In September, as I was walking around my neighborhood, I saw a sign advertising an open house. It was late morning, with the temperature hovering around 95 degrees, and the back of my neck was slick from sweat. The house was low-slung, single-story, and midcentury modern, with an olive tree out front. I was nowhere near being in a position to purchase a home, let alone one in Huntridge. But I’m curious about how other people live, so I stepped into the cool air conditioning to take a tour.
Two real estate agents greeted me. “Sorry I’m so sweaty,” I told them, certain I did not look like a person who could buy a house that was listed for $750,000. “It’s hot out there.” They nodded. “That’s summer for you,” said one of the agents.
I strolled through the rooms, basking in the air conditioning, and walked onto the back patio, the heat hitting my body full-blast, a shock. I wondered how the real estate agents would market this house to someone coming from out of town. Is it always this hot? the potential buyer might ask as they contemplate a move to Las Vegas. Will it get hotter?
On Reddit threads, people thinking about moving to Las Vegas often ask this. Locals’ responses are honest, sometimes verging on apocalyptic.
“The summer heat is brutal. My highest power bill was $500.”
“It’s like living in an oven May through September.”
“We are legitimately running out of water. It’s not a sustainable place to live at all.”
Is Las Vegas a sustainable place to live long-term? Over the past year, while researching drought, heat, and dust, I’ve asked this question over and over. Surely, no place in the United States is immune to climate change, from wildfire-stricken California to flooded Vermont. Still, Las Vegas, with its extreme heat and reliance on the steadily drying Lake Mead, seems uniquely positioned for disaster.
IN EARLY AUGUST, I met Philena Carter, the 32-year-old singer of the local band Stanley Ave. She had a show later that night at Taverna Costera for First Friday, and despite the hundred-degree temperature, dozens of people were milling around the stalls and food trucks outside. She and I were inside at the bar. The restaurant had put up a sign warning customers to be careful of hot doorknobs. “It’s one of the few bars that actually lets bands play their own music,” Carter told me. Elsewhere, she’s often asked to play covers, a bid, she thinks, to attract tourists.
Carter is petite, with a pixie cut and a sharp voice. She moved to Vegas from Oklahoma almost fourteen years ago — “I’ve lived here thirteen and a half years too long,” she joked — and described her upbringing in the Institute in Basic Life Principles, a Christian fundamentalist group, as a cult. She was glad to get out of Oklahoma but had to adjust to many new aspects of life in Las Vegas — including, centrally, the climate. The first thing she noticed about Las Vegas was its dry heat. It’s difficult for her to sing because she gets a dry cough, and now she runs two humidifiers in her house on a regular basis just to make sure her voice is okay to perform. Over time, she developed a personal set of guidelines for summers in Las Vegas. Don’t get into cars with leather seats. If wearing shorts, bring a shawl to sit on because benches can burn the backs of legs.
As a part-time job, Carter leads scooter tours of downtown Las Vegas in the full sun. She asks all her customers to bring water, and she stops the tour to sit in the shade if they feel dizzy. Still, people sometimes don’t listen. (Floridians, she said, get into the most trouble because they believe they can handle the heat.) She received first aid and CPR certification just in case and knows to put a bottle of ice water on someone’s wrist if they overheat. The blood vessels are close to the skin there and can cool the blood down immediately, which, in turn, can cool down the internal organs.
Carter was hit by a truck a few years ago and suffered a traumatic brain injury. As a result, her body can’t handle heat as well as it used to. She has to sit out the worst of the hot days. Between June 30 and July 31, Las Vegas temperatures exceeded 100 degrees every day. Heat exhaustion sets in when the body reaches 104 degrees Fahrenheit. The symptoms are, at first, easy to miss. Headaches. Excessive sweating. Then, the body feels nauseous, weak, and dizzy. Muscles cramp; it becomes difficult to walk. The heart pounds faster and faster. When the body overheats, organs can fail.
Heat kills more people in the United States than any other climate emergency. As of August 16, Clark County recorded 21 heat deaths this year.
IN MID-JULY, TWO Las Vegas women, aged 34 and 29, died from heat exhaustion while hiking in Valley of Fire State Park. It was a 118-degree day, and they ran out of water. One of the women was found dead a quarter mile from the parking lot. Officials presumed she was trying to get help.
