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A United Methodist Insight Commentary | July 31, 2025
I’m a prisoner these days – a climate prisoner.
July and August – sometimes September as well – are the year’s hottest months in Texas. When we moved to Dallas in 1988, the 100-degree days were fewer than they are now, according to Climate Central, a non-profit educational organization tracking the climate crisis. Now excessive heat happens regularly and earlier.
Consequently, I’m imprisoned in our air-conditioned home for the remainder of summer. Last Sunday, even with a high temperature predicted around 90 degrees, I stayed home from church, a rarity. This week, with air temps above 100 and heat indexes close to 110, I rarely venture farther than our backyard patio, if that.
Here’s what heat does to me: I can’t breathe. Simply walking out into the yard drenches me in sweat. Sometimes I get a moment of double vision, usually because I haven’t drunk enough water.
Worse beyond the physical discomfort is the mental fatigue.
After an encounter with extreme heat, my brain simply refuses to engage in higher cognitive functions like proofreading or arithmetic. As a persnickety editor, I don’t even try to think critically about anyone’s writing; I can barely sign my name or make a handwritten grocery list. I put it all off, and that procrastination cascades into deadline stress as I try to craft our weekly newsletter.
My social life all but disappears in the heat. This week I bowed out of the 90th birthday celebration for a beloved retired pastor at our church because it occurred in the middle of the day when the high temperature was predicted to be 103. Merely thinking about going out of the house in such heat induced revulsion close to an anxiety attack.
I’m not exaggerating. I’m giving explicit warning of what life is like under extreme heat for someone who has chronic illness, a physical disability, and is considered elderly at 72. I’m not alone; there are millions of Americans like me, and I have no clue how many of the world’s people suffer similar debilitating conditions. For a heart-rending account of what life in the heat is like for someone with a disability, watch Angela Molloy’s segment of United Methodist Creation Justice Movement’s July Movement Café (in which I am also a speaker).
Even currently “able-bodied” people (or “not-yet-disabled folx,” as Angela puts it) need to take precautions. One of the off-duty officers who provides outdoor security at our church told me he keeps a cooler of water bottles in his car and frequently takes breaks to sit in his car’s air-conditioning. “I have to get out of the heat before I start seeing double,” he said.
My recitation of summertime woes has a two-fold purpose: to remind us that we “climate canaries” are alerting the world to a scorching future, and to invite churches and individuals to put an important date on your calendars: Sept. 21, “Sun Day.” That’s the day when climate activists and supporters will celebrate something that could cool off the planet – the Sun.
What staggering irony: the solar power we collect from the Sun could soon replace the need to burn fossil fuels for energy, resulting in fewer greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere that propel the global scorching that’s killing us. Unfortunately, fossil-fuel advocates and politicians are standing in the way of advancing solar power, which in the past two years has become cheaper than fossil fuels through technological advancement in collection and energy storage. But this week, according to a recap from historian Heather Cox Richardson, "EPA officials told Lisa Friedman of the New York Times they intend to argue that it is climate regulations, rather than greenhouse gas emissions, that cause the real harm to human health because they lead to higher prices and less consumer choice."
We're squandering our abundant solar resource in favor of burning dead dinosaurs. We’ll be dead ourselves in a few years if we don’t mend our ways, but there’s hope amid the gloom, and it’s us. We have the power to get power from renewable sources that don’t harm the Earth, humans included. If we need a theological justification to advocate for solar energy, all we need do is read biblical accounts to remember who really “owns” creation, and what our role as caretakers of creation is (or ought to be).
I hope I live long enough to see us give up our addiction to fossil fuels, because I’d like to enjoy, not dread, one more summer before I die.
PS I got an alert as I was writing this from Climate Central about how climate science is disappearing from government websites. Click here to read the letter.
Cynthia B. Astle
Photo by Taylor Walters Denyer
A professional journalist for more than 50 years, Cynthia B. Astle serves as Editor of United Methodist Insight, an online journal she founded in 2011.