Slow Burn: The Hidden Costs of a Warming World

by Robert Jisung Park

Overview

How the subtle but significant consequences of a hotter planet have already begun—from lower test scores to higher crime rates—and how we might tackle them today

It’s hard not to feel anxious about the problem of climate change, especially if we think of it as an impending planetary catastrophe. In Slow Burn, R. Jisung Park encourages us to view climate change through a different lens: one that focuses less on the possibility of mass climate extinction in a theoretical future, and more on the everyday implications of climate change here and now.

Drawing on a wealth of new data and cutting-edge economics, Park shows how climate change headlines often miss some of the most important costs. When wildfires blaze, what happens to people downwind of the smoke? When natural disasters destroy buildings and bridges, what happens to educational outcomes? Park explains how climate change operates as the silent accumulation of a thousand tiny conflagrations: imperceptibly elevated health risks spread across billions of people; pennies off the dollar of productivity; fewer opportunities for upward mobility.

By investigating how the physical phenomenon of climate change interacts with social and economic institutions, Park illustrates how climate change already affects everyone, and may act as an amplifier of inequality. Wealthier households and corporations may adapt quickly, but, without targeted interventions, less advantaged communities may not.

Viewing climate change as a slow and unequal burn comes with an important silver lining. It puts dollars and cents behind the case for aggressive emissions cuts and helps identify concrete steps that can be taken to better manage its adverse effects. We can begin to overcome our climate anxiety, Park shows us, when we begin to tackle these problems locally.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691221038
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	04/09/2024
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	272,735
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

R. Jisung Park is assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he holds appointments in the School of Social Policy and Practice and the Wharton School of Business. An environmental and labor economist, he has been investigating and writing about the economics of climate change for more than a decade. He has advised organizations that range from the World Bank to the New York City Departments of Education and Health.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“In the context of a plethora of tomes about climate change filling bookshelves, this important new work by a brilliant young economist offers something very different—a lucid, balanced, and data-driven analysis of the gradual, long-term, and very real damages of a warming world. In so doing, Jisung Park provides a welcome respite from the extremists at either end of the spectrum, and thereby offers new insights regarding the threat of climate change, as well as valuable and pragmatic guidance about what can be done about it.”—Robert N. Stavins, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University

“Jisung Park shows clearly why a warming world is such an insidious threat. Heat can harm us in a multitude of ways, and indeed Park demonstrates that it already is doing so. He summarizes extensive scientific evidence that even in the United States, one of the world's richest and best-adapted countries, we are paying a high price for the warming that has already occurred, and will pay even more for what may be to come. This book is compellingly written and is compulsory reading for anyone with an interest in one of the great issues of our time.”—Geoffrey Heal, Columbia Business School

“Park adds a new dimension to our understanding of climate impacts, by focusing less on the huge dramatic consequences (wildfires the size of Rhode Island) and more on the intimate changes that a heated world produces (say, more aggression and violence). It’s a novel idea, and well presented.”—Bill McKibben

Editorial Reviews

04/01/2024

This unconventional debut study from Park, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania, examines the less intuitive consequences of the climate crisis. Surveying research on the indirect effects of wildfire smoke, Park points to studies showing that on days with poor air quality, Israeli students performed 15% worse on tests and California farms were 6% less productive. Hotter weather has been correlated with numerous negative outcomes, Park reports, citing evidence that social media users curse more and judges give harsher sentences when the temperature increases. These burdens will not be distributed equally, Park warns, noting that in the U.S., poorer neighborhoods with more residents of color tend to be hotter than “wealthier, whiter areas within the same city” owing to a comparative lack of greenery. Park suggests ameliorative policies might include energy subsidies to help people without air-conditioning install cooling systems and making it easier to access credit for climate change–related investments, which could help lower-income individuals update their homes to deal with climate threats, or move to less affected regions. Discussions sometimes get bogged down in scholarly minutiae, as when Park offers a detailed investigation of the pros and cons of various methods for calculating heat deaths, but the unsettling research makes clear that climate change’s effects will reverberate even further than commonly understood. It’s enough to make readers break out in a sweat. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 03/01/2024

In this deeply researched book about the effects of climate change, environmental and labor economist Park (Univ. of Pennsylvania) warns that global warming's impact goes beyond the weather events in the news. He demonstrates the sweeping effects of climate change on health, education, and productivity by taking an economic approach to the analysis of even minor increases in the average temperature of the planet. His book spotlights research indicating how higher temperatures negatively affect worker productivity, conflict, violence, and student learning, achievement, and performance on tests. For example, increases in the number and size of forest fires not only cause disastrous damage to homes, property, and lives, they also create long-term damage thousands of miles away due to the spread of smoke, impacting the economy, health, and mortality. He argues that societies need to tackle these dangers and that it will take a globally coordinated approach to ameliorate them. VERDICT With gripping prose, this book encourages policymakers to consider the many hazards associated with the unavoidable increases in global temperature that the world faces. This is a call to arms addressing one of the most critical issues of contemporary times.—Rebecca Mugridge

Library Journal

2024-02-14
An invitation to “view the climate problem through a slightly different lens.”

Park, an environmental and labor activist and a social policy professor at the University of Pennsylvania, shows us how changing our focus to the deeper-seated implications of climate change for education, health, and the economy brings startling facts to bear. For example, injuries are more common on 90 F days as compared to 60 F days, murders increase, and cognitive performance declines. A warming world, Park observes, accelerates “subtle social disparities” and inequalities. In poor and developing nations along the equator, such as Ghana, heightened temperatures will mean a spike in the mortality rate, nearly double that anticipated for nations in relatively more temperate latitudes. In the U.S. on a hot day, “Black and Hispanic students are two to three times more adversely affected than their White or Asian counterparts,” given the lack of an adequate physical plant in poorer schools. Not that the wealthy are altogether safe; as Park notes, in the summer of 2023, when Canadian wildfires’ smoke blew south, New York “was the most polluted major city in the world,” the Upper East Side as much as Hunts Point. This speaks to the hidden cost to human capital, perhaps the single most important tool in working our way through the crisis. In a useful aside, the author takes on the libertarian let-the-market-fix-it crowd by observing that even Milton Friedman acknowledged that there are problems too large for the market to solve. Though some knowledge of economics is helpful for readers, Park writes clearly and well, making a strong case for immediate action rather than waiting for the costs to compound—which, over the next couple decades, they are certain to do.

A multifaceted look at the many externalities of a warming world.

Kirkus Reviews