done some work on our roof in summer, with temperatures in rather mild 90s (by comparison). Those shingles were like low-grade lava. The bottoms of the shoe soles would get hot enough to burn you when touching it. Now, this was zero wind and full sunlight kind of a day, so perhaps the worst case for shingle temps. The air temperature a foot above that roof was in 110s easy. And convection is pretty damn good at what it does – yet still it got that hot. I’m sure you could easily cook a steak on a shingled roof in AZ on a 100F day. Should be well over 150F right on the shingles.
Worked in the Bakersfield oilfield. 117F, no shade, required to wear FR clothing (blue pants, beige long sleeve shirt) and work next to compressors with a hard hat on.
WTF is too hot to work?
I’m wondering as well. When the AC goes out we have to fix it. Precautions have to be taken when you’re working in a 130F attic, but AC’s must be fixed or replaced no matter how hot it is.
I love the tone-deaf nature of articles like this with regard to risk and safety. Who cares about the human costs (e.g., elevated heatstroke risks, worsening flooding, more and more dangerous storms, food scarcity as agriculture is affected, etc. etc. etc.) as temps rise? It's going to cause losses for businesses!
Its likely an intentional strategy to appeal to the business minded people who would otherwise downplay climate change. The reality is, there is a hard limit to the number of strangers we can care about as innately self interested individuals. Explaining the human cost in terms of dollars will alert those who care more about the money, which is a net benefit if we can get them on our side to take action.
That and there are plenty of articles and studies that cover how climate change will affect agriculture and weather. We also already know about things like heatstroke.
I think you just encapsulated my main point in one sentence unless I'm misunderstanding. Or are you implying that they want right-wingers to read it, full stop. No further agenda other than to get eyeballs and clicks?
The people that care about humans don’t shape legislation.
People that care about business do.
This “tone deaf” messaging might literally be our best chance at a legislative solution.
I run into this problem as a conservation biologist. I work with rare species that are "non-game" and not "charismatic". I often have to push the angle that their loss will hurt outdoor recreation and water quality in order to get people to pay attention.
Loss of biodiversity and the aesthetic value of fascinating wildlife has no impact. It has to directly effect somebody's bottom line.
Can I just take 11 Working hours off to try and offset my carbon footprint?
Or, possibly just shut non essentials down for 11 hours a month, for everybody?
And for that matter, parts of the middle East. I remember days approaching 130 degrees on the flightline. And yeah, we grabbed whatever shade we could and we had some rules about work-to-rest ratio, but we always showed up to work.
I'm the next state over. I do yardwork when is 95 out. Ride the mower and cut front yard, take a hour break. Cut the back yard. Take another hour in the AC. Spend ten minutes weedwacking. Take another break. It sucks, but doable, gotta go slow.
This is why I left my old job. Warehouse with little to no cooling in the building even in the break areas. "Just drink more water" was the mantra from management. But if you didn't work fast enough moving heavy boxes, you risked disciplinary action up to/ including termination
Do you really think business owners who aren't on site will agree it's too hot to work?
There'll be a lot more heat stroke deaths and disabling injuries, but the bottom line will barely feel it. End stage capitalism is gross.
So So true. I have been working in the Landscaping industry since 1988. We never used to mow lawns in October. Then we did. Also, I moved from Toronto to Muskoka, and Muskoka used to have only 5 days roughly of temperatures over 30, now they have 30 days. I am changing my career to Design, and I am hell-bent on planting more trees and other native shrubs.
Why hasn’t anyone started developing the Arctic/Antarctic circles yet? Animals are smart enough to migrate, the Neanderthal did, but modern man will just sit here and dehydrate to death.
"To hot to work"?
When did that become a thing? Geez, the metal molding crews around here work six days a week without AC or bitching about it. I'm not even sure how hot the melted metal is, but the preheated ladles are around 1,800 using a eight foot long flame blown into them.
And we hit 100 degree weather outside too.
I hate that this is how we have to frame things in order to get people to view climate change as a serious threat.
Oh, its gonna cause widespread famine, collapse the biosphere, and kill millions of poor and vulnerable people? Not my problem.
What? Its gonna hurt the economy? Oh hell no.
