Something Trump Can Do to Help Americans Withstand Extreme Temperatures - Cold and Hot
Maybe it's finally time for a life-saving cold.gov online resource to go with heat.gov
The center of the United States is facing another record-breaking outbreak of polar air. Two deaths in the extreme Kentucky storms were from hypothermia. The Trump administration is seemingly doing anything it can to wipe away Biden initiatives. Given all of this, I think it’s worth revisiting the case for Cold.gov.
You may recall I credited the Biden administration back in 2022 for creating the one-stop-shopping Heat.gov website - stuffed with all kinds of granular data, maps and resources on heat exposure and vulnerability around the nation. You may also recall that I criticized the Biden team for not pairing this with a Cold.gov realtime online resource hub.
That warming-centric administration defended its decision in a response I appended to my original post. But I didn’t find it convincing. You can judge for yourself.
The need for both is vividly clear in the data, with or without human-driven global warming. The study that made this clearest, done in Michigan, showed that the policy paths to cut vulnerability to heat and cold are often the same in any case. Read about it here.
Maybe, amid all the destructive “wood chipper” budget cuts and website shutdowns, President Trump could show just the slightest bit of rationality and request that the batch of agencies that helped the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration develop Heat.gov finally launch Cold.gov as well.
There are federal cold-weather resources now, although they are scattered. Here are two: