US July Sets All-Time Heat Record as Extreme Heat Inequality Deepens

July 2025 broke the US all-time monthly temperature record, with the National Weather Service confirming the national average exceeded any previous July and ranking as the hottest calendar month in the country's instrumental record. Prolonged heatwaves struck the Southwest, Southeast, and parts of the Midwest simultaneously, overwhelming emergency services and killing dozens of people, with heat-related deaths disproportionately concentrated among outdoor workers, elderly residents in non-airconditioned housing, and urban communities with limited tree canopy.

The distributional problem is structural: cooling infrastructure in the US is almost entirely privatised, meaning access to air conditioning correlates directly with income. Cities can open cooling centres, but research consistently shows the most vulnerable populations — farmworkers, unhoused individuals, informal-sector workers — do not or cannot use them. At the same time, the electricity grid faces peak demand stress precisely when heat is most dangerous, and utilities in several states imposed rolling restrictions that hit low-income neighbourhoods first. The cost of retrofitting housing stock for passive cooling, or expanding urban tree canopy at scale, runs into hundreds of billions of dollars with no clear federal funding mechanism post-IRA rollbacks.

Watch whether OSHA moves to finalise a long-stalled federal heat standard for outdoor workers — a rule in development for three years that would set mandatory rest-and-shade requirements — and whether any state legislatures act independently after this summer's death toll.