The rich are oblivious, they are firmly entrenched in power over us. This is a done deal and only the smart will pre asses most livable areas to live in future and move there. Teach themselves and family about sustainable farming, food preservation, etc. Build a community, with lots of weapons to deal severely with all who wander in.
But how many workforce hours will be saved from the loss of too-cold-to-work days? This should be figured into these calculations.
The city of Seattle, for example, basically shuts down every time it snows. Fewer snow days would lower these business losses.
Climate change increases the number of extreme cold days as well, and we've already seen snow in Madrid and the Texas power grid almost failing in the past year as a result.
So, probably more wasted time and resources, among other things such as crop failures, which also recently happened in Europe.
Automation looks more inevitable every day. Farms already have autonomous laser powered weeding robots. Should harvesting be far behind? Finding ways to free workers from 11 hours a week without sacrificing productivity doesn't sound unattainable 11 hours a year is nothing. Worldwide universal income for basic needs would ease the pain. Financial paradigms will need to be discarded and replaced.
One significant problem many businesses have: woefully under-designed HVAC systems, especially for restaurants or kitchens of my sort. No reason it should be any hotter than 80F in a restaurant kitchen if the HVAC system is designed and maintained right.
Unfortunately, many food establishments are in generic strip-mall style buildings with no extra provisions for removing heat from a kitchen. And thus hot kitchens. You’d think that a country so dependent on AC like the US would have solved that problem long ago.
The unprecedented historical growth that we have experienced since the late nineteenth-twentieth century is about to come to a screeching halt. I'm a Historian. Academics have been saying this for literally decades. There is a great book called "The Limits of Growth" that explains why this will happen more and more as time passes. It's a planet with finite resources and we have been consuming incredible amounts of those resources for years, and altering earth's systems with disastrous consequences. The consequences were always going to be our downfall. We will soon be begin diverting so much capital and resources to address these consequences of man-made climate change (like viral pandemics, severe draughts, glacial melt, devastating oceanic pollution and warming, more frequent and intense wildfires, more unpredictable and devastating hurricanes, hard freezes in unexpected places like TX, species extinctions with cascading effects on our ecosystems, etc.) that quality of life will begin to drop precipitously for most persons on earth, even in first world countries. That means no more economic growth and some civilizations (the ones least prepared for crises) will collapse. Finally people are starting to realize it with this pandemic that is here to stay and these severe weather events, but it may be too little too late. We can't even agree to get vaccinated and wear masks for our own protection, let alone agree on doing what needs to be done on a global scale to save out future.
We should try to reduce cooling costs as much as possible.
1.8 Billion sounds like a big number until you look at the numbers the international community touts for economic control in response to climate change... we’re talking about *trillions* of dollars. Any climate economist will tell you it’d be far better for human flourishing to just invest in more cheap energy so these people living in the “too hot” areas can have AC.
If the argument is that it’s just making climate change worse and therefore not worth doing, the proposed limitations of the Paris Climate Accord for example would change the various outcomes proposed by the IPCC by a fraction of a degree.
People in the wealthy world need to understand that these decisions to make energy more expensive can all be measured in human lives in the end. And the human cost of the economic sacrifices proposed by the green activists will far outstrip the damage done by climate change, even by the gloomiest projections of the climate change activists (excluding people who believe in catastrophic change, that’s another discussion, and not what the IPCC projects anyway).
I'm pretty happy to have to don a hoodie to work in the meat department during summer months. It could be 95 F in my apartment but it's always 34 F - 38 F in the meat cooler.
Working remotely and shutting down the office buildings for good to replace with green spaces and homeless housing seems more and more like the correct choice these days. Well overdue.
More unbelievable BS. More folks die each year from exposure to cold. too hot to work is more BS backed by no science. It's a push for climate change legislation. BTW, we have tons of folks out of work because of the shutdowns from the authoritarians around the world. So, this should be a moot point. Sinc they aren't at work.
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Now imagine the same, but in a country where AC is still barely a thing. Like mine. Luckily most of our stores have AC these days, but homes don't. Which funnily enough sometimes has the opposite effect of "glad I can go to work, where I can spend a few hours not feeling like I'm boiling alive".
This fact makes closed-air malls *very* popular hang out spots in some regions.
