When President Joe Biden visits South Carolina to tout a new solar-energy-manufacturing facility today, he will underscore a striking pattern: Some of the biggest winners from his economic agenda have been Republican-leaning places whose political leaders have consistently opposed his initiatives.

Centered on a trio of bills Biden signed in his first two years, the president’s economic program has triggered what could become the most concentrated burst of public and private investment since the 1960s. The twin bills Biden signed in 2022 to promote more domestic production of clean energy and semiconductors have already helped generate about $500 billion in private investment in new factories and expansion of existing plants, according to the administration’s tally. Simultaneously, the federal government is spending billions more repairing roads, bridges, and other facilities through some 32,000 projects already funded by the bipartisan infrastructure bill approved in 2021. Companies are spending twice as much on constructing new manufacturing facilities as they were as recently as two years ago, a recent Treasury Department analysis found.

“We had high expectations, and we are meeting or exceeding those expectations, particularly on these investments serving as a catalyst for private-sector investment," White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients told me in an interview.

[Read: Biden’s Blue-Collar Bet]

This surge of investment could rumble through the economy for years. The reverberations could include reviving domestic manufacturing, opening new facilities in depressed communities that have suffered plant closings and disinvestment since the 1970s, and potentially increasing the nation’s productivity, a key ingredient of sustained growth.

“That data suggests we are in the midst of a big build as a country,” says Joseph Parilla, the director of applied research at the Brookings Metro think tank. “We are in a very important economic moment, particularly for a lot of these regions that have been waiting for this type of private investment, and desperately need it.”

But the political impact of this investment for Biden and other Democrats remains much more uncertain. Polls suggest that for most Americans, the continued pain of inflation, even as it moderates, overshadows the good news of new factory openings. And analyses by Brookings Metro and other groups have found that this private investment is flowing disproportionately into places that didn’t vote for Biden in 2020 and remain highly unlikely to vote for him again in 2024. Many of the communities benefiting most are represented by congressional Republicans who initially voted against the new federal incentives encouraging these investments, and more recently even voted to repeal some of them.

Biden has presented the red tint of the investment patterns as a point of pride, proof that he’s delivering on his promise, after the polarization of Donald Trump’s presidency, to govern in the interest of all Americans. “I promised to be a president for all Americans, whether or not they voted for me or whether or not they voted for these laws,” Biden said last week when announcing a $42 billion plan under the infrastructure bill to extend high-speed internet to all communities by 2030. “These investments will help all Americans. We’re not going to leave anyone behind.”

Many Democrats see that as an important economic commitment and a powerful political argument. But portions of the party are grumbling that the administration is not showing enough concern as companies steer so much of the investment triggered by the new federal incentives toward Republican-leaning states and counties.

That concern is rooted partly in the belief that voters in those places are unlikely to credit Biden for promoting new factories and facilities or to punish Republicans who have opposed the incentives that made them possible. An even larger complication may be the fact that many of these new jobs are moving into states where workers have historically received lower wages and benefits than in the more heavily unionized blue states. “They are sending the money to the states with the lowest worker protections, lower worker standards,” Michael Podhorzer, the former longtime political director of the AFL-CIO, told me. “It’s putting pressure on blue-state employers to lower their standards to be competitive.”

The magnitude of the Biden boom in investment could be historic. Three bills are contributing to the upsurge. One is the Inflation Reduction Act, which provides sweeping subsidies for the domestic manufacture and deployment of clean-energy products such as electric vehicles. The second is the CHIPS and Science Act, which allocates billions of dollars to encourage the domestic production of semiconductors, now produced mostly abroad. The third is the bipartisan infrastructure bill, which funds not only traditional infrastructure projects such as roads and bridges but also new needs like the broadband program and a nationwide network of electric-vehicle chargers. Biden hopes to turbocharge the effect of these bills with other policies pushing companies to buy American in the materials they use in all of these projects.

“What seems to be emerging is a clearly American industrial strategy,” says Ellen Hughes-Cromwick, a senior fellow in climate and energy at Third Way, a centrist Democratic group. “This is about moving ahead in markets where we can be super competitive.”

In a rough calculation, the administration has forecast that these three bills will generate about $3.5 trillion in investment over the next decade. Public spending, either directly on infrastructure projects or through the tax and grant incentives for semiconductors and clean-energy projects, will account for only about two-fifths of that total, with investment from private companies providing the rest. If these bills inspire that much new public and private investment, it would represent a substantial increase—as much as 7 percent annually—in the level of investment the economy now produces (about $5 trillion annually).

The torrent of spending from companies that these bills are expected to unlock is crucial because it refutes the traditional conservative complaint that public investments simply discourage private investments, Jared Bernstein, the new chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, told me. “The idea that public investment crowds out private investments turns out to be ‘bass-ackwards,’ and that is an important insight of Bidenomics,” Bernstein said.

There’s no guarantee that the bills will generate as much net new investment as the administration hopes. Jason Furman, who served as chair of the Council of Economic Advisers for President Barack Obama, told me that if the surge of investment contributes to “overheating” the economy, that would prompt the Federal Reserve Board to raise interest rates, which would reduce the level of investment elsewhere. “If you get more in these areas, you are going to get less in other areas, and you can’t just think of these as additive,” said Furman, now an economics professor at Harvard.

