The Republican Plot to Let People Die of Heatstroke

Soaring electricity bills force lower-income households to choose between keeping the air on and necessities like food and childcare. Discussions about Republican attacks on climate policy in recent weeks have focused mainly on the House’s budget bill, which would gut IRA programs that incentivize corporations and homeowners to invest in low-carbon manufacturing, energy-efficient appliances, and renewable energy. Yet that bill’s sweeping cuts to welfare state programs like Medicaid and SNAP benefits—which would kick tens of millions of people off both—could leave millions at risk of dying in heat waves in ways that are harder to track, as more people are forced to make dangerous trade-offs between staying cool, seeking out medical treatment, and putting food on the table.

These pressures are especially acute for the country’s 45 million renters. While states typically require landlords to keep renters’ homes above a certain temperature in the winter, there are many fewer provisions to protect tenants against extreme heat. Some historically hotter municipalities—like Tempe, Arizona, and New Orleans—have put in place cooling standards and maximum temperature ordinances, but such protections are rare. Even rarer are rules that keep landlords from raising rents by exorbitant amounts if they do install air conditioners.

The GOP has for years tried to paint climate policy as a wasteful extravagance for coastal liberals who want to virtue-signal to their neighbors by putting solar panels on their roofs and buying electric vehicles. As temperatures continue to rise, however, all policy is climate policy. Cuts that make people poorer also make them more vulnerable to baking in their homes; programs that keep people out of poverty help them avoid meeting that fate. In the short term, especially, LIHEAP, SNAP, and Medicaid are arguably as important to surviving a warming world as any of the programs that Democrats might advertise as being a part of their climate agenda. If Republicans take an ax to all of the above, they’ll have blood on their hands.