If you're reading this, you know it's hot right now. President Joe Biden knows it's hot right now. Grammy-winning rapper Nelly definitely knows it's hot right now. What we don't really know: How much that heat costs the country. "We’re figuring this out as we live it," said Jennifer Harris, the former senior director for international economics in Biden's White House National Security Council. It will take years, if not decades, for Biden’s landmark climate law to make a measurable difference in stemming rising temperatures, assuming it works as intended. So instead of taking a victory lap today on the first anniversary of the deal that secured the law, the president is trotting out modest measures to help besieged communities, outdoor workers and vulnerable Americans endure a month that is on track to be the hottest ever recorded. Meanwhile, the tab rises. Biden said Thursday that extreme heat costs the U.S. economy $100 billion a year. That's likely an understatement, said Sabeel Rahman, who until recently was a senior counselor in Biden's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. “The systemwide nature of it is pretty mind-boggling," Rahman said. Extreme heat can collapse ecosystems, buckle roads, melt power cables, sap worker productivity, worsen destructive hurricanes and kill people. Today, Biden rattled off devastation that sounded like modern-day plagues: boiling oceans, faltering fisheries, roaring wildfires, deadly working conditions and record temperatures. Such effects can be hard to model and translate into a monetary figure, Harris said. Experts say the expense of addressing climate change would be far less than the cost of living with it. The Inflation Reduction Act, which includes $369 billion in clean energy spending, is the biggest such package in U.S. history, but even Biden has acknowledged that “we have a lot more work to do.” Inching forward: In the meantime, Biden has announced measures designed to stave off the vagaries of an unhinged climate. They include improvements to weather forecasting, reinforcements for Western water supplies and increased workplace inspections to ensure workers are protected from the heat. The federal government has only limited ability to respond to extreme heat, which is not legally recognized as a disaster, Thomas Frank notes in a story today. The administration is also hampered by years of budget cuts to federal agencies and an increasingly conservative federal judiciary and Supreme Court, Rahman said. For example, the Labor Department is years behind finalizing a long-sought federal standard protecting workers from heat, despite pressure from climate, labor and health advocates. "We’re paying the price for the decades of attacks on our regulatory capacity," said Rahman, who is now a professor at Cornell Law School. "It creates a lot of friction and makes it harder to do big things like this.”
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