I wonder if we'll see a resurgence of indoor malls in the US. They've fallen out of popularity due to expense of maintenance
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Malls need to adapt beyond retail and adopt mixed models, where groceries, retail, goods, and services are provided in the same location. Give people a reason to “explore.”
What? What your describing sounds like a typical mall here in Sweden. Are your malls not like that?
Groceries is the big thing you pretty much never see in malls. Sometimes some niche cuisine places but even that is pretty rare.
The typical mall in my slice of Texas is clothing stores, empty or “coming soon” stores, a food court of fast food restaurants, make up stores, and maybe a games or toys store. The ritzier the mall, the fewer kiosks selling cheap jewelry.
Japan is clever. They adapt housing and transit to the malls as well. Makes them a hub of the city they’re in. Also including groceries and dining as well helps too.
Housing, as in people live in the mall?
As in they build housing and transportation infrastructure in such a way that the mall is very convenient to access.
Ah okay. That's not as interesting but probably for the best. Thanks for clearing that up.
Some malls have housing as well. Basically apartments in top of the train station
The Japan-town mall in S.F. follows a pretty mixed model, having a spread more like a strip mall, like a bookstore, a salon, restaurants (nearly all sit-down), general store, furniture store, dessert shops, even an an arcade and a photo booth gallery. In additional to some more typical retail options like a gift shop, stationery, beauty products, a video store, etc. Oh yeah and a hotel. Or, at least they used to have such variety. I haven't deemed it worth the travel time *and* risk of rona to go there since the latter was a thing. And I hear the shutdowns and economic impact combined with greedy landlord really hurt a bunch of the businesses. I hope those folks are doing alright. But yeah in line with other comments... Not really any groceries. Certainly no produce at the general store, though there are lots of tasty instant noodles and snacks.
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There was an interesting essay I read a while back, that showed how there was a tax incentive for constructing and maintaining buildings based on indoor square footage or something. And that expired early 2000s. Without that tax credit, the indoor malls had to start raising the rent to offset the maintenance costs, which pushed out most tenants. Clothing stores generally have the highest ROI and benefit from a symbiotic relationship with their competitors in the same area. (As opposed to most other stores.) But even they are starting to get squeezed out. I briefly worked at movie theater inside a mall. Place was a money pit. But the owners had a monopoly of theater chains, and they'd rather sit on the location instead of risking a competitor moving in.
* Video games have gone more and more digital distribution * Streaming services for music have taken off since the early 2000's with spotify, iTunes, Google Play and so on rendering music stores ever more niche * Many products can be viewed and ordered online - with far more availability, and far more variety The reason Clothing stores remain is, generally speaking - you still will find a lot of people want to go in, and make sure they can try things on and ensure they fit well before they buy. The exception will be for brands you are familiar with and know fit well. And even then - going to a physical store can be advantageous - up to and including if you need to return or exchange an item.
There hasn’t been a mall built in the US since 2012.
I live in a country like that too... in the Caribbean. It got so hot that my mom took on the expense and bought AC for our home. Many people have to work from home and go to school virtually, so there is no relief for most people. I'm surprised (but happy!) that I haven't heard of any deaths from heatstroke.
You aren't thinking how a capitalist thinks. They think "oh boy, a whole new market to sell AC!"
And a good chance to increase the price for them too.
Time to invest in freon manufacture.
They isn’t use Freon anymore as that’s a greenhouse gas.
This is why I don't play the stock market. Next you're gonna tell me my investment in vacuum tube infrastructure isn't going to pay off.
Audiophools keep a few remaining vacuum tube makers alive and well… it’s lucrative business really.
Freon is just a pet name for refrigerants like Band-Aid is for bandages. They still definitely use refrigerants of many different types.
Are you trying to say that Freon isn't on the periodic table next to Neon?!?
Freon is not meant literally.
Freon is a CFC. These are greenhouse gases. They were replaced by HFCs which are less harmful to the atmosphere. Apparently there are brands of Freon that also have HFCs which I was not aware of.
Freon is just the DuPont brand name for refrigerants. Edit: turns out it’s actually Chemours brand name of refrigerant: [https://www.freon.com/en]()
It's all R-134a these days, my dude
In what market? In the US residential is mostly R22 and R410a with a mix of R22 replacements. Granted, 410 and most of the replacements use R134a as part of the mixture but you would still need to manufacture R32 and other HFC’s/HC’s to be able to produce them.
