Jeff Goodell on How Extreme Heat Impacts Construction Workers

Heat is one of the deadliest and most immediate threats that outdoor workers face today.  

Especially vulnerable are the millions of men and women who work on construction sites around the world under an increasingly harsh sun. In comparison to other industries, construction workers are 13 times more likely to die from a heat related illness, accounting for nearly 36% of all occupational heat-related deaths in the US between 1992 and 2016.  

What policies and practices can we adopt to protect construction workers from the rising heat? How does the construction industry as a whole need to adapt in response to the new climate era? And how is the built environment both a source of and potential solution to the health and safety risks posed by global warming?  

To answer these questions, we reached out to climate journalist and New York Times best-selling author Jeff Goodell to speak about his latest book, The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet. 

The author of six previous books and a regular contributor to Rolling Stone, Goodell has reported on climate change for more than 20 years and has appeared on a variety of major news networks—including NPR, CNN, and Fox News—to discuss the risks and opportunities that humanity faces on our rapidly warming planet. 

Speaking over the phone from the cool interior of his home in Austin, Texas, Goodell recently chatted with Mike Anderson—a writer for the ONE-KEY™ Inbound Marketing & Education Team—about what Goodell sees as an urgent imperative for everyone in the construction industry and beyond to “get smart about climate change.” 

What follows is a transcript of their conversation, lightly edited for clarity. 

ANDERSON 

Hi Jeff, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. How hot is it in Austin today?  

GOODELL 

It’s 106 degrees. Heading to 107. I think this is the 53rd day in a row above 100 degrees. It’s become brutal. Everybody lives like vampires. Getting out early in the morning and late in the evening.  

ANDERSON 

Having written this book, do you find yourself more attentive to the heat and the weather now? 

GOODELL 

I spent three years working on this book about heat, so I’m definitely more attuned to thinking about how long these heat waves last, especially this summer, which has been so extreme. I find myself looking at how people are talking about it, how people are adapting. I saw three dogs yesterday walking in Austin with booties on to protect their feet from the sidewalk. I’d never noticed that before.  

ANDERSON 

Let’s get into your book. The Heat Will Kill You First is an incredibly informative, well-written, and easy-to-read treatment of what’s a very difficult subject. There’s a revolving litany of heat-related headlines I could recite depending on when we conducted this interview: There’s the wildfires in Canada, the one that just burnt down Lahaina, and this July was the hottest month in recorded history. I’d like to focus today on how the rising heat is impacting outdoor workers—specifically the men and women who work in construction. Related to that, I understand you grew up in a family of landscape contractors. 

GOODELL 

That’s right. My grandfather and my father were both landscape contractors in the Bay area. They ran a successful landscape contracting company that did a lot of things, like build public parks around Palo Alto and the South Bay. They also worked on building some of the highways, like Highway 280, which runs from San Francisco down to San Jose. I worked with them through high school until I went to college, doing things like driving dump trucks, running out to nurseries and getting various trees and bringing them back, loading up the tractors and digging holes for the trees, all that sort of thing. 

ANDERSON 

What was it like to have that experience working outside in the California heat when you were younger? And how did that experience affect your reporting for this book? 

GOODELL 

Well, the Bay area in the 70s was pretty idyllic. It’s a Mediterranean climate. And back then, before things had warmed up as much as they have now…I don’t remember any days where I was thinking “oh my god, it’s so hot here.” I remember sweating but I don’t remember any house or any vehicle I was in in those days having air conditioning. It was just not a climate that needed that. I lived in New York for a long time and in Texas now. But I did not grow up smart about climate or weather. I grew up in what a lot of people would say was the perfect climate. I don’t remember any temperatures ever even getting in the high 90s. So I grew up kind of climate dumb in a lot of ways. 

“The first thing I would say for workers is to know the risks. Understand heat. Understand the signs of heat exhaustion and heat stroke. Understand what particular vulnerabilities you may have.”

ANDERSON 

Before we zoom into how heat impacts construction workers, I’d like to zoom out for a second and take a look at the big picture of climate change. So just briefly, why is heat rising around the globe, why should people care, and what are the dangers and costs of inaction? 

