Grand Canyon Times

H. Sterling Burnett, director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy, joins the Grand Canyon Times Podcast to discuss the creation of "chief heat officers" within the State of Arizona government and Phoenix city government, the agenda behind those positions, and the way in which "heat related" deaths are reported within Arizona.

Dr. Burnett is also the managing editor of The Heartland Institute's Environment & Climate News and previously worked at the National Center for Policy Analysis for 18 years.

This episode can be found on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.

Full, unedited transcript of this episode:

[00:00:00] Leyla Gulen: Welcome to the Grand Canyon Times podcast. I'm your host, Leyla Gulen. In this episode, we welcome our guest, Dr. Sterling Burnett. Dr. Burnett is the director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy. He is also managing editor of Environment and Climate News. Dr. Burnett has 30 years of experience in professional and public policy, including serving as a member.

of the Environment and Natural Resources Task Force and the Texas Comptroller's E Texas Commission. Dr. Burnett, welcome. Thanks for having me. Great to have you with us. And I believe it was in Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, and I quote, if you cannot think of anything appropriate to say, you will restrict remarks to the weather.

That's what we're going to do today, right? But I think in this case, our remarks might sting a little bit. Dr. Burnett, what's your take on the current state of affairs weather wise? Thank you

[00:00:57] Dr. Burnett: Well, weather is, as weather has always been, chaotic. We get, I'm in Texas, for your audience that doesn't know, in North Texas, and we got hit pretty hard recently with weather.

A lot of branches down in my yard, a lot of my neighbors have it worse than that. Power's been an issue. And that's not unusual in spring in Texas, it's, it's weather, they predict rain one day and we don't get it. And then we get it the next day. So what we are seeing across the country, both with severe storms, tornadoes.

We have something called a tornado season, and that's because tornadoes come pretty regularly during certain times of the year. We have hurricane seasons because hurricanes come pretty regularly during certain times of the year. You can expect wildfires at certain times of the year. The thing is, if you look at long term trends, a lot of people want to say every tornado that comes through or every straight line wind that comes through, large hail, Oh, it's climate change.

Climate change is doing this as if weather didn't exist. Before they started talking about climate change and as if trends were showing some kind of change. And in fact, trends aren't showing any kind of change. Hurricanes aren't increasing in number or severity, strength. Tornadoes aren't increasing in number or severity.

In fact, we've had a large lull in the number of the most powerful hurricanes of nearly 20 years now. Class 5 wildfires seen more frequent because they're covered more on the news But it turns out if you look at the satellite data from both Europe and the US wildfire Globally are down dramatically about 25 percent over the last 20 years That's not what you get from the news headlines because news headlines sell based on alarm.

But if you looked at the underlying data, long term data, you don't see climate change making weather worse.

[00:02:47] Leyla Gulen: Now, I'm curious as to how much you and your colleagues agree and disagree on the current state of our weather and our forward track. But before we get to that, Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs, she's taking things a step further by announcing in March, the state's first extreme heat Preparedness plan in hiring what could be not just the nation's, but the world's first chief heat officer, Dr.

Eugene LaVar, uh, Dr. Burnett, can you just offer us what your first thoughts are on this announcement and what do you know about Dr. LaVar?

[00:03:22] Dr. Burnett: But I don't know anything about Dr. LaVar, and I'd be interested to know what his salary is, but I guess it's a nice gig if you can get it. The heat index is gonna only be a problem for a few months of the year.

My suspicion is that money that's devoted to that office would be better spent on more directly intervening in problematic heat areas. So, look, Arizona, not just Arizona, But Phoenix, Maricopa County, Arizona as a whole, and the whole Southwest, Death Valley has recorded the largest, the hottest day in history since we've been recording.

Of course, that's not a very long history, but it was recorded in Death Valley. That region of the country is hot. It's naturally arid. It's a desert. And yet more and more people move there as we modify the environment. And so when your population doubles, grows 2 percent a year for a long period of time, you have more people exposed to the extreme heat that's already natural in that area.