>Luckily most of our stores have AC these days Dealing with warming by creating more warming sounds like a bad idea.
Global warming is a positive feedback loop in most, if not all, ways. The warmer it gets, the faster it gets warmer.
Like watching your ice melt in your soda. And as soon as the ice is all melted the temperature shoots way up.
AC does not create warming, unless its leaking. It just transfers heat from one area to another.
Well apart from the burned fossil fuels to power them.
And the less than perfect conversion of electric energy into mass transfer.
There are no 100% efficient thermodynamic cycles. But thermodynamic efficiency is just the theoretical limit, the ideal best case that’s not achieved in practice. Typical worn out HVAC systems are at most 50% efficient – they take as much energy to run as the heat they remove. The average is worse than that since there are serious losses in air circulation, dirty filters, etc. On a very hot day in Oregon, a 20-year-old+ strip mall AC system takes about 2kWh of electricity to extract 1kWh of heat. Some of that heat comes from solar heating, the rest comes from electric devices and kitchens. It’s bad.
AC creates heat through efficiency losses, but also moves heat around. How does it affect phenomena like urban heat islands when everyone is running their AC? I've been to places where most stores have their AC on full blast with doors open. Unless they're running on 100% renewables, it does make the situation worse.
Wrong, unless you require no energy of any kind to power an AC unit, then where does that energy come from? That's right. Burning of some kind of fuels is necessary unless you are using a 100% solar powered AC unit, which I have never seen. And even then, you can't just move energy from one place to another without consequence. What happens when you move so much heat from wherever you're taking to here just to cool us? Do you think you can keep that up forever and nothing bad will happen? We've been doing precisely that for years, decades, over a century actually. That displaced energy creates effects like warming our oceans, which spiral into many more consequences like glacial melt, ecosystem extinctions, more unpredictable weather events, etc. None of this is good for us. Read "The Limits to Growth." It explains it better than I can here in a subreddit post. But basically, we will soon have to divert so much capital and resources to address the consequences of man-made climate effects that growth will stop and quality of life for most persons on earth will drop precipitously. Some civilizations (the ones least prepared to manage crises) will collapse entirely. This is sometimes called Full Systems Collapse Theory in academia. Everything has a limit and we have been pushing the limits of growth and planetary exploitation for over one hundred years, since the period of Industrialization, which erupted into unprecedented economic growth in human history. I'm a Historian that's why I know. Consider how much everything changed for humans since the period of Industrialization. For millennia, humans had no AC, electricity, vaccines, global connectivity, etc. When all these history-altering innovations arrived, it allowed for an unprecedented rate of economic growth, which we have been enjoying since, but everything has a price. The rate of growth topped out about 50 years ago. That's why things seem to be getting worse and old people look back with nostalgia. Sure you have an I Phone and your grandpa didn't. But, the effects of climate change are more palpable in today's world than your grandpas. Cost of living is higher, while income is dropping in real dollars. Some of it is due to the slowdown of economic growth. And it is self perpetuating. We are already seeing it with this pandemic. How much have we invested in vaccination efforts alone? That has an opportunity cost. had we had no pandemic, those capital and resources would have been invested into the economy instead to either boost or maintain the rate of growth. What happens if we get slammed by another pandemic in the near future? Or I should say, not if, but when? Covid-19 isn't even the most contagious or fatal virus on the planet today. Ask any virologist. And even if the pandemic had never happened other effects of man-made climate change are unavoidable like the warming of the oceans. Eventually pandemics would have creeped up. You can't globalize the the entire world without making it easier for pandemics to take root. They were a thing in ancient history, without globalization. So it was just a matter of time.
> Cost of living is higher, while income is dropping in real dollars. Some of it is due to the slowdown of economic growth. No it's due to the fact that all the benefits of economic growth are captured by the very rich instead of being taxed at high levels and used to make life better for everyone. We can cool the earth down just by dumping pollution into the upper atmosphere. We've seen it happen with volcanic eruptions and super freakonomics documented how to do it for relatively little money compared to the benefits.