GOODELL 

That’s a really big question that we could spend a lot of time talking about. The essential thing is that heat is rising because we’re continuing to burn fossil fuels at an extraordinary rate. Fossil fuels, when you burn them, create CO2 which goes into the atmosphere and traps heat and stays in the atmosphere for thousands of years. So we’ve been building up this blanket of CO2 that keeps getting thicker and thicker. Scientists have known this for many of decades. This is not anything new. We’ve just continued to do it because we’ve always thought of it as some sort of far-off problem in the future, and because the fossil fuel industry has spent a lot of money on disinformation and lobbying in order to downplay the urgency. Now it’s starting to catch up with us. Now we’re starting to see a lot of these climate impacts that scientists have been talking about for decades playing out in real time around us. We’re seeing it with Maui burning, these extraordinary heat waves, the wildfires in Canada, rising sea levels around the world. Everyone says the climate has always been changing and all of that. Of course that’s true, but we are pushing those changes much much faster than would normally happen. The science of this is very well established, it’s all solid as gravity from a scientific point of view. But we still haven’t embraced the urgency of this. As for the costs and consequences…depending on how far we let this go, the consequences are incalculable. We’re starting to see this summer—with these extreme heat events and these wildfires and tropical storms—this sense of moving into what climate scientists call the new climate era. Where the old rules are gone. And we’re not ready. From a construction point of view, the world that we built over the last century is not suited to the world we’re moving into in this century. 

ANDERSON 

In the opening of your book, you write “When heat comes, it is invisible.” This drives at a difficulty you identify throughout the book that we as a species have with thinking and talking about heat. Can you talk about this difficulty and how it shaped your writing process? 

GOODELL 

We’re very conflicted with how we talk about and how we think about heat. Most people in general like warmer weather. We can see that in development patterns of America in the last century, with people moving toward the Sun Belt, enabled by air conditioning. Even talking about warming is complicated. You go to a club and meet someone attractive, you say he or she is “hot”. At Rolling Stone where I work, we have “hot” lists of movies and books for the summer. In our language “hot” is often a good thing. And that’s also in the language of climate change—global warming just sounds like better beach weather. We have a lot of trouble understanding the risks of extreme heat, also partly because of the fact that it’s invisible. It’s not like a hurricane, where you see the trees bent in half and the roofs flying off houses. Looking out my window right now, I can’t tell if its 70 degrees or 110 degrees out. So there’s a lot of really conflicting messaging when it comes to thinking about the risks of extreme heat for outdoor workers and everyone else. 

“Guaranteeing rights to cool spaces. Guaranteeing rights to water, so that no worker has to feel like they have to make the choice between their life and their job… It’s really about how to require these kinds of simple protections—of water, and shade breaks, and access to cooling spaces.”

ANDERSON 

Science-fiction author William Gibson is often quoted as having said “The future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed.” Do you think our planet’s “climate future” is already here, and in what ways is it unevenly distributed across geographic and sociopolitical lines? 

GOODELL 

That’s a great phrase and there’s some truth to it in the sense that some places are feeling the changes more urgently and more suddenly than other places, whether it’s related to heat, sea level rise, or drought. Obviously not everywhere is equal. My problem with that phrase is that our future is not a particular place. It’s moving and changing all the time, and we still have a lot of control over what that future looks like. These weather extremes are evidence that the climate we built our world to work in—the climate that our bodies and the bodies of all living things evolved to thrive in—is gone. We’re living in a new climate that plays by different rules and has different extremes. And we’re really ill-suited for it. 

ANDERSON 

I’d like to talk now about how heat impacts construction, from the people who work in it to the built environment as a whole. Outdoors workers in general are uniquely impacted by rising heat, and of this group, construction workers are particularly vulnerable. Did you meet any construction workers while working on the book and what did you learn from your reporting about how heat impacts the health and wellbeing of outdoor workers around the world?  

GOODELL 

Outdoor workers are the most vulnerable. There’s this idea that we can deal with extreme heat just by air conditioning our way out of it, but construction and other outdoor workers are exempt from that. I see it around here in Texas all the time. Guys working in the streets laying asphalt on summer days. Working on rooftops in extreme heat conditions. It’s really brutal for them. And it brings up a lot of really difficult questions. Is summertime in the South going to become a kind of “no work” time, when it’s simply too hot for too long to continue construction and other kinds of outdoor work? Are we going to pass laws that require shade and water breaks for outdoor workers? There are clearly ways to do it without putting people’s lives at risk, like starting work at four in the morning and stopping earlier in the day—changing the rhythms of work life. But there’s a lot of people and companies that aren’t really interested in doing that. I talked to a city official in Houston who told me that they’re considering moving a lot of their construction projects to nighttime. That’s a huge change that would have huge economic and other kinds of implications for the city. But they simply feel the risk to outdoor workers is too high. The question is: What kind of risk tolerance are we going to put up with? What kind of protections are we going to put in place? Is an individual employer going to tolerate 10 guys every summer dying from heat stroke on the job, and just think that’s the cost of doing business? Are governments going to allow that? Here in Texas, Ghsovernor Abbot—in the midst of the worst of the heat wave—passed legislation forbidding any Texas city or county from passing any laws requiring shade and water breaks for workers. That’s the exact opposite of what you’d do if you wanted to be thoughtful and concerned about the welfare of workers. I wrote about Sebastian Perez, a farm worker who died in the 2021 heat wave in the Pacific Northwest because there were no worker protection laws at the time. He understood the risk of heat but he also understood that if he stopped and took breaks and tried to cool off and sit under a tree for ten minutes, he was likely to get fired. He didn’t want to get fired, so he had to choose between continuing to work and what he knew was a dangerous situation. He chose wrong and he ended up dead. 