It turns out that if you look at, the reason they did this is because deaths related to heat have spiked there. Yeah, I definitely want to talk about that too. Yeah. And you have to ask yourself, well, does that mean it's suddenly Much more dangerous in Arizona. Why weren't people dying before? Well, there, A, there were fewer people there.

B, there were fewer particularly Vulnerable. Yeah, what do you classify as vulnerable? Well, it turns out if you look at the statistics, more than half of the people who died of heat related illness in the last summer were drug abusers. Fentanyl accounted for more than half of that. So, in my experience, drug abusers, chronic drug users, aren't the healthiest people to start with.

A large percentage of the people affected already were older and had cardiopulmonary diseases. And they had moved, retirees moved to Arizona from colder places. So now they're being exposed to heat they've never been exposed to. Then it turns out, if you look at the statistics, a large percent of the people who died due to heat related illnesses or medical complications were homeless.

So, you've got a population, you've got a sub segment of the population who is vulnerable to extreme weather, who are not, in health studies show, the not the healthiest population in Arizona, who have other complicating factors, and then they die during some hot days, and they want to blame it on climate change.

And the fact is, Uh, the truth is, Phoenix has seen a rise in temperatures, seen a pretty dramatic rise in temperature. So it's hotter there, and, and there are more people there exposed to the heat. The question is the heat from global warming, climate change, and it turns out it's not. It's called the urban heat island effect, which means If you go to inner cities, if you go to cities, you find they're hotter than the surrounding countryside.

And it's like, well, why would that be? Well, it's because of the concrete. It's because you build a lot of concrete, you have a lot of air conditioning that vents hot air. You have a lot of population. You have a lot of metal. All of these things, absorb heat during the day and then slowly release it at night.

So you go 20 miles outside of Phoenix into the desert there. The nighttime temperatures could be 10 or 15 degrees cooler than the temperatures in the city. Only slowly releasing that heat. The daytime temperatures, however, would also be cooler than in the city. So, you have a vulnerable population exposed to the urban heat island effect of Phoenix, which is one of the, which, Maricopa County is one of the fastest growing counties in the United States, so it's seen the most growth.

And Dr. Roy Spencer and some of his People at the University of Alabama Huntsville, they've looked at the data and they show that density is highly correlated to the urban heat island effect, which is highly correlated to health impacts on heat. Now, what you can't do is extrapolate from Phoenix's unique situation.

Worldwide, which you should be able to do globally, if it's a global climate change. It turns out that worldwide, cold kills far more people than heat every year. Far more, 10 to 17 times more. And that's true for warm countries and cool countries. And the reason is, in most warm countries, people have acclimated to heat.

Uh, but they're really caught off guard when it's cold. People go out and have to shovel snow. Well, people who aren't in shape that are shoveling snow, they have heart attacks every year. So,

[00:08:30] Leyla Gulen: we're not talking about hypothermia, we're talking about,

[00:08:32] Dr. Burnett: there are a lot of people who die from hypothermia and exposure and frostbite, but no, it's, it's just like we're not talking about heat directly in Phoenix.

We're talking about health events related to, or in response to, frostbite. What's going on with the temperatures?

[00:08:50] Leyla Gulen: And I've got a question about that, but I just wanted to point out that the Phoenix reporter did a story that showed nearly seven in 10 heat related deaths reported by Maricopa County's Department of Public Health in 2023 did involve drugs and or alcohol.

So you say that is also compounded by the rate of homelessness and other issues. Well, you've got,

[00:09:12] Dr. Burnett: you've got a large Uh, illegal immigrant population, and, uh, they're bringing in, not every one of them, but, you know, some of those people are traffickers bringing fentanyl, fentanyl is implicated in a lot of these deaths.

But what is true of the immigrant population is that, um, they take social services, either short term when people are, when the county It's housing immigrants and longer term when their kids are going to school. So the question is, what money could have been devoted to the homeless population there to get them either off the streets or to make sure during instances of extreme heat, you have places for them to shelter.

You make sure they have plenty of water. Maybe get them some help, drug counseling, get them off some drugs, so that they're less likely to be homeless and to have sort of pre existing health conditions related to their drug use. It's a complex problem. You wouldn't know that from the headlines. The headlines are, Oh, we got a heat officer because climate change is changing, is making it hotter in Phoenix.

