Bad Takes: Worker deaths show that climate change is real and demands immediate action

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Jaime Monzon

Southwest Workers' Union members and others attend a climate rally in downtown San Antonio.

Editor's Note: Bad Takes is a column of opinion and analysis.

In another sign of the climatepocalypse already upon us, sellers on Amazon and eBay are charging $100 for two 17-ounce bottles of Srirarcha, the beloved Huy Fong sauce made from chili peppers sourced in Mexico and California.

The company blames drought-related crop failures, and according to a study published last year in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Climate Change, northern Mexico and the Southwestern United States just experienced the driest two decades in over a millennium.

"The turn-of-the-twenty-first-century drought would not be on a megadrought trajectory in terms of severity or duration without anthropogenic climate change," the researchers wrote. "In fact, it would not even be classified as a single extended drought event."

And then we might be able to afford Srirarcha again, the study authors should have added.

Of course, our rapidly warming planet also brings other more serious concerns. Last summer, San Antonio construction worker Gabriel Infante, just 24, collapsed of heat stroke on a non-union job while burying fiber optic cable during sweltering conditions. When he arrived at the hospital, his core body temperature was 110 degrees. He died the following day.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration slapped his employer, B Comm Constructors with a $13,000 fine, and last month, his mother sued the firm for gross negligence, seeking $1 million in damages.

Regardless of the outcome of that case, our system seems incapable of preventing similar tragedies.

During triple-digit heat waves in June, Gov. Greg Abbott signed a law that will nullify local ordinances that would mandate 10-minute water breaks for outdoor laborers. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, at least 42 outdoor Texas workers died between 2011 and 2021 from environmental heat exposure. That number likely represents an undercount since it doesn't include heart attacks.

More than just workers, upwards of 20,000 adult deaths in the U.S. from 2008 to 2017, were linked to extreme heat, and about half of those were due to heart disease, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association. Study leader Dr. Sameed Khatana, a staff cardiologist at the Philadelphia VA Medical Center and assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine, who led the study, told the Associated Press heat may amount to a silent killer.

"Hurricanes, flooding and wildfires are very dramatic," Katana said. "Heat is harder to see and especially affects people who are socially isolated and living on the margins."

This summer, 11 people around Laredo perished over a 10-day stretch of 115-degree heat, according to Webb County's medical examiner. On July 4, according to the chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the world likely hit its hottest day in recorded human history.

Yet San Antonio's District 10 Councilman Marc Whyte, a self-declared "common sense conservative," parroted the corporate line of the National Federation of Independent Businesses and openly cheered Abbott's signing of HB 2127, the bill that banned municipally bestowed water breaks.

"It's simply not the job of a local governmental entity to tell employers what kind of benefits must be offered or what an employee's schedule should look like," he wrote in the Express-News. "Unfortunately, some Texas municipalities are addicted to power ... . There is a rich irony to elected officials around our state who oppose HB 2127 because they don't want the Legislature telling them what they can and cannot do, yet they want to wield similar authority over businesses."

If climatologists such as Columbia University Professor James Hansen who worry that climate change could result in a rapid doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide are right, mottled regulations will be the least of our concerns.

"A human body cannot survive in an environment with a 'wet-bulb temperature' (the temperature with 100 percent humidity) at 95°F or above for more than a few hours without suffering from metabolic failure," economist Minqi Li wrote in 2020, summarizing the available literature. "For people who have to do outside work exposed to the sun, the practical tolerance limit is likely to be significantly lower. Currently about 60% of the world population lives in areas where the annual maximum wet-bulb temperature is 79°F or above and the highest instantaneous wet-bulb temperature anywhere on earth is about 86°F. Global warming by more than 10.8 degrees Fahrenheit would turn a part of the earth surface literally unsuitable for human inhabitation and impose hitherto unknown heat stress on more than one half of the world population."

Sounds like a compelling argument for holding carbon emissions to net zero by 2050. But the GOP-dominated Texas Legislature this session declared war on the "woke" renewables that are saving our grid from blackouts during summer heat waves. Even purported progressive San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg went back on his word and approved of CPS Energy operating one of its fossil-fuel plants for decades longer than his own climate advisory board recommended. 

No one organized a march on behalf of dead San Antonio worker Gabriel Infante. His name made no national headlines. There was no summer of protest in his name.

The governor, the mayor and the business owner on whose watches he died will sleep as comfortably as such men usually do. Neither Davos billionaires nor oil tycoons flew in to pay their respects at his funeral.

Nevertheless, we're all sweating under the same sun.