This piece is part of the Climate Crossroads series. Read the rest of the series here.

Seattle’s residents once had little need for air conditioning. (Wikimedia)

Late June 2021 will remain in my memory as one of the worst times of my life. A four-day heat wave hit the Pacific Northwest. Temperatures soared above 110 °F —ironic, given that escaping the D.C. heat was one of the reasons I chose to spend my summer at home in Seattle. The first day was bearable. The second day I spent soaked in sweat and unable to sleep. By the third day, I thought I'd gotten the hang of surviving in extreme heat. After dinner, my family fled to the air-conditioned supermarket Fred Meyer to push through the last few hours. Just when we were about to go home, we received a distressing notification: our power was out.

We lingered at Fred Meyer for another hour, but the Puget Sound Energy outage map showed that authorities still hadn't assessed the cause of the outage. During the heat wave, thousands of homes throughout the Puget Sound region lost power. That meant no air-conditioning or fans, no Wi-Fi—even though many worked remotely—and a lot of food in powerless refrigerators that would spoil.

We—my family, local governments, utility companies—were wholly unprepared. Although the percentage of Seattle homes with air-conditioning has jumped from 31 percent in 2013 to 44.3 percent in 2019, Seattle is still the least air-conditioned metropolitan area in the country. This statistic makes intuitive sense; because Seattle has the fewest estimated heat-attributable deaths per summer, according to the EPA's Excessive Heat Events Guidebook, its residents have little need for AC. But the EPA drew from past data; if we know anything about global warming, it's the unpredictability of its future effects.

Before the heat wave, Vox published an article explaining how climate change makes heat waves longer, more intense, and more frequent. The article lists numerous side effects of heat waves, such as sleep disruption and infrastructure failure:

The tools used to cope with heat are also stressed by it: Power plants, which provide electricity for everything from fridges to air conditioners, themselves need to be cooled, and they become less efficient as the weather warms. Power lines have lower capacities under extreme heat, and hardware like transformers experience more failures. If enough stress builds up, the power grid can collapse just when people need cooling the most. Power disruptions then ripple through other infrastructure, like water sanitation, fuel pumps, and public transit.

But even Vox's warning did not measure up to the true damage that heat caused to infrastructure. In Portland, Oregon, the heat melted the power cables, suspending light rail and streetcar service. Some roads in Seattle became impassable when the asphalt buckled under the triple-digit temperatures. In the Puget Sound region, the issue was not excessive energy consumption, but heat-related equipment failures, according to Charles Woodman, a field editor for local news platform Patch. With a lighthearted tone, Woodman dismisses the heat wave as a one-time event:

Fortunately, the problems are likely to die down as the temperature does: The excessive heat warning has been extended through Tuesday evening, but temperatures are expected to cool back into the mid-80s by Wednesday. Until then, residents should stay out of the sun, keep the AC running—and maybe unplug the toaster if you're feeling toasty enough already.

While that may be true for Seattle, other extreme weather cases related to rising sea levels and increased precipitation are bound to happen. Woodman takes the blame off Puget Sound Energy; he does not address the problem of inadequate infrastructure and suggests methods individuals can take to protect themselves against the heat.

The Pacific Northwest heat wave of summer 2021 hit record temperatures. (Flickr, European Space Agency)

Many Pacific Northwest residents will likely install air-conditioning. Like Woodman, Constantine Samaras, an engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University, views this mass adoption of AC as a "worthy form of climate adaptation."

Unfortunately, traditional air-conditioning systems actually make the heat worse. They release millions of tons of carbon dioxide each year, leak hydrofluorocarbons (which have a global warming potential 1000 to 3000 times that of carbon dioxide), and pump hot refrigerant gas outdoors. They devour about six percent of the electricity produced in the United States. During both a brutal heat wave and an energy crisis in 2013, the South Korean government disabled air-conditioning in public buildings to keep the country's power on.

Questions of responsibility inevitably arise: For unpredictable events, should individuals take all the precautions, or should companies design their products and services to be energy-efficient and climate-resilient? Are Pacific Northwest residents to blame for not installing air-conditioning? Are those with air-conditioning accountable for their subsequent greenhouse gas emissions, or is it the fault of bad design? When my mother's melatonin degraded in the heat, should she have stored it in a cooler location, or should the manufacturer have made it more heat-resistant?

Though we all want someone to criticize for undesirable situations, the truth is that it's impossible to pinpoint any one actor as singularly responsible. In the case of the Pacific Northwest heat wave, we are all culpable—though to varying degrees. Nevertheless, tackling future weather emergencies requires public, private, and individual action that addresses both the causes and effects of climate change.

How Should We Structure Infrastructure?

On the public side, President Biden's Infrastructure Framework is a $1.2 trillion infrastructure spending plan, which includes $579 billion of new plus current spending over eight years. The White House's fact sheet emphasizes equity (such as closing the digital divide through $65 billion dedicated to broadband infrastructure) and sustainability (attaching "clean" before infrastructure projects). Most notably, the Framework is "the largest investment in the resilience of physical and natural systems in American history" with $47 billion allocated to preparing against the impacts of climate change, cyber attacks, and extreme weather events.