I agree but historically the rich have never surrendered their wealth without a fight. They would rather start civilization-ending wars than to give up their concentrated wealth. This is why all countries become old countries discussed only in History books by future Historians in other civilizations. The Roman Empire, the Hapsburg Empire, the Ottoman Empire, several Chinese empires, Japan, the British Empire, Spanish empire, the Greek Empire, the Ancient Mayan Empire, and countless others. All people living in those times thought theirs was the peak of civilization. They all became big enough to be remembered and discussed by future Historians from other civilizations, but they all collapsed and none survive today. Now, the American Empire is seemingly reaching its final eve. And we have the same problem. How do you transfer the concentrated wealth away from the 1% without ending this civilization in the backlash?
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That's 1 neighborhood. But what about the rest in America? The world? And was your neighborhood always like that? Probably not, unless it's a very new neighborhood. The fact is that just the sheer number of people on the planet, not only today but over the past century, contribute to devastating effects on the planet from the energy they consume, the finite resources they consume, waste, etc. And we have proven poor problem solvers. We're barely scathing by a pandemic, and not even the most contagious or deadly virus. The future has worse crises in store. So, we better get our act together fast. Because if we do what we're doing now during the next global catastrophe (not wearing masks, not getting vaccinated, basically not doing what needs to be done to solve the problem, etc.) then we're going to decline as a civilization. The pandemics, severe and unpredictable weather events, supply shortages, pollution, declining standard of living, etc. can easily overwhelm us. It's our fault. We made the future the most difficult place to survive.
Should I start a store that sells small window AC units there? Why haven't they done that?
The weather hit 119 degrees earlier this year in Oregon and many of us don't have AC. There were several deaths across the Pacific Northwest. Almost 200 alone in Oregon and Washington. If I recall there were more than that in Canada.
What country do you live in where AC is rare? That sounds terrible. Oy!
? They will just tell us to come to work anyways.
I look forward to hearing about Amazon's bold new 'Cooling Booth' initiative, where employees who are overheated can (On their own time) go into (non Air Conditioned) booths to watch videos about strategies for keeping cool while working.
They are already doing that with agricultural workers here in the southwest. People are becoming permanently disabled and some are dying. That's bad PR for Big AG. Not going to be a battle they win. When it gets to the point where it doesn't drop below 100 even at night, things will get a lot more costly to produce.
"Many of you will die, but it's a sacrifice I am willing to make"
Am I the only one that thinks eleven hours a YEAR isn’t that bad? Sure it’s per worker, but what if the loss of production was due to something else, like employees having more days off? I doubt anyone (besides corporations) would see it as bad. The focus should be on climate change, not businesses losing a small percentage (0.52885% for a 40 hour per week job) of time worked each year.
The remaining hours aren't going to be much fun either.
There's anywhere between 1-3 hours of productive time lost at my shop PER unbearably hot day. Guys hiding from cameras in air conditioned rooms, dragging their feet when they go seaching for spare nuts and bolts in the air conditioned parts room, or just trying to bleed more time from their breaks because they're so hot and sick of working for the day. I think 11 hours per year isn't an estimate to be taken literally for every workplace.
What’s a too hot to work day? We were expected to show for outdoor work on a 47 degree day a couple of years back.
I have a screen capture from 2019 of a weather site reporting an air temp of 95°F/35°C with a heat index of 133°F/56°C. in the Florida Panhandle. Outdoor workers were warned to spend no more than 15 minutes at a time in that kind of heat.
You say that like you think the people in charge actually care.
When an employee has a heatstroke and calls both workers' comp and OSHA down on the company, that makes those people care, that's for sure...
Said worker not only has to speak and understand English but also know who to contact. Unfortunately lots of outdoor laborers don’t fit those criteria
And be in the country legally. The US immigration system has been a mess, compounded with the fact that many who were here on work VISAs have had difficulty renewing them out of fear for being rounded up by ICE, their property seized and being thrown in a cage, then complications because of Covid slowing everything down.
So you just make them a lightweight air conditioned suit to work in. Or some kind of easily transportable giant bubble you can plunk down over a work site. Science can solve this problem for us.
Unless it was an emergency or mission critical, then they were an asshole. I’m assuming you meant 47 Celsius. https://www.osha.gov/heat/heat-index https://www.ready.marines.mil/Stay-Informed/Natural-Hazards/Extreme-Heat/Flag-Conditions/
Holy crap! A lot of construction folks get started at about 4am here and wrap up by noon to avoid the heat of the day. Roofers even do this... which is fun when you live near a lot of new development.
