I am an environmental lawyer who came to the challenge of ensuring worker safety and health midway through my career. The same week that a heat dome stifled the central and eastern United States, OSHA continued the formal hearings required before it issues a rule protecting workers from extreme heat. To give those proceedings some context, a brief background on how climate change perspective exacerbated the heat wave seemed important.
As most of Confined Space readers know, OSHA proposed a strong rule to protect workers from excessive heat toward the end of the Biden administration and Confined Space covered it here and here.
During the hearings on the proposal, pro-labor representatives exhorted the agency onward while pro-industry representatives demanded that OSHA weaken the rule to allow each company to write its own plan to protect workers exposed to excessive heat as long as the plans “work.”
That would turn every enforcement case into a lengthy General Duty Clause violation, a burdensome process that OSHA – especially in the diminished form the Trump administration envisions, could not hope to conduct. Such a standard would open the door to scofflaw that offers the appearance of company compliance while failing to address the problem in a meaningful or effective way.
With the nomination of David Keeling to become the Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health, prospects for a strong final rule are dim. Keeling was an executive at UPS and Amazon, workplaces where heat is an urgent problem for warehouse workers and drivers, but he resisted any and all proposals for additional protection. During his tenure at Amazon, workers were injured at a rate 70% higher than at other warehouse businesses.
At the risk of being just one more downer in your day, the following explains why climate change makes state and private action on workplace heat hazards even more urgent.
Climate Change and Workplace Heat
The last week in June, some 160 million Americans subsisted under a “heat dome” that produced “heat index” temperatures as high as 110 degrees. (Heat index numbers take into account humidity and result in more accurate assessments of the damages caused by extreme temperatures.) Excessive temperatures blanketed the central and eastern United States, out to the Great Lakes and up from Florida to Massachusetts. Federal, state and local governments issued alerts warning people to stay hydrated and spend as much time as possible in air-conditioned indoor spaces. The warnings focused on children, the elderly, or people who suffer from health problems that leave them vulnerable to excessive heat. They should have extended to threatened workers, especially in the agriculture, construction, and delivery sectors.
Heat domes can be compared to the cover of a pot sealing in the contents of pan simmering on the stove. They are the product of strong, high pressure atmospheric conditions that remain stationary for inordinate periods of time. These effects are greatly exacerbated by climate change.
My home state of Maryland was in the thick of the action. Temperatures in Baltimore city, which used to have a moderate summer climate between 64 and 82 degrees Fahrenheit (18 to 28 degrees Centigrade), reached heat indexes in the triple digits, prompting the health commissioner to issue a Code Red Extreme Heat Alert. The cognitive dissonance of the entire experience was hard to master.
Suburban streets and playgrounds were empty. The sky was either devoid of clouds or a uniform smokey gray, two other symptoms of excessive heat caused by domes that disrupt normal interactions in the atmosphere, eliminate clouds and exacerbate air pollution. Roads got so hot they buckled in Delaware, Wisconsin, and Missouri, a drawbridge got stuck in Virginia, and dozens of people were hospitalized.
And the ultimate irony: The air conditioning in the Department of Labor’s Washington D.C. headquarters broke down during the second week of the hearing, requiring the OSHA staff to run the hearing remotely from home.
Of course, summers are hot, and have been since we began keeping track of the country’s history in general terms, and its weather patterns specifically. But ongoing research has also made clear the reality that climate change is exacerbating extreme weather events from floods to drought to heat domes.
As Jonathan Overpeck, dean of the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan, told the congressional newspaper The Hill, climate change has slowed the jet stream and made it curvier. (The jet stream is a narrow, high-speed wind current that forms in the atmosphere five to nine miles above the earth’s surface.) Overpeck added, “This is where you start to get these high-pressure domes that just sit in one place longer. These very hot events are becoming more frequent because of that; they concentrate the heat in one large region.”
Michael Mann, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the most prominent climate scientists in the nation, agreed, explaining that the excessive heat waves plaguing the United States and Europe “show that [heat domes are] part of a very large-scale pattern, associated with a very ‘wiggly’ jet stream where the ‘wiggles’ stay in place for days on end.”