“Figuring out a way to escape the tyranny of heat—there’s no magic cure other than that.” 

ANDERSON 

You talk in the book about some ideas for federal, state, and local policies that might protect construction workers from extreme heat. Can you talk about some of those policy ideas?  

GOODELL 

It’s not complicated. It’s not like we have to outfit outdoor workers with kryptonite cold spacesuits or something. It’s really simple: Requiring water and shade breaks. Having clear worker guidelines. If it’s 90 degrees and humid, every worker shall get a 20 minute break every hour and a half. Or something like that. Guaranteeing rights to cool spaces. Guaranteeing rights to water, so that no worker has to feel like they have to make the choice between their life and their job. There doesn’t need to be a lot of innovation really. For workers, it’s really about how to require these kinds of simple protections—of water, and shade breaks, and access to cooling spaces. It goes to these fundamental questions of worker rights and the role of government. OSHA has been working on a federal heat standard for eight or nine years. That just shows you how politically charged this is. Companies push hard against it because they think it’ll cut down their productivity. They don’t want this kind of responsibility for their workers. 

ANDERSON 

Short of policy changes, what’s your advice to construction and other outdoor workers? What actions and everyday practices do you think they should adopt to protect themselves from extreme heat within their workplaces? 

GOODELL 

Heat is dangerous for one reason: Your body temperature rises too high and your body can’t handle it. As your body temperature rises, your heart starts pounding faster, putting a lot of stress on your circulatory system. A lot of people who die of heat stroke die first of a heart attack or some other sort of circulatory problem. So the first thing I would say for workers is to know the risks. Understand heat. Understand the signs of heat exhaustion and heat stroke. Understand what particular vulnerabilities you may have. Do you have a heart condition? Are you taking certain drugs like beta blockers that make you more vulnerable to heat? Older workers in general tend to be more vulnerable than younger workers. Getting educated about it is first, and then you need to have access to cool spaces. When you’re working outdoors in the heat, you need to be able to get out of the heat for certain periods of the day. There’s a very clear link between exercise in heat and overheating. As everyone knows, if you’re standing outside on a hot day, it’s very different than digging a ditch or running a mile. Your body is building up additional heat, so you have to take breaks to get into cool spaces. And you have to do that early, before your body temperature begins to rise too high. Because the higher it gets, the harder it is to cool off. So heat management, whatever that means. If you’re working on a roof, get off the roof into an indoor space for 10 or 15 minutes every hour and a half. Figuring out a way to escape the tyranny of heat—there’s no magic cure other than that.  

“I call air conditioning the technology of forgetting. We’ve forgotten that we know how to build cool spaces without having to use air conditioning.”

ANDERSON 

You’ve mentioned air conditioning and how it isn’t really a solution for people who work outside. In your book, you talk about cooling strategies from nature, like the ventilated architecture of termite mounds. Whether in nature or other human cultures, what are the alternatives to air conditioning that you find most intriguing? 

GOODELL 

Air conditioning has been wonderful and awful. One of the things it’s done is make building construction dependent upon it. In the 15th Century in Iran, they used to know how to build buildings in one of the hottest places on the planet that would circulate air over underground ponds and through wind towers. They could make ice in Iran in the 15th Century! There’s a lot of ways of constructing buildings that use breezes, shade, and natural ventilation. There’s a reason why houses in hot places—think Mexico, Greece, and Italy—traditionally have thick walls and were painted white. Because they insulated much better and reflected away the heat. So there’s all kinds of ways to build cooler structures without air conditioning. But air conditioning has made us forget all of that. It’s much cheaper to throw up a thin-walled building with windows that basically don’t open. I think we’ve all been stuck in hotels and other types of buildings where there’s no air ventilation except the air conditioning. These buildings are cheaper to build and we’ve become dependent on them. I call air conditioning the technology of forgetting. We’ve forgotten that we know how to build cool spaces without having to use air conditioning. You see it here in Texas—they call them dogtrot houses, where they have these big breezeways in between, and transoms that open to let the heat out of the ceiling. I hope that we get back to a lot of that. 

ANDERSON 

In the book you talk about the Goldilocks Zone, the period of global climate stability in which human civilization was built. Cities, where the majority of humans now live, are particularly vulnerable to a world outside the Goldilocks Zone. You write, “Cities on the coast have to adapt to rising seas. Cities in mountains have to adapt to raging rivers. And cities everywhere have to adapt to rising heat. It is the great urban engineering project of our time—making a city that was not designed for extreme heat into a city that is livable in extreme heat.” What troubles and excites you most about how cities will have to adapt and change on the edge of the Goldilocks Zone? 