Sounds very simple, except it's not simple. It's a complex phenomenon due to a variety of causes and climate change isn't prominent among them. But that is the one that gets the headlines. So let me

[00:10:38] Leyla Gulen: ask you this. Why are we hearing so much about heat and not as much about the cold? And what you referenced earlier, as far as the number of deaths due to cold being so much higher than deaths due to heat.

[00:10:52] Dr. Burnett: It's, well, because no one ties cold to global warming.

It's political. It's political. To be fair, in Phoenix, You're not going to have as many cold weather related deaths, but I did look it up and they've had, and they have, they have hundreds due to exposure. Most of them, once again, the same subpopulation that's exposed to heat when you're homeless and it goes down to freezing.

You don't do well. Uh, when you're on drugs and it goes down to freezing and you're homeless, you don't do well. So Phoenix does have those deaths, but just not as much because it's, it's A, it's got a big urban edelman effect and it's an arid part. But Phoenix, like I said, is not a microcosm of the world.

And the world, more people die from cold because our bodies are not acclimated as much to extreme cold. And as the earth has modestly warmed, it turns out cold related deaths are falling dramatically, and heat related deaths are only going up a little bit. So, fewer people now than ever before in history, are dying from complications related to temperatures.

[00:12:03] Leyla Gulen: Now, if I were to play devil's advocate here, global warming is not just tied to Phoenix's heat index, but we're also talking about rising sea levels, the melting of the polar ice caps and things like that. So, so how does that all tie into the conversation that Arizona is having and the governor's move to create this heat preparedness plan, which I want to Talk more about as well.

But how does that all work its way together? Or is this just the evolution of the planet, regardless of human impact?

[00:12:39] Dr. Burnett: Well, there's a band I like called Tool. And they wrote a song about, the song's not titled Arizona Bay, but the only instance in which Arizona would have to worry about sea level rise is if California falls into the sea from earthquakes.

And then you might have some nice beachfront property. So sea level rise is an impact that Arizonans have to worry about. And in fact, seas aren't rising at a historically unusual rate, they've risen about 450 feet since, which is a lot, don't get me wrong, that's a lot, 450 feet, since the end of the last ice age about 12, 000 years ago.

They're rising now about a foot a century. We've handled more than a foot a century around the world for a long time. Ask the Netherlands, which have been dealing with it for a long time.

[00:13:25] Leyla Gulen: In fact, the Dutch have even been, Dutch engineers have been called to places like Charleston, South Carolina to figure out how to mitigate Flooding there as well.

Yeah.

[00:13:33] Dr. Burnett: Yeah, they've got a little experience there. Right? So this has been going on a long time It turns out the rates of rise right now are not historically high or unusual They've risen at rates that are far faster for long periods of time and at rates that are modestly slower For some periods of time, but that's not the ice caps you hear about the melting It turns out they're not.

The Arctic has largely stabilized. We've reached some highs in the middle of the century, and as you may, you're probably not old enough, but you know, when I was young, they were talking about global cooling and the next ice age was coming. And at that time, the Arctic ice was expanding. Now, in the early 2000s, the Arctic ice started to fall off, and oh, clear sign of global warming, clear sign, no, it's, look, Arctic ice waxes and wanes, but right now it's stabilized for about 7 to 12 years.

In Antarctica, the West Antarctic ice shelf is declining, and yet you've got subsurface volcanic activity under the ice sheet there that is warming it from below and causing melting, which is causing the ice to slide into the sea. But it turns out Antarctica as a whole. Hasn't warmed and actually may be net adding ice.

Who says that? Not Sterling Burnett or the Heartland Institute, NASA. They've measured it. Whereas West Antarctica, one small part of the continent and the Antarctic Peninsula are losing ice, Central and Eastern Antarctica, which makes it the bulk of the continent, are gaining ice. So is it contributing to sea level rise on balance?

