Reporter Miriam Wasser brings a unique perspective to her work as a climate journalist: she used to be a reporter here in Phoenix, where we know a thing or two about heat.
These days, Wasser reports on environmental issues for WBUR in Boston, where she’s been covering the city’s ongoing efforts to be more livable in the summertime.
Wasser recently spoke with The Show’ about what Boston might be able to teach us here in Phoenix.
Among other things, she says, Boston started by making heat maps. Rather than thinking in terms of overall average temperature, they tried to figure out what life was like on the ground in various parts of the city.
Full conversation
MIRIAM WASSER: It was remarkable when these maps came back. I mean, there are areas of the city that were like 5 to 10 degrees hotter or cooler, depending on tree coverage. So once you really have a good handle on what the problem is and where the problem spots are, you can then go about figuring out how to combat them.
So in Boston, you know, we have a lot of trees in the city but they're not evenly distributed and it can be hard for urban street trees to survive. So the city is putting a lot of effort into building up the urban canopy and making sure it's distributed equitably around the city. There are pilot projects out there to see about, can we paint the roofs of buildings white?
SAM DINGMAN: Yeah. Well, I, I think this brings up a couple of really interesting things, one being things like, you know, lighter colored rooftops, more trees. These don't really strike me as super expensive solutions. I mean, I know they're not free, but it's not like we're talking about major technology.
We're talking about things that seem more oriented towards community investment and buy-in in terms of how our streets are going to look and whether or not people are willing to put in the effort to plant the trees and figure out how to keep them alive in an urban environment.
Have you found that that investment and buy-in from the community is as much of a challenge as the cost of these programs?
WASSER: I have never encountered anyone who says I don't want street trees. And it's remarkable that something as simple as trees can make such a huge difference, but it really does.
DINGMAN: But given the fact that, you know, as we're talking about, these are not super complicated solutions that seem to be able to have a measurable impact, why do you think we're not seeing trees just planted willy-nilly in in our respective cities or like massive roof painting initiatives being undertaken to mitigate this crushing heat right away.
What are the obstacles to the broader adoption of, of these things that we have seen be effective?
WASSER: Well, I think in general, anything that city government does or anything that any government at any level does often takes a long time, right? There's a lot of studies that need to be done. You want to make sure that you're doing it in a fiscally responsible way. I actually did a story a couple of years ago about street trees in Boston and a remarkable number of them died.
So you can go about and plant 100,000 trees, But if you don't have the personnel in your public works department who can go out and care for them and make sure that they're watered and that they're going to survive, they all die and that's just a huge waste of money.
How do you make sure that you're planting species that can withstand the coming effects of climate change? Because that's an issue too. A lot of plants that are, you know, native to certain areas can't thrive that well in, in a hotter climate. Certain trees don't do well with a lot of pollution. And so you want to make sure that the money and effort you're putting into a project is going to have the payout that you want.
DINGMAN: One of the other big questions here is development. Phoenix obviously has an exploding population. And a lot of the people who move here are moving into these big fancy new apartment buildings, which also brings more and more air conditioning. And the air conditioning obviously is a good immediate term solution when it's unbearably hot and you and you need to be inside.
But can you tell us at all about how more air conditioning which leads, of course, to more energy usage can perhaps be counterproductive over the long term.
WASSER: I think the concerns, those concerns are completely valid. But people that I talk to will say, as you said, we're not going to not install air conditioning. We're not gonna not save lives now because we're worried about the impact in the future. But I can't speak to how popular heat pumps are in Arizona.
But here in the northeast, there's a big, big push for heat pumps. And these are gadgets that run on electricity and provide both heating and cooling and they are much more efficient than fossil fuel heating sources and much more efficient than your traditional AC options too.
DINGMAN: Tell me more about these, these heat pumps. Is this like an individual unit someone would have in their home or is this something that could be implemented in an entire apartment building?
WASSER: It could be both. Yeah. So a heat pump is essentially you, you've seen heat pumps even if you don't know that you have, there are multiple kinds of heat pumps. One you might have encountered would be a mini split, which are those little like white boxes on the wall that do heating and cooling.
DINGMAN: Yes, you control it with like a remote control and the vents open.
WASSER: Mhm. Mhm. Actually, your refrigerator is a heat pump. So, heat pump technology is quite ubiquitous but using it to, to do home, whole home heating and cooling is something that is picking up a lot of momentum. So, yes, if you haven't heard of heat pumps, you probably will hear a lot more about them in the coming years.
DINGMAN: Another thing that I have noticed as a recent transplant here is how much hotter it feels at night.
WASSER: And it's super dangerous too. Here's the thing about night time heat, like I feel like when we talk about heat, we often think about the highest possible temperatures, which happened during the day, but it's actually the nighttime temperatures that are in some ways the most dangerous because nighttime is when your body is supposed to get a break from that heat.
It's when it sort of like resets itself and when it can't do that, the risks from extreme heat just compound over time.
And so like there are studies out there showing that like the longer the heat wave, the more risk you have. And we know that when it doesn't cool down at night, it just makes it more likely that your body is going to be strained from the heat.
DINGMAN: There's the physical risk that happens in the moment when your body temperature is elevated. But then over the long term, we know that there can be serious health implications to not getting enough sleep.
WASSER: That's another part of the hotter temperatures at night, for sure. In advance of this conversation. Actually, I looked up some of these statistics because I was curious, like, how much hotter are nights in Boston and Phoenix than they've historically been since 1970. On average summertime nights in Phoenix are 5.8 degrees warmer than they used to be. And in Boston it's on average 2.2 degrees warmer.
So, like anyone listening to this who thinks like, oh, back when I was a kid, it didn't get this hot overnight, like it really didn't. And that just, I think, illuminates like the change in nighttime temperature is more dramatic in a lot of ways than the change in daytime temperature.
But the lack of cooling down at night is in some ways the really big risk, and we know that that's a particular risk for people who don't have homes, right. So who are unhoused and live outside.
DINGMAN: So it seems like a, a word that comes up a lot in these conversations is resiliency, which in my mind is sort of an ominous word because it implies that that warming is inevitable and we, and we just have to be strong against it.
Is there a sense that this is ultimately like a losing battle and, and we just have to kind of have to do the best we can, or is the thought that these mitigation strategies could really keep cities livable long term?
WASSER: Oh, I think people really believe that these mitigation strategies will keep cities livable long term. One of the things that I think is really cool about a lot of climate solutions is that they're not just doing that one thing. They're not just lowering temperature, they're also just making life better, right?
Like trees are great and we know that they help clean up the air and there's all sorts of studies out there about how trees can improve mood and they can help academic performance, like trees apparently can do everything. And so a lot of these climate solutions that we have are also just going to make cities nicer places to live.