Undoubtedly, infrastructure investment is much needed. But the way in which it’s delivered matters just as much. Researchers at Rice University's Kinder Institute for Urban Research advocate for a bottom-up strategy centered around a consultative process in which local officials decide what infrastructure projects require local, state, and federal funding. They view the American economy as a "network of regional and metropolitan economies," with cities and metropolitan areas being the "true engines of American prosperity." By aligning metropolitan infrastructure projects with federal goals, they argue, the policymakers and regulators implementing Biden’s agenda can better address problems of accessibility, racial and geographic equity, and the digital and urban-rural divides.

I appreciated the contemporary quality of the Kinder Institute's analysis. Published in February 2021, the authors identify economic recovery from the pandemic as a major challenge for the United States, and argue that COVID-19 has highlighted the urgent need to address its other pre-pandemic challenges, such as digital transformation:

New technology has opened the nation to new possibilities. But an infrastructure strategy must embrace technological change to transform our cities and communities, not just expand capacity. For example, instead of simply building additional highway lanes, we should also embed congestion management sensors and communication systems into those roadways. At the same time, as the pandemic showed in critical areas such as schools and medical care, the growing “digital divide” has made it difficult for many Americans, in both urban and rural areas, to benefit from these advances. An infrastructure plan must address these inequities as well.

Given the authors' focus on technologically integrated cities and local infrastructure projects, they seem to support the development of smart cities. On climate resilience, the report recognizes the wide range of climate change-related effects and the necessity of emission reduction through renewable energy and public transit projects.

But, like other reports that address climate change, the Kinder Institute's report mostly focuses on past and current trends, highlighting our collective myopia against the unprecedented nature of climate disasters. The Climate Change Mitigation/Resilience section only dives into examples of water supply, wastewater, and flood control projects. While it's true that water management is a priority for many metropolitan areas, a nation of truly smart cities must also make action plans for extreme weather events in the near future.

Moreover, the report defines “bottom-up” as local-to-federal-government. But what happens when the priorities of the local government leave residents dissatisfied? Citizens need to rethink how policymakers make resilience plans on a larger scale. Who are the true "experts": institutionally-backed companies like Puget Sound Energy and sheltered public officials, or people with actual lived experience in the conditions we want to avoid for the future?

Because, at the end of the heat wave, Seattle survived as a, and because of, community. People lounged around at grocery stores, neighbors offered water and ice to fellow neighbors and delivery workers, and companies like T-Mobile opened up their air-conditioned offices for employees and their families to escape from the heat. When no one wanted to step outside, we connected via social networks—but their benefits extended only as far as our existing relationships and willingness to help others. For instance, I immediately went on Nextdoor when the power outage started, but no one had a solution. Instead, a good friend reached out through Facebook Messenger, offering his house for Wi-Fi and power access.

Beyond Community-Based Solutions

Although I'm overwhelmingly grateful for these community solutions, a long-term solution should include better city design and resilient infrastructure. I would've liked to live in a smart city with free Wi-Fi, accessible chargers, and eco-friendly cooling systems.

As defined by Ecocity Builders, an ecocity is "a human settlement modeled on the self-sustaining resilient structure and function of natural ecosystems." Their Ecocity Framework & Standards Initiative has 18 standards organized into four pillars of urban design, bio-geo-physical and socio-cultural features, and ecological imperatives.

The urban design pillar includes a green building standard, which includes "using and reusing locally available building materials, designing and orienting buildings to take advantage of sunlight and shading, co-locating buildings to allow heat generated from one building to warm another or conversely to allow shade generated from one to cool another." The Smart City Journal and Smart City Press's green building design solutions for heat resilience include increased vegetation, green roofs and walls, cool roofs and white roofs, cool pavements, buildings with large amounts of thermal mass, shading structures, and solar panels.

New York City is adopting cool roofs as a way to regulate heat. (Twitter)

Whether it involves the utilization of volunteers or paid workers, implementing green building initiatives requires the ability to effectively mobilize residents, highlighting the importance of social capital. But choosing the most appropriate measures is also crucial. For urban areas like New York City, which are "dominated by dark and hard materials - concrete, asphalt, paving," cool roofs are the most effective way to cool down the city.

Meanwhile, Medellin, Colombia, has adopted the $16.3 million Green Corridors project, which hired 75 low-income citizens to plant 8,800 trees and plants in thirty corridors. By creating greenspace where there was none before—its neighborhoods built of concrete and bereft of greenspace were once labeled “heat islands”—the Green Corridors project helps cool the city down.

Green corridors can help cool cities down. (Pixabay)

Not all living places can be classified as cities, let alone have the resources to be a smart eco-city. But there are still ways for these places to implement green building standards. In India, where many live in informal settlements, the Mahila Housing Sewa Trust has installed water-proof modular roofs in many cities, including Delhi. Made of paper waste and coconut husk, they can cool settlements down by 11 °F. Many cities have adopted heat action plans with five core elements: community outreach, early warning systems and interagency coordination, capacity building among healthcare professionals, addressing vulnerable groups, and building adaptive infrastructure systems.

We tend to think of the smart eco-city as a futuristic vision. In some ways, it is: computerized management of waste disposal, smart traffic monitoring, and pollution sensors are all technologies we are aiming for. But the idea of optimizing cities and settlements with technology is not new. For most of human history, technology was about human interaction with the natural world—not the destruction of the natural world, but coexistence with and dependence on it. Building something entirely new should not be our first instinct until we address the structural factors that create the problems we are trying to solve.