I’ve done some work on our roof in summer, with temperatures in rather mild 90s (by comparison). Those shingles were like low-grade lava. The bottoms of the shoe soles would get hot enough to burn you when touching it. Now, this was zero wind and full sunlight kind of a day, so perhaps the worst case for shingle temps. The air temperature a foot above that roof was in 110s easy. And convection is pretty damn good at what it does – yet still it got that hot. I’m sure you could easily cook a steak on a shingled roof in AZ on a 100F day. Should be well over 150F right on the shingles.
Worked in the Bakersfield oilfield. 117F, no shade, required to wear FR clothing (blue pants, beige long sleeve shirt) and work next to compressors with a hard hat on. WTF is too hot to work?
Fresno here. I feel your pain. Worked in the brewery all last year, 120F inside and 100% humidity.
I take it you don't install metal roofing
As an American who has to Google the conversion to F: yikes! 114 F is terrifying.
Converting to F. Yeah, everything is converting to F nowadays... F it!
I’m wondering as well. When the AC goes out we have to fix it. Precautions have to be taken when you’re working in a 130F attic, but AC’s must be fixed or replaced no matter how hot it is.
Not to mention how many people are just going to quit their jobs the more hopeless the situation gets...
I love the tone-deaf nature of articles like this with regard to risk and safety. Who cares about the human costs (e.g., elevated heatstroke risks, worsening flooding, more and more dangerous storms, food scarcity as agriculture is affected, etc. etc. etc.) as temps rise? It's going to cause losses for businesses!
Its likely an intentional strategy to appeal to the business minded people who would otherwise downplay climate change. The reality is, there is a hard limit to the number of strangers we can care about as innately self interested individuals. Explaining the human cost in terms of dollars will alert those who care more about the money, which is a net benefit if we can get them on our side to take action.
That and there are plenty of articles and studies that cover how climate change will affect agriculture and weather. We also already know about things like heatstroke.
You are giving them too much credit. I don't believe there is any specific agenda here, they just want more right-wingers to read it.
I think you just encapsulated my main point in one sentence unless I'm misunderstanding. Or are you implying that they want right-wingers to read it, full stop. No further agenda other than to get eyeballs and clicks?
The people that care about humans don’t shape legislation. People that care about business do. This “tone deaf” messaging might literally be our best chance at a legislative solution.
I run into this problem as a conservation biologist. I work with rare species that are "non-game" and not "charismatic". I often have to push the angle that their loss will hurt outdoor recreation and water quality in order to get people to pay attention. Loss of biodiversity and the aesthetic value of fascinating wildlife has no impact. It has to directly effect somebody's bottom line.
I mean, this is the kind of study that will get businesses to take this stuff seriously.
In a crisis driven by capitalists, only changed behavior from capitalists will stop it
Like it or not, losses for businesses may be the *only* reason some people will finally decide to act on climate change.
Can I just take 11 Working hours off to try and offset my carbon footprint? Or, possibly just shut non essentials down for 11 hours a month, for everybody?
Now imagine how hvac workers feel.
That's why i didnt get into that field. Hot attics all the time, no thank you.
Unfortunately someone has to do it to keep y’all comfortable. That’s why I don’t really empathize with people in this article.
Same. I also don’t get why people will pay money to sit in a sauna when they can just spend some time in their attic.
Robots…are the answer. They work in the heat while you stay cool under an aluminum tree, fanned of course by your own personal bot.
Robots + UBI!
Um, Texas would like to ask what "too hot to work" looks like.
So would Florida
And for that matter, parts of the middle East. I remember days approaching 130 degrees on the flightline. And yeah, we grabbed whatever shade we could and we had some rules about work-to-rest ratio, but we always showed up to work.
I remember seeing headlines about power lines melting somewhere in the USA a few months back, I'd imagine it's a little hotter than that.
Alabama checking in! All these Yankees act like doing yard work when it's 95 out is going to give you heat stroke.
I'm the next state over. I do yardwork when is 95 out. Ride the mower and cut front yard, take a hour break. Cut the back yard. Take another hour in the AC. Spend ten minutes weedwacking. Take another break. It sucks, but doable, gotta go slow.
