Hot Cars, Hot Planet

July of 2019, the hottest month on record worldwide, a father in New York City was charged with manslaughter and criminally negligent-homicide after leaving his twin one-year-olds strapped into their car seats while he went to work. He found their bodies eight hours later, as he glanced in the rearview mirror on his way home. Their internal temperature reached 108° that day: they died of heatstroke as sunlight streamed through the car windows but heat could not get out.

The father told authorities that he had dropped his older child at school and somehow thought he had also dropped his twins. He drove to work, got out, and went into the building.

I have not been able to stop thinking about that family. I imagine my own two children as toddlers, strapped into that car. I imagine their wide, trusting eyes as I close the door and walk away. Then I can see them looking around anxiously, squirming, turning slightly toward each other. I see sweat appearing on their beautiful faces. They begin to cry then scream and eventually, I see their swollen, hot bodies falling limp. I imagine finding them. Finding my mistake. I imagine my family hollowed, forever lost because I forgot. Because I was thinking ahead to my day, because the car was quiet when I got out, because I forgot and left my children in a hot car on a hot day.

When scientists first described climate change, they termed it “the greenhouse effect.” They recognized that increasing the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by burning oil, coal and gas, made the atmosphere function the way a piece of glass in a greenhouse functions: sunlight streams in but heat cannot get back out. It’s what happened in the car in New York in July and it’s what’s happening to the planet today. Now we call it climate change, but it’s the same thing with a different name. Sunlight is streaming into our planetary car and we can’t open the windows. We are burning up.

The temperature reached 114° in France this summer and 90° in Alaska in early July. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration records show that July was the 415^th consecutive month with temperatures above the 20^th century average.

But it’s not just the heat that’s lethal to humans, it’s the heat index, a measure of the combination of temperature and humidity. A heat index of 90°- 103° requires “extreme caution.” A heat index above 103° is considered dangerous to human life, leading to heat exhaustion and, the more deadly, heatstroke. In July 2019 the heat index in Washington, DC reached 110°. In Chicago, 113°.

During that July week when the father left his twin children in the car, the heat index in New York reached 105°.

In 1968, psychologist Garrett Hardin, writing in Science Magazine, articulated what has he termed the “Tragedy of the Commons.” He noted that individuals, acting independently in their own best interests, will, together, end up degrading a shared resource. Using a grazing field – the common – as his example, he posited that every farmer around the field has an incentive to put one more sheep out to graze on the common. And then one more and one more.

In the absence of regulations, rational farmers will add sheep to the grazing patch until the patch has been grazed down to nothing, he said. The principle holds for fisheries, clean water, air, land, sidewalk space in a busy city, dogs in a dog park. And for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

The beauty and the tragedy is that no single individual farmer is responsible for ruin of the pasture just as no single individual or company is responsible for climate change. Each of us individually, and every country in the world, has an incentive to add a marginal amount of carbon to the atmosphere in search of incremental economic growth, better quality of life, more money.

So here we are after that blistering hot summer, nearly eight billion of us strapped into our car seats, the windows stuck shut, political chaos unfolding all around. We are thirsty, hungry, angry and scared. 

Scientists have been warning us about this future for decades, warning us that we are rolling up the windows on our children. But we have done almost nothing. And no one has been charged with anything.

• Not the fossil fuel companies that crafted a deliberate campaign to sow doubt and confusion about the rock solid climate science that discovered the cause and provided a solution for stabilizing the atmosphere.
• Not leaders of the political party that repeatedly pulled out of international climate agreements, choosing to believe the fossil fuel companies over climate scientists who made careers out of studying climate science.
• Not the current president, who pulled the United States out of the Paris Climate Agreement, which offered the last best hope for worldwide action.  

Nor have I been charged, sitting here at my computer a five hour fossil fuel-powered plane ride from my home in Spokane, Washington, my sweaty son beside me in an air-conditioned room, a car at the ready in the driveway. I have not been charged.

The New York father who left his young twins in a hot car all day is facing the possibility of up to five years in prison. It is also possible that prosecutors will drop the charges against this devastated man because they will confirm that it was, as he says through tears, an accident. He would never deliberately kill his own children.

Just like loving parents in the oil industry, in political leadership, like parents who hold shares of stock in the fossil fuel industry. Like me, flying across the country to see family. None of us would ever deliberately kill our own children.