GOODELL 

Cities are 15 to 20 degrees hotter than surrounding areas. In Austin where I live, or Phoenix or many other cities in the Sun Belt, as temperatures start to rise, they become uninhabitable. You don’t want to go outside during the day. It’s just too hot. Cities are going to have to change how they’re built in order to make them habitable again. And that means thinking differently about vehicles in central urban areas. It’s going to mean putting a lot more nature back into cities, a lot more public green spaces that don’t absorb and radiate the heat so much. More emphasis on trees and shade. Not every bus stop has to be a convection oven. We can easily design downtown plazas that aren’t these giant football fields of concrete, that literally are cooking the people who walk across them. A lot of it is going back to a more traditional kind of urbanism, that isn’t asphalt, concrete, and vehicle dominated, but more nature and human scaled.  

“I feel still a real opportunity to build a better world. To use this crisis and some of the loss that will come with it to do things better. I remain weirdly optimistic.”   

ANDERSON 

I understand you were there in 2015 when world leaders signed the Climate Accord. How did you feel then and how do you feel now about climate change? 

GOODELL 

In what context? 

ANDERSON 

Where are you at on the optimism scale? 

GOODELL 

It’s a constant two-steps-forward, one-step-back kind of thing. The hope that I had in Paris in 2015 was that the nations of the world had finally come together to a common understanding of the risks of climate change, and were going to put their political shoulders to the wheel and work really hard to reduce emissions really quickly. That has not happened. A lot of the good feeling and good vibes that people felt in Paris has completely dissipated. So in that sense, it’s been very disappointing. But on the other hand, a lot of other things have happened that are really galvanizing. For one thing, the economics of clean energy have changed in the eight years since Paris in such a big way. Clean energy is cheaper in every part of the world than fossil fuel energy is. Here in Texas during this heat wave, 30% of the grid has been powered by solar energy. Which is amazing. So there’s been a lot of progress towards renewables. I think there’s a lot of rising political action and awareness. When I started writing about climate change 20 years ago, I wrote about the sex lives of porcupines. And nobody cared. It was like some weird sideline thing I was oddly fascinated with. And now, it’s everywhere I go. Where should I move? How hot is it going to get? Who should I invest in? Is this a good company?  Are we still going to be eating hamburgers in 10 years? It’s just part of every conversation now. And I think that’s really hopeful. Connected with that, there’s a lot of opportunity for profound change in how we live our lives, where we get our energy, where we get our food, how we build our buildings, how we build our cities. I think everything is up for grabs right now. So my optimism comes from the idea of people getting smarter and smarter about this, seeing more and more opportunity for change. The world we’ve built is not a perfect place. Every time I drive by a strip mall in Texas, I’m like “oh my god, we can do a lot better than this.” I feel still a real opportunity to build a better world. To use this crisis and some of the loss that will come with it to do things better. I remain weirdly optimistic.   

ANDERSON 

What is the one takeaway you’d like people to have from your book? 

GOODELL 

The one takeaway is that our climate is changing fast and we’d better get smart about it. And you’d better get smart about it if you want to survive. If you want to thrive and live a happy prosperous life in the 21st Century, you have to get smart about climate change. You have to understand the risks. You have to understand the dangers and the opportunities. Because it’s not a far-off thing. It is here now and happening very fast around us in real time. There already is a big separation between the smart and the stupid, whether you’re poor or wealthy. I think the most important thing to do right now is to get smart about it, whatever you’re particular interest or angle is. Whether it’s worker safety, investing, food supply, or whatever. The dangers and opportunities right now are just so huge. So I hope the immediacy of the book captures some of that for readers. That’s why I called it The Heat Will Kill You First. I wanted it to be about your life here and now. Not about some future generation. Not about what your children are going to think about. Not about the world they’re going to be living in. It’s about the world you and I are living in right now.  

ANDERSON 

Jeff, thank you again so much for taking the time to speak with me today. As we close out, what’s your next big project and where else can our readers find your work? 

GOODELL 

Oh, my next big project is, like…relaxing for a month or two. Getting a book out into the world is in some ways as hard as writing it. I have a couple other ideas for a next book. It’ll certainly be continuing on these themes, but I don’t know what exactly yet. As for my writing, I continue to do a lot for Rolling Stone. I think I’m going to back off on that a little bit and just work hard on trying to getting the next book out. 

ANDERSON 

I imagine it must be exhausting to be a sort of climate guru, with people coming at you with all these big questions all the time. So a break is probably very well deserved. 

GOODELL 

It’s really great. I’m really grateful for all the attention and success this book has had. It’s far beyond what my publisher or I anticipated. It’s become a great opportunity to talk and connect with people. That’s why a writer does work like this. It’s not to get rich or anything, it’s to write about something you care about. So I’m really happy for this exhaustion I feel.