A paper Mann published with three colleagues in April 2025 documents the direct association between extreme summer weather and changes in climate conditions. These conditions include amplified Arctic warming and land-sea thermal contrast, as well as strong El Ninõ events. (In this context, thermal contrast means upward currents of warm air. El Ninõ is a climate pattern that causes unusual warming of the tropical Pacific Ocean that can affect local weather around the world.) In addition to “record-shattering heatwaves,” the scientists said these developments resulted in “heavy precipitation and flooding, prolonged droughts, and more extensive wildfires” that are increasing in “frequency and severity.”
Getting Hotter Faster
Scientists further warn that, as The New York Times put it in a headline, “The World Is Warming Up. And It’s Happening Faster.” In June 2025, a large team of scientists published a paper concluding that the acceleration of warming was significantly higher than the most recent findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its Sixth Assessment Report published in sections from 2021 to 2023. The new group of scientists concluded that “[h]uman-induced warming has been increasing at a rate that is unprecedented in the instrumental record.” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, explained that “each additional fractional degree of warming brings about a relatively larger increase in atmospheric extremes, like extreme downpours and severe droughts and wildfires.”
Climate change is exacerbating the country’s wildfire problems by making drought worse and drying out forest detritus. Heat domes trap the smoke from fires rather than letting it dissipate. The trapped smoke is one reason the skies were gray during the eastern heat wave. Compounding wildfire pollution is the Trump administration’s determination to weaken limits on emissions from power plants and cars. If you have headaches during heat waves or an irritated throat or nose, the cause could be pollution, not just heat.
EPA: The Energy Promotion Agency
Meanwhile, EPA administrator Lee Zeldin marches on, zealously dismantling the agency’s work on climate, while he, along with Trump, continues to label climate change as a “hoax.” He is turning the EPA into a shell of its former self. He has pledged to cut the agency’s budget by 65%, declaring that “it is the highest priority for me to ensure EPA never wastes ANY of your hard-earned tax dollars.”
Zeldin has pledged to put “a dagger through the heart of climate-change religion” and introduce a “Golden Age” for the economy. As I write this, the administration just shut down the U.S. Global Change Research Program’s website, blocking access to years of scientific information also funded by taxpayers.
Zeldin has commended Trump’s pledge “to do everything in his power to unleash American prosperity throughout this country” and is making EPA into an energy promotion agency: “we have an important role to play to make sure the EPA is accomplishing its mission in a manner that doesn’t lose sight over the strong desire by the American public to unleash American prosperity. In order to do so, we need to become energy dominant.”
In October 2024, the Pew Research Center surveyed 9,593 American adults about climate change. The results showed an even split regarding the economics of the issue, with 34% concluding that policies to reduce climate change help the economy and an equal number concluding that such measures hurt it. Thirty percent were undecided. Oddly, 64% told pollsters that climate change affects their local communities a “great deal or some” yet three-quarters said that they might have to make minor sacrifices because of climate change, while only 23% expected to make major changes.
Workers Suffer the Most
Workers, of course, are at greater risk from heat waves than the average person who can take a break, find air-conditioning and drink a bottle of water whenever they’re uncomfortable. Workers risk their jobs if they take a break in hot weather whenever they need it. And piece-rate workers and others stand to lose income even if unpaid breaks are allowed. Too many employers do not take measures to protect their employees from heat – the basic measures that the OSHA standard would require.
OSHA is the only federal agency that can protect the construction, agriculture, warehouse, factory and other workers who are at risk from higher heat. The Trump administration is unlikely to issue any heat standard (or any other meaningful health and safety standards), and if they do move forward on heat, it is likely that they would attempt to weaken the requirements, replacing Biden’s strong proposal with a meaningless, unenforceable rule like Nevada just issued.
The nihilism of the Trump Administration will paralyze American efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and exacerbate the devastating impacts of climate change for years to come. Unless other, less controversial issues like the economy push a majority to oppose MAGA, heatwaves will kill workers in growing numbers.