Maybe, but probably not. Probably not. So you can look at, Phoenix isn't going to be affected by hurricanes. We sometimes get some winds from hurricanes. We do get tornadoes. The point is, if you look at data, as opposed to media hype, as opposed to glomming on to the most recent weather, extreme weather event, long term data doesn't show that most of these extreme weather events are becoming more frequent.

Or, when they occur, more powerful or stronger. So, it's not clear, Phoenix probably has to worry about heat, Phoenix probably has to worry about drought. Honestly, Phoenix has become a resort community, a resort destination, a retirement destination, a lot of golf courses. Historically, that is not the place I would have thought to design golf courses.

In a desert. So they're having to drain the grass. Yeah. Yeah. So you've got to, you've got to drain the Colorado river and drain the aquifers to water these golf courses and to make sure these burgeoning communities have drinking water.

[00:16:18] Leyla Gulen: Here's a thought. And then they want to blame it on climate change.

It's like, here's, here's a thought since everybody in that region between Arizona, Nevada, California has to have a rock garden. Why don't we make a golf course made of rocks? And we don't have to worry about it.

[00:16:34] Dr. Burnett: Well, you're not watering rocks. You don't have to convince me. I'm not a golfer, but yeah, , neither am I.

If you can, I have a feeling that people who golf don't want rocks on the greens that where they putt, but I could be wrong about that.

[00:16:48] Leyla Gulen: We'll have to come up with the new sport. Maybe let's go back to the extreme heat preparedness plan. The plan also identifies the historically unequal allocation of federal low income Home Energy assistant program.

dollars to the state. Governor Hobbs has addressed a letter to the Arizona congressional delegation requesting action on this issue to support low income families. So I'm curious, what do you take from this plan? What do you glean from, I suppose, the long term intent? Of this plan, is it truly to mitigate heat and heat related deaths, or is there a broader purpose?

[00:17:35] Dr. Burnett: It is to rake in as much federal dollars as possible for the city to spend, how it will ultimately spend it to say that low income communities. Miss out on low in dollars devoted to low income communities is ridiculous. They are not giving Weatherization the federal government is not paying for the weatherization of rich people's homes that there are there are income limitations Could more people benefit from federal programs probably I'm not in favor by the way of federal programs I don't think the government should be I don't see why people in Dallas have to fund Weatherization in Phoenix any more than I see why people in Phoenix have to the tornado damage in Dallas.

I think we should buy our insurance, pay for our own repairs. Uh, but, the point is, these dollars are out there, and when federal dollars are out there, everyone says, oh, this is bad, y'all are treating the poor bad, we need this money for the poor, and it's often not used for the poor, it's used to hire chief heat officers at high, it's used for, bureaucracies waste a lot of these dollars.

Some of it may trickle down to the intended audience. Others will be spent on, uh, infrastructure. Which may or may not benefit people vis a vis the heat problems there. If you really want to benefit people, maybe don't encourage them to move to a desert and encourage overuse of water there. Uh, maybe develop better water infrastructure so you're recycling and reusing your water.

I know part of the plans had to do with having stations set up so people can come in and get water and remain cool during the heat. And that's a noble, good, good way. I mean, that might help people who are homeless and drug, and on drugs. But remember, they're already unhealthy. And they will leave those shelters, those areas, and be back on the streets.

And so the question is, long term, do we patch it for a day, or do we solve the problem long term? And if we were to cut greenhouse gas emissions, it would do nothing to help the homeless who are on drugs, who are living on the streets during extreme weather.

[00:19:48] Leyla Gulen: Your battery operated Tesla is not going to rehabilitate a drug abuser, is what you're saying.

[00:19:55] Dr. Burnett: Well, and worse than that, look. So, the Biden administration is pushing to electrify everything. Everyone's supposed to be an electric car by 2032, about 66%, they say. We don't want gas appliances, we want electric appliances. At the same time, they're undermining the electric power grid by making it more and more reliant on wind and solar power, which is, of design, intermittent.

I'm sorry. The wind doesn't always blow. And in Phoenix, by the way, it doesn't blow a lot. You get a lot of sun, but we have this thing called night that occurs even there in Arizona, when it's not producing power, and you have clouds, and you have dust storms, which cover the panels. In Texas, we get hail storms that smash the panels.

