Grand Canyon Times

Arizona’s recent hiring of a Chief Heat Officer to warn people about dangerous heat is “a waste of scarce resources,” H. Sterling Burnett, the Heartland Institute’s Director of Climate and Environmental Policy, said in summing up a discussion about climate change on the Grand Canyon Times Podcast with host Leyla Gulen. 

“Greenspaces, help for the poor struggling to pay their power bills, and shelters for the homeless and indigent when temperatures soar or plummet would be of far more help to Phoenix's residents than an officer warning people on hot days ‘it’s hot outside,’” said Burnett.  

In March, the Arizona Department of Health Services hired Dr. Eugene Livar under Gov. Katie Hobbs’ newly initiated Extreme Heat Preparedness Plan.

Livar, the Department said on its website, would “oversee the implementation of the plan and work to coordinate partnerships between the state, county health departments, local municipalities, communities, the private sector, and community-based organizations.”

Grand Canyon Times requested information from the Department about Livar's salary and whether he would be hiring additional staff. The Department said it was working on a response to the inquiry.  

“Building up another bureaucratic fiefdom with the city government will do nothing to help the homeless, addicts, and the elderly poor keep cool during the summer or warm in the winter,” said Burnett. “There is no evidence Phoenix's climate is changing due to the use of fossil fuels, although it is heating up in response to the growth in population, density, and development driving the urban heat island effect.”

For an earlier story, Steve Cortes, president of League of American Workers, told Grand Canyon Times that the "extreme heat emergency" being led by Phoenix-area politicians is actually "a massive homeless problem and a drug crisis" caused by illegal immigration during the Biden Administration.

“Supposedly expert public health officials in Maricopa actually pretend that these preventable deaths result from Arizona heat?" said Cortes. "Every sensible citizen knows there is a massive homeless problem and a drug crisis that’s fueled by proximity to Biden’s open border.”

“These politicized comments from public health officials only accelerate the collapse in public trust since the abuses of Dr. Fauci and other health officials during the COVID panic,” he said.

During the podcast, Burnett cited a recent University of Alabama study by Dr. Roy Spencer that showed “that [population] density is highly correlated to the urban heat island effect, which is highly correlated to health impacts on heat."

He also echoed recent comments by Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore—comments that shocked environmentalists—that CO2 emitted by humans is actually beneficial.

“Climate changes. It has always changed,” Burnett said. “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, are largely driven by the urban heat island effect.”

Burnett said that politicians are trying to redesign a power system that was created by engineers.

“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,” he said. “They're not engineers. They don't know anything about the power system, and they want more and more things electrified.”