Earlier that week, a 71-year-old Los Angeles man died while hiking in Death Valley during 121-degree heat. He’d spoken with a Los Angeles Times reporter at Zabriskie Point only a few hours before. In a photo the paper published, he was sitting underneath the shade of a sign and wore long sleeves, long pants, a wide-brimmed hat, sunglasses, and gloves. “It’s a dry heat,” he told the reporter. “Everything is hot here.” He was the second person to die in Death Valley that month.
July was Las Vegas’ hottest month on record. That week in mid-July was the worst of the summer’s heatwave. City burn centers saw an influx in patients: Pavement can heat up to 140 degrees, hot enough for a second-degree burn. Delta Airlines canceled a flight after several passengers suffered heat-related illnesses while the plane was stalled on the tarmac for hours. An unhoused person was found dead on the sidewalk outside a shelter.
LAS VEGAS HAS always been hot, yes, but not like this. It’s one of the fastest-heating cities in the nation. Over the past 30 years, average temperatures for each month have increased by at least half a degree. Over the past half-century, the average temperature in Las Vegas has increased by 5.76 degrees.
Scientists attribute the heating to climate change and urbanization. More concrete and asphalt — for new buildings and roads — create islands that absorb and retain heat. Downtown Las Vegas, around where I live, is several degrees hotter than Summerlin, which is higher in elevation and has more trees and parks to counter the absorption of heat. People of color and poor people are more likely to live in heat islands. People living in trailers with insufficient air conditioning are at high risk, as are people who work outside, in construction or mail delivery. Last year, the City of Las Vegas piloted a program to plant trees across the city. But it won’t be enough.
CARTER AND I went up to Taverna Costera’s rooftop so she could start setting up for the show. The sun was slipping behind the Spring Mountains, and a breeze listed over our heads. It was bearable out now, at least. During July’s heatwave, I found the Strip to be the most bearable outdoor space. Frigid air conditioning wafts from storefronts and casinos, and misters spray on patios. On the Strip, you can be forgiven if you forget you’re in the Mojave Desert. That’s by design.
As I was leaving the bar’s rooftop, I overheard a DJ and a sound technician talking. “You can’t play vinyl in this heat, absolutely not,” the DJ said. Vinyl would melt. He always brings backup thumb drives in case his computer system overheats because if his laptop gets too hot, his signal chops up. Sometimes, he even brings a portable a/c unit. “Some people set gel icepacks on top of their switchboards,” the technician said.
I asked how long they’d lived here. “Born and raised,” said the technician. As we talked, he wiped sweat from his brow. “There’s no amount of acclimating to the heat here,” he said. “You bounce from shade to shade and stay indoors. That’s all you can really do in Vegas.”
OUR LANGUAGE TO describe heat is limited. During the July heat wave, I heard people talk about furnaces and ovens: “It is like sticking my head in an oven.” We use the descriptors like “record-breaking” and “hellish” and “excessive” and “scorching” and “sweltering.” Those are the words I use, too. But overuse of this language numbs us to heat’s lethal reality.
When I interned at a newspaper several years ago, the interns were sent off to gather anecdotes about people weathering a heat wave. One intern went to the beach and talked to people who were eating ice cream. I spoke with people who were taking their children to the movie theater. Photographers took photos of kids splashing in park water fountains. Heat was, in these depictions, an inconvenience.
In recent years, media coverage of heat has become more serious. When the Pacific Northwest suffered an unprecedented heatwave in 2021, journalists reported on cities that aren’t built for extreme temperatures. In Seattle, asphalt roads rose from the heat. In Portland, metro authorities stopped running light rail and street cars because the heat melted power cables.
Heat has a weight. It presses down on the body, the forehead. It crushes. It kills.
RECENTLY, I'VE BEEN talking with friends about our future in Las Vegas. We’re young, in our twenties and thirties, with families and friends and lives here. Las Vegas is home. I’ve lived in Las Vegas longer than anywhere since college. I’ve hiked through Mt. Charleston’s aspen grove and the Mojave National Preserve’s Joshua tree forests, dipped in Red Rock’s creeks, swum in the icy Colorado River, camped under a brilliant sky in the Spring Mountain foothills, and watched roadrunners race across Sunset Park. It is a place that’s grounded me, literally and psychologically. It’s grounded my friends, too.
We ask the same questions as everyone. Will it become too hot? Will there be water? We’re lucky. We can leave Las Vegas if we want to. But the rest of the country suffers the effects of climate change, too: drought and wildfires, flooding and blizzards and hurricanes. If we were to leave, where would we go?
Meg Bernhard is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. Her book on wine and power was published by Bloomsbury in June.