The point is, our power system was designed at one time by engineers, with the idea of reliability and relatively inexpensive power in mind. And now it's being redesigned by politicians to fight climate change that don't know anything about climate change. They're not engineers. They don't know anything about the power system, and they want more and more things electrified.

So what happens? You get California. Every year, California leads in electric vehicles, and every year during the middle of summer, it's not rare, it's every year they have blackouts and brownouts, during which time the governor comes out and says, oh, and by the way, don't charge your electric vehicles. It's

[00:21:29] Leyla Gulen: like you don't know if you're coming or going in that state.

But I got to say this, as far as up till 2022, Arizona had six utility scale wind farms that provided less than 2 percent of the state's total electricity generation.

[00:21:46] Dr. Burnett: We have wind farms. We're I think Texas is now the largest wind producer in the nation. And they built the wind farms. You have to build wind farms where, to some extent, where it makes sense.

So where the wind blows, fairly constantly. That, unfortunately for migratory birds, happens to be in migration routes. But, so we built most of these wind farms in north and west Texas, a few down near the coast. Oklahoma. Oh yeah, Oklahoma's got them, though the tribes are ripping them out in some places there.

And what happens is, it turns out that they don't need the power in West Texas. They need the power in Dallas and Houston and Austin. So you got to string hundreds and hundreds of miles of new wire, which then get damaged in storms. And it turns out that during peak summer, the wind doesn't blow very well in West Texas.

So you get a lot of wind during the fall and the spring. And it looks like, Ooh, wind power is doing great guns or solar power is doing great guns. And then the wind stops and we don't have sufficient power to keep the lights on because we've closed the traditional power plants that weren't weather dependent.

[00:22:58] Leyla Gulen: Just to show how timely what we're talking about is, the story just came across my desk from Bloomberg, an opinion piece by Mark Gongloff, he's a columnist, and the headline reads, Phoenix is facing a Hurricane Katrina of heat, and that it's not alone. And, It talks about a book called The Heat Will Kill You First by Jeff Goodell.

So, The Heat Will Kill You First, I mean, it sounds very ominous. It sounds very imminent as well. But you're here to say that's not true. Would you read this book? It's highly

[00:23:37] Dr. Burnett: unlikely that I will read that book. Look, I look at The Lancet. And the guys, the title of the book, I don't know what's first in relation to, but what the Lancet huge research studies show, multiple ones, covering hundreds of countries, dozens of countries, hundreds and thousands of cities, hundreds of thousands of people, and death notices, Show that it's not the heat that will kill you first.

It's the cold that will kill you first. In other countries, It's not the heat that kills you. It's lack of food and energy poverty, where they're being denied access to the fossil fuels that have made us, our lives, so much better. Lack of shelter will kill you first. The number one killer is around the globe is poverty.

Poverty will kill you first. And you know how you get out of poverty? You use fossil fuels to make your society better, more resilient, more adaptable to the, in the face of climate change, whatever direction and whatever type of event it causes. The difference between what happens in Louisiana or Houston or Texas when a hurricane hits and what happens when it hits in Malaysia or Indonesia.

It's not wind speeds, it's not rainfall amounts, it is infrastructure and wealth. Hundreds of thousands die there, dozens to, in New Orleans, due to poor management of their system, a couple of thousand die there. But it wasn't because the hurricane was so much more severe. It was because they're poor and they don't have the infrastructure.

They don't have, they're not able to adapt, respond, and predict these events like we can through our use of modern technologies, which are actively denying them.

[00:25:39] Leyla Gulen: Now, we have heard that obviously this plan is going to cost money. With that being said, money. According to this article that I'm just kind of gleaning some information as we're in real time here, money is tight.

And so Politico noted that the city's heat response depends on COVID relief funding that will expire in 2026. So, so they're talking about planting more trees and they're talking about tweaking urban design. So do you, do you foresee that they're actually going to be investing money in altering the urban landscape, or do you think this money is going to sit in the coffers and then get used for other things?