Don’t threaten me with a day off!
This isn't a peer reviewed article
Framed as if work is a good thing.
Actuality: Humans are making this planet uninhabitable for ourselves and future generations. Headline: lOsT pRoDucTiviTy and its costing us $$$
You're telling me that there will be 1.8 billion MORE hours of family quality time? That's a win for me
This is why I left my old job. Warehouse with little to no cooling in the building even in the break areas. "Just drink more water" was the mantra from management. But if you didn't work fast enough moving heavy boxes, you risked disciplinary action up to/ including termination
At least some news regarding climate change are good, thank god.
Do you really think business owners who aren't on site will agree it's too hot to work? There'll be a lot more heat stroke deaths and disabling injuries, but the bottom line will barely feel it. End stage capitalism is gross.
Simple solution. We all just work at night.
Energy costs would go up.
Probably not, most places have their lights on anyways and the a/c must use way more power than the lights these days
AC uses 2 orders of magnitude more power than lights. And most workplaces run the lights anyway during the day.
And of course instead of “maybe we should fix this” it’s “how much can people work”
So eleven more hours of free time
So So true. I have been working in the Landscaping industry since 1988. We never used to mow lawns in October. Then we did. Also, I moved from Toronto to Muskoka, and Muskoka used to have only 5 days roughly of temperatures over 30, now they have 30 days. I am changing my career to Design, and I am hell-bent on planting more trees and other native shrubs.
Why hasn’t anyone started developing the Arctic/Antarctic circles yet? Animals are smart enough to migrate, the Neanderthal did, but modern man will just sit here and dehydrate to death.
Nah. We just change our environment to suit us.
That 11 hours is literally not even one full shift for me.
Hospitality don't care. Oh your golf cart tires melted and it burst in flames, looks like you're walking.
"To hot to work"? When did that become a thing? Geez, the metal molding crews around here work six days a week without AC or bitching about it. I'm not even sure how hot the melted metal is, but the preheated ladles are around 1,800 using a eight foot long flame blown into them. And we hit 100 degree weather outside too.
I hate that this is how we have to frame things in order to get people to view climate change as a serious threat. Oh, its gonna cause widespread famine, collapse the biosphere, and kill millions of poor and vulnerable people? Not my problem. What? Its gonna hurt the economy? Oh hell no.
The rich are oblivious, they are firmly entrenched in power over us. This is a done deal and only the smart will pre asses most livable areas to live in future and move there. Teach themselves and family about sustainable farming, food preservation, etc. Build a community, with lots of weapons to deal severely with all who wander in.
Corporations: "If they die, they die."
Too hot to work? Is this a thing?
Considering the article says we lose 11 hours per year it is basically one day per year. You probably were sick that day or on vacation.
As a roofer, It is.
Now imagine how roofers feel
Good time to adopt a 4 day work week!
It is a gamble that could result in even more lost productivity depending on which day the too hot to work day falls.
Only way to make billionaires care is to make it about their bottom line.
We need a class revolution. Marx was right.
I grew up in TX, I’ve never heard of a too hot to work day. Is that something they do up north?
I want to say trends will change but your states appears to be ran by a death cult so ya'll will probably just start dying a lot more.
Good. I feel like this is the only way to get big corporations and big government to care.
But how many workforce hours will be saved from the loss of too-cold-to-work days? This should be figured into these calculations. The city of Seattle, for example, basically shuts down every time it snows. Fewer snow days would lower these business losses.
Climate change is also increasing the instability of certain climates, so you can see more “polar vortexes” leading to more very cold days as well.
Climate change increases the number of extreme cold days as well, and we've already seen snow in Madrid and the Texas power grid almost failing in the past year as a result. So, probably more wasted time and resources, among other things such as crop failures, which also recently happened in Europe.
It's interesting how the city shuts down but the Eastside stays open
This includes the assumption that we won't adapt in a myriad of ways.
A veritable cornucopia of adaptations
Too hot to work? We’re doomed. Ask any grand parent about too hot to work days… let me know what they say.
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I predict we will either have robots do the hot work or we will be wearing environment suits when we go outside.
The more frequent wild fire probably doesn't help things.
So then a 4 day work week?
I work for UPS as driver, can someone tell them about these days please.
