Officials with the Milwaukee Health Department and the Milwaukee County Office of Emergency Management have issued a Heat Warning for Wednesday as the National Weather Service anticipates heat index values over 105 degrees Fahrenheit this week.
The extreme temperatures come at the tail end of a hot summer. NASA officials determined that July 2023 was the hottest month on the 143-year record, continuing the decades-long trend of dramatic warming across the globe.
As manmade climate change fuels increasingly unstable weather events (recent examples include tropical storms threatening to batter the continent’s west coast and Canadian wildfires tossing smoke over much of the American midwest, including Milwaukee), the demands of the profit motive continue to oppose the needs of the people to brutal and deadly ends.
Only public ownership and control of the utilities can adequately change the course of what is proving to be an ineffective approach to how we produce and allocate energy in Milwaukee.
As it stands, the heat is very costly for people living under the profit motive. Residents complain of high bills from We Energies in the first summer following the recent rate hikes demanding 11% higher rates for residential homes, 8% higher rates for small businesses, and 6% higher rates for big businesses. (We Energies has requested additional gas and electric rate increases for local residents in 2024.)
Working-class residents must make costly decisions concerning their use of pricy air conditioning or other electric-powered cooling devices, which consume about 6% of all the energy in the United States and cost Americans hundreds of dollars each month to operate. Milwaukee residents on average reportedly pay the highest utility bills of any major U.S. city, dishing out more than $500 a month just to maintain access to only some of the means of survival.
The utility bills fall especially heavy on households in Milwaukee’s predominantly Black and Hispanic/Latinx neighborhoods, where the energy burden—the annual energy utility bills divided by annual household income—is roughly double that of majority-white neighborhoods.
A 2022 study found a 10-degree difference between the hottest and coolest parts of the city on a given summer evening. The hottest, most densely developed areas are less open than cooler rural spaces, and these urban developments tend to rely on heat-absorbent materials and re-radiators like asphalt and concrete.
This means working-class families in the city will risk losing expensive electrical services over non-payment against other necessities like food, housing, transportation or medical care, not because the service is unavailable to them in a material sense, but because it is so costly in order to provide investment returns to shareholders, even when that means cutting operation costs.
Additionally, increasing outages during extreme weather events lead families to repurchase expensive groceries that spoil in a matter of hours without power in the summer heat, a cripplingly high cost for low-income families, who spend higher percentages of their wages on these elements vital to survival.
For many in southwest Wisconsin, though, the threat of the heat lies well beyond the pocketbook. The extreme weather events prove to be deadly as the infrastructure crumbles and We Energies’ parent company, WEC Energies, boasts better-than-expected shareholder profits at residents’ expense.
Despite the state’s cold-weather reputation, summer heat waves are the biggest weather-related killers in Wisconsin, and thousands are hospitalized each year in the Badger State for heat-related illness. The increasing risk of outages from deprioritized infrastructure only compounds the risk.
In late July, during the period in which WEC Energies boasted cuts in operation costs, outages reportedly led to the death of Alton Smith, an 84-year-old Milwaukee resident whom officials say died when the power went out and left him unable to recharge his oxygen tank. Reports state it was “uncomfortably hot” in Smith’s home at the time of his death.
Outages that weekend impacted 100,000 homes in the area, some of which did not see restoration for more than 48 hours. It is little wonder then that the power failure impacted the health of the people who live in Milwaukee, as prolonged outages can mean heat illness and death for the elderly and other vulnerable residents, none of whom have any recourse for the actions from the top floor of We Energies’ headquarters. In fact, Milwaukee residents have no meaningful input into how their energy utilities operate, even though they interact with them daily.
Outage times in the U.S. have more than doubled since 2013, when the average outage duration was only 3.5 hours. Now, residents face an average of more than seven hours of power failure each year, the grid crumbling behind every cut cost along the way.
These outages will only worsen as climate change causes more extreme weather events, the number one driver of blackouts. Because power outages occur most frequently between April and August, the heat will be an increasing threat for people living in Milwaukee and beyond.
Two values are at odds with one another: the demand for shareholder earnings and high profit margins presses against the need to sustain human life and provide basic fundamental services to people across the city, an imposition of values that results in high quarterly earnings for a privileged few, and illness and death for many more.
The official line in Milwaukee is that there is no alternative to We Energies and the dangerous valuation of profit against human life. The company maintains a private monopoly on public utilities made cozy by 100 years of exploitation of Milwaukee’s working class. The Milwaukee Democratic Socialists of America, however, are imagining a better world through its Power To The People Campaign, a campaign calling on Milwaukee City Hall to replace We Energies with public power, which would save residents money, return resource controls to the community and use funding monies to provide excellent services instead of generating shareholder profits.
To help build a mass movement for public power in Milwaukee, residents can sign the Power To The People petition, which links supporters and demands city leaders hear the voice of the working class and enact change through existing Wisconsin State Statutes. In the meantime, as the sweltering heat continues, the Milwaukee Health Department says people needing space to cool off can do so at public cooling sites across the city.
Power To The People is holding a campaign town hall at the Kosciuszko Community Center on Saturday, September 23, at 12 p.m. The utilities that Milwaukee residents depend on to survive will only start measuring their success through people’s quality of life — rather than profits — when they are truly publicly owned.
G.D. Brown is a working-class writer living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His debut novel, Sinners Plunged Beneath That Flood, was published by Leftover Books in 2022.