[00:26:23] Dr. Burnett: Well, some of it probably will be used for urban landscape design. Creating more green space is pretty smart. Planting trees, not a bad idea, but how much of it, who knows? Rather, how many trees could they plant for what they're paying a chief heat officer? Right. How many, how many, how much green space could they sod and, uh, maintain watering?

So, and, as you say, the money doesn't, it doesn't fall like man from heaven. It's coming from somewhere and it's going to dry up, especially, I think it's funny what you said. Oh, this money comes from COVID relief, hold it, COVID, I'm sorry, COVID relief funds, the perils of live broadcasting, um, was a disease.

What does it have to do with funding for heat relief in Phoenix? It has nothing to do with it. They're using dollars that were intended for other things for something else. And my suspicion is that dollars from the laughingly called Inflation Reduction Act, More spending doesn't reduce inflation, folks.

It causes it contributes to it that many of the dollars devoted to climate things there will also go to other things that

[00:27:43] Leyla Gulen: yeah, well, it says that whether the weather is back in Texas, right? Well, they say that some on the city council aren't sold on using tax dollars to help the unhoused and particularly those with substance abuse problems.

I'm quoting there. So it doesn't sound like everybody in. Phoenix nor Arizona is completely sold on the idea, but between you and your colleagues across the board, how much of this do you agree or disagree with one another on what's happening in our climate and planetary evolution?

[00:28:21] Dr. Burnett: Well, I guess I'm not sure what you're saying.

Climate changes. It has always changed. It's changing now. Currently, the CO2 added to the atmosphere is benefiting us. It's producing crops at record yields. It's greening the earth. It's not having a negative impact on extreme weather. Most of the hotspots, extreme heat measurements that you get in recent years, as in Phoenix just last year, multiple days of over a hundred temperatures, um, are largely driven by the urban heat island effect.

We believe at Heartland that the best policy in the face of climate change is resilience and adaptation. And government policies, Aren't very flexible government mandates, telling people while the elites fly private jets to win awards for their climate work, telling average folks, they can't fly telling average folks, they can't have the car of their choice while the elites have multiple cars.

Hey, that's hypocritical and tells me they really don't think the climate is in that much danger. If you're an ex president and you warn the world of sea level rise. And when you. leave the presidency, you buy a house on the ocean where sea levels are supposedly rising. That tells me you really aren't that worried about sea level rise, or you're over insured, but that you weren't concerned that seas were going to swamp your house as you said it would, uh, concerning other people.

In the end, Wealth matters. And the more, the faster we can grow our economy, make people wealthier, build better infrastructure, get people off the streets and off of drugs, the fewer deaths we're going to have from extreme heat or extreme cold, regardless of which predominates in a certain area. And that's true in developing countries as well.

The sooner we, they have adequate food and they no longer face malaria because they get the kinds of Fixes that we used here in the U. S., people don't realize. Western Europe and the U. S. used to have malaria endemic. How do we wipe it out? Well, particular pesticides that we used a lot. Getting those kinds of fixes to those people helps them become wealthier, healthier, and better able to survive extreme weather events, whatever their cause.

[00:30:52] Leyla Gulen: Indeed. Dr. Sterling Burnett, in addition to his weekly publications, you can catch him hosting the Environment and Climate News Podcast. How do people find you?

[00:31:02] Dr. Burnett: Well, I'm not good for good or for bad. I'm not a hard man to find. www. heartland. org HSBurnett at heartland. org is my email. You can get my Climate Change Weekly publication.

You can go somewhere for climate realism and see our daily rebuking of false news stories on climate. You can go if you really want some good educational material for yourself or the young people in your lives. We have a series called Climate at a Glance. Which is short one page, two page articles on different topics and we have a whole video series based on those now on YouTube.

So, I encourage you to check it out. I think you'll find out a lot and hopefully after reading this and checking the sources, because by the way, as I had mentioned earlier, this is the Sterling Burnett thing. This is what data shows. We reference all our stuff. After reading that, I hope, That your audience will come away feeling a little bit more secure and a little bit more optimistic.

[00:32:03] Leyla Gulen: Indeed, Dr. Burnett. Thank you so much for joining us. It's been a pleasure. Thanks for having me on. Take care