My Health Is a Victim of a Warming Planet | Opinion

Climate change—and the pollution that causes it—makes people sicker. Adding record-breaking heat waves makes it even worse. I know firsthand that it's true.

Like many parts of the country, Texas has been enduring an extreme heat wave since the beginning of summer. This prolonged hot weather has triggered my allergies, making it hard for me to live my life. I am the full-time caregiver for my 75-year-old father, and for the last two months—since this heat wave started—I've had a terrible cough, become easily winded and had very low energy. Lately, I get headaches that won't go away, no matter what I try.

My doctor has confirmed that this isn't COVID, or pneumonia, or some other illness. No: It's from an environmentally triggered allergic reaction that's gotten out of control.

I've lived in Houston my whole life, and my health has been adversely affected by the high levels of industrial pollution in our community. As a child I was in and out of doctors' offices, constantly needing treatment for asthma, bronchitis, pneumonia, and hay fever. One of my doctors used to call me his Bubble Girl, because of how often I was sick. I got better as a teenager, but recently, it's gotten much worse.

My community is poisoned by oil and gas refineries, chemical plants, concrete batch plants, long-haul trucks and cargo ships. The science linking air pollution to serious health impacts is clear.

But it's not just the pollution by itself that is so harmful. The same communities bearing the brunt of the industrial air pollution are also getting extreme heat waves every summer, sometimes more than once, and hot weather makes poor air quality even worse.

When the temperatures rise across the country, so does the demand for electricity so people can run their air conditioners. To keep up with the surging power demand to keep homes and buildings cool, these plants are operating at full capacity—and pumping out more nitrogen oxides, carbon dioxide, and particulate matter into communities of color and the poorest neighborhoods. In Houston, for example, nearly all of the gas-fired power generated comes from plants located in neighborhoods with populations that are majority low income or people of color. Racism and historically discriminatory practices such as redlining are directly responsible for this disparity in communities across the country.

Worse, the heat dome trapping hot air over the southern U.S. (and the reason this heat wave has been so long and intense) also traps this extra pollution. Warmer temperatures, trapped by pollution, cause vegetation to produce more pollen, leading to longer or even year-round allergy seasons and worsening air quality.

My family and I know all too well what happens to people who live in neighborhoods where fossil fuel, petrochemical, and manufacturing industries build their power plants and factories. Benzene, toluene, nitrogen oxides and chemical solvents like trichloroethylene and many other toxic chemicals pour into our communities on a daily basis. These pollutants are linked to a range of serious and even fatal health complications, from asthma and respiratory diseases to heart disease and cancers.

The air pollution from the oil and gas industry and other manufacturing processes is also linked to severe birth complications, including premature births and low birth weights. And it is linked to disproportionately high incidence of type 2 (adult onset) diabetes, which I and multiple members of my family have.

And yet, I know we're among the lucky ones: We are fortunate to have air conditioning in our house. At least one person in Houston has died this summer because his home lacked air conditioning. Families across Houston, and thousands of people across the county, only have a window AC unit, or a box fan. Those hardly help.

All across the United States, but particularly neighborhoods with a majority of people of color and low income families, people are suffering as we live through what's shaping up to be the hottest summer on record. Future summers will be even hotter, and people who are already vulnerable will experience the worst impacts to their health and wellbeing.

I'm a proud Chicana, a fifth-generation Tejana. My grandmother moved to Houston to raise a family. My mother and father stayed and raised their family. I want my children to be able to bring up their kids in the neighborhoods they grew up in.

Children in every community across the country are owed the right to grow up healthy and safe. But that can't happen until our government stops ignoring the inequities of the climate crisis and starts putting the wellbeing of people like me above the profits of polluting industries who don't care how many people they hurt.

Rita Robles is a lifelong Houstonian and a climate justice community ambassador with the Coalition for Environment, Equity, and Resilience (CEER).

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.