Never heard of a chief heat officer? Safe to say most people haven’t. Safer to say scarcely anyone has.
Yet here they come, the latest in politicians’ mad dash to do something – anything – that looks like an effort to “fight climate change.”
“As global temperatures continue to rise because of human-caused climate change, some cities in the United States are hiring ‘chief heat officers’ to respond to extreme heat and its sometimes deadly ripple effects,” Smithsonian Magazine reported as summer temperatures warmed up.
The story was published just after “Los Angeles became the latest and largest city to appoint its first-ever chief heat officer, joining Miami and Phoenix in adding the new position to their city leadership teams.”
Los Angeles’ CHO is Marta Segura, who had been the city’s director of climate emergency mobilization. Smithsonian says her duties include working with “other city departments and public health officials to reduce heat-related deaths and hospitalizations.” She is responsible for “adapting infrastructure to reduce heat and heat-related deaths, planting trees to provide cover, and informing the public about heat-related needs and rights.”
But these are obviously duplicative responsibilities that are already handled by public health and disaster-aid departments. So, why do we need an expensive new bureaucracy at city hall? Obviously, the reason is virtue signaling by politicians about climate.
Taking a closer look at the numbers shows that heat-related deaths aren’t enough of a problem to warrant expanding municipal administration. The U.S. Energy Information Agency says that nearly 90% of American households turned on the air conditioning – hated by the same people demanding the hiring of more CHOs – this year. (Some Californians have been cranking up the AC, at least they did when they weren’t disconnected from the grid by blackouts, intimidated by flex alerts, or deterred by the state’s high energy costs). Most users (66%) have a central system to cool their homes. Both numbers have grown from 77% and 54% in 2001.
Furthermore, heat-related deaths, both as “underlying” and “underlying and contributing” factors were lower in 2018 than in the late 1990s (just before the increase in air conditioning use referenced above), though there have been spikes (none higher than the late 1990s peak) as well as rapid declines from throughout.
When all climate-related deaths are counted, the trend is sharply downward over roughly the last century. Numbers from the International Disaster Database show that annual fatalities from extreme temperatures, floods, droughts, storms, and wildfires have plunged from nearly a half-million a year in the early 1920s to fewer than 25,000 in the late 2010s.
Nevertheless, the CHO trend seems to be settling in. Steven Malanga of City Journal says chief heat officer is “likely to be the hottest (pun intended) new job title at city hall.”
In some cities, the title could be “extreme-weather coordinator or chief weather-resilience officer,” but the intent is the same: Forwarding the narrative that human activity is overheating Earth. Malanga points to the wave of alarmist media reports of “soaring temperatures and their impact on urban life” as having “helped turn the CHO, a job barely a year old, into a new staple of local government.”
“These newly minted bureaucrats,” he says, “will make it their business to enumerate the impact of heat on the local population – an effect certain to increase now that government is counting it – and seek ways to mitigate it.”
So it sounds like a racket? Maybe it is.
“As Milton Friedman used to say, if you want to understand the motivation of an individual or organization, follow the self-interest,” says PRI senior fellow Henry Miller. “The self-interest of bureaucrats is ever-expanding bureaucracies and bigger budgets, and the sweeter-sounding the ostensible purpose, the better.”
And nothing sounds sweeter to the ear of the many than the sound of someone swearing they’re doing something about the climate – even if whatever it is they’re doing has zero effect on it.
Kerry Jackson is a fellow with the Center for California Reform at the Pacific Research Institute.
