Climate reporter Jeff Goodell writes extensively about this divide between the “cooled and the doomed” in his new best-selling book The Heat Will Kill You First. “There’s a profound gap in every city, everywhere, between people who have air conditioning and people who don’t,” Goodell told me in July, as Phoenix was experiencing what would become a 31-day stretch of 110 degree days — the hottest month in any U.S. city on record.

There’s a profound gap in every city, everywhere, between people who have air conditioning and people who don’t.

Heat is swiftly becoming one of the most formidable climate-fueled health threats of our time. It kills more people than any other extreme weather condition. Like Ebola and other deadly outbreaks in global history, it kills unequally. Finding this inequality in the United States is appallingly easy — just follow the racial boundaries that divide many cities and towns. Wealthy, white neighborhoods are less likely to experience deadly heat than non-white areas. A lot of these segregated communities are clustered in Southern states, among the hottest in the nation, and big cities that lack green space.

Read the full article about the heat gap by Zoya Teirstein at Grist.