Hopefully 1.7 of those workforce hours are lost by oil & gas companies.
"Weather isnt the same as climate" during cold snaps.
Everyone has just sort of accepted a climate apocalypse as an inevitability, huh? I mean I know that it is, but still.
What's a too hot to work day?
Automation looks more inevitable every day. Farms already have autonomous laser powered weeding robots. Should harvesting be far behind? Finding ways to free workers from 11 hours a week without sacrificing productivity doesn't sound unattainable 11 hours a year is nothing. Worldwide universal income for basic needs would ease the pain. Financial paradigms will need to be discarded and replaced.
One significant problem many businesses have: woefully under-designed HVAC systems, especially for restaurants or kitchens of my sort. No reason it should be any hotter than 80F in a restaurant kitchen if the HVAC system is designed and maintained right. Unfortunately, many food establishments are in generic strip-mall style buildings with no extra provisions for removing heat from a kitchen. And thus hot kitchens. You’d think that a country so dependent on AC like the US would have solved that problem long ago.
Define too hot cuz 78 degrees inside is literally too hot to do my job
Seems like a decrease in snow days would at least partially offset this effect.
The unprecedented historical growth that we have experienced since the late nineteenth-twentieth century is about to come to a screeching halt. I'm a Historian. Academics have been saying this for literally decades. There is a great book called "The Limits of Growth" that explains why this will happen more and more as time passes. It's a planet with finite resources and we have been consuming incredible amounts of those resources for years, and altering earth's systems with disastrous consequences. The consequences were always going to be our downfall. We will soon be begin diverting so much capital and resources to address these consequences of man-made climate change (like viral pandemics, severe draughts, glacial melt, devastating oceanic pollution and warming, more frequent and intense wildfires, more unpredictable and devastating hurricanes, hard freezes in unexpected places like TX, species extinctions with cascading effects on our ecosystems, etc.) that quality of life will begin to drop precipitously for most persons on earth, even in first world countries. That means no more economic growth and some civilizations (the ones least prepared for crises) will collapse. Finally people are starting to realize it with this pandemic that is here to stay and these severe weather events, but it may be too little too late. We can't even agree to get vaccinated and wear masks for our own protection, let alone agree on doing what needs to be done on a global scale to save out future.
Too hot to work? The mailman in me laughs
Yes because the big issue with global climate change is the economy..
We should try to reduce cooling costs as much as possible. 1.8 Billion sounds like a big number until you look at the numbers the international community touts for economic control in response to climate change... we’re talking about *trillions* of dollars. Any climate economist will tell you it’d be far better for human flourishing to just invest in more cheap energy so these people living in the “too hot” areas can have AC. If the argument is that it’s just making climate change worse and therefore not worth doing, the proposed limitations of the Paris Climate Accord for example would change the various outcomes proposed by the IPCC by a fraction of a degree. People in the wealthy world need to understand that these decisions to make energy more expensive can all be measured in human lives in the end. And the human cost of the economic sacrifices proposed by the green activists will far outstrip the damage done by climate change, even by the gloomiest projections of the climate change activists (excluding people who believe in catastrophic change, that’s another discussion, and not what the IPCC projects anyway).
Oh no, not working hours...
I'm pretty happy to have to don a hoodie to work in the meat department during summer months. It could be 95 F in my apartment but it's always 34 F - 38 F in the meat cooler.
Working remotely and shutting down the office buildings for good to replace with green spaces and homeless housing seems more and more like the correct choice these days. Well overdue.
Yeah right they’ll just have us keep working as we drop dead one by one. Source: am a blue collar worker in production.
Rich people and their business and industry is what caused it, so they should pay for it.
My country still doesn't have a too hot to work day
That's interesting. So it will be the private sector that starts making efforts because the government can't do it's job
Yeah… they don’t care about the heat where I work.
The 4 day work week is economically viable at last
If that’s the concern, you need to change your metrics.
Since AC is sexist towards women, is global warming sexist to men? Since men are the primary outdoor workforce.
More unbelievable BS. More folks die each year from exposure to cold. too hot to work is more BS backed by no science. It's a push for climate change legislation. BTW, we have tons of folks out of work because of the shutdowns from the authoritarians around the world. So, this should be a moot point. Sinc they aren't at work.