Bernstein doesn’t entirely reject that possibility, but he told me that more investment will just as likely expand the economy’s capacity to produce more output without inflation. “These are investments in the supply side; they are ways to give yourself a little more room to grow,” Bernstein said. “If you are truly standing up a domestic industry that wasn’t there before, that’s new capacity, and, in the long run, that reduces inflationary pressures.”

Whether or not the Biden agenda generates all the investment the administration now projects, it likely will represent the federal government’s most ambitious effort since the height of the Cold War to upgrade the nation’s physical infrastructure and nurture technologically advanced strategic industries. Economic-development experts such as Parilla say that the closest modern parallel to Biden’s investment agenda may be the intertwined federal initiatives from the mid-1950s to the late ’60s to build the interstate highway system, invigorate higher education and scientific research after the shock of the Soviet Union’s Sputnik-satellite launch, upgrade our nuclear-weapons capabilities, and then win the space race to land on the moon. Those efforts accelerated the development of an array of new technologies, from semiconductors to computers to the internet, that provide the foundation of the 21st-century digital economy.

Biden has indicated that he’s expecting similar long-term economic benefits from his agenda, whose direct public spending in inflation-adjusted dollars is larger than the funds Washington spent combined on the interstate highway system and the Apollo moon-landing program. Some Democrats see Biden’s interlocking policies to increase public and private investment as the party’s most fully fleshed-out alternative to the GOP’s argument, since the Ronald Reagan era, that lower taxes and less regulation are the keys to growth.

But the distribution of this new investment has complicated that political calculus. Parilla and a senior research analyst at Brookings Metro, Glencora Haskins, calculated that half the private-sector investments the White House has cataloged have gone to counties that voted for Trump—far more than the 28 percent of the nation’s total economic output that those places generate. Regionally, the biggest winner from the new investment has been the Republican-leaning South, attracting more than two-fifths of the new dollars, considerably more than its share of the total GDP (about a third). The Midwest (about a fifth) and West (about a fourth) have each attracted a share of new investment that roughly matches its portion of the GDP, while the big loser has been the staunchly Democratic Northeast, which is drawing only about an eighth of the new spending.

Some key swing states are among the biggest beneficiaries. Arizona, Georgia, and Michigan—each of which flipped from Trump in 2016 to Biden in 2020—rank in the top six states receiving the most investments, according to unpublished data provided by Brookings Metro to The Atlantic.

But nine of the 15 states receiving the most private investment backed Trump in 2020—including Texas, Ohio, Idaho, Kentucky, Tennessee, Indiana, Utah, North Carolina and South Carolina. And of those nine, North Carolina is the only one that Biden realistically can hope to contest in 2024. Meanwhile, several blue-leaning but still competitive states that Biden likely must hold to win next year have attracted much less investment, including Wisconsin (24th), Pennsylvania (26th), Minnesota (34th), and New Hampshire (44th).

Administration officials are adamant that they are not trying to channel the investment in any way. “The president ran as being president for the American people, for communities all across the country, and that is what he is doing,” Zients told me. “This implementation is not a political exercise.” Instead, Zients said, “the money is flowing into all communities” where there is either, in his words, a “need” to upgrade infrastructure or an “opportunity” to locate manufacturing facilities.  

Hughes-Cromwick correctly notes that if Biden in any way said, “‘This money needs to go to blue states,’ the reaction” from Republicans “would be fierce.” But critics are also correct that the administration’s hands-off approach to the investment flow could threaten its broader economic and political goals.

[Joel Dodge: My Hometown Is Getting a $100 Billion Dose of Bidenomics]

The administration hopes “that in red and purple states, workers will credit Biden and Democrats for the new investment and jobs, which will make Democrats competitive in the region,” Podhorzer, the former AFL-CIO political director, told me. “That is just not going to be the case. History tells us that if any politicians are credited, it’s much more likely they will be local ones.” Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, last week demonstrated the problem when he denounced Biden’s program and credited local efforts at the opening of an electric-vehicle-battery plant in the state that has received tax breaks under the Inflation Reduction Act.

The issue is not just who gets political credit for the new jobs. To achieve its full impact, Biden’s investment agenda will need durable support over time from a congressional majority willing to defend its central provisions. The early evidence suggests that investment in red places is not helping this cause: Even though four-fifths of all the clean-energy investments announced have gone to districts held by Republicans in the House of Representatives, every one of them voted this spring to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act incentives that have encouraged those investments.

The White House, in a fact sheet for Biden’s visit to South Carolina, pointedly noted that Republican Representative Joe Wilson (who famously yelled “You lie” at Obama during one of the president’s State of the Union speeches) was among those who voted to repeal the incentives, although they helped finance the expansion of solar manufacturing in his district that Biden visited to celebrate today. Zients said that Biden plans to aggressively “call out” Republicans who are not just “showing up at the ribbon cuttings for a bill they didn’t support, [but] are actively trying to take that money away from their communities.”

The biggest challenge in the red-state-investment tilt may be whether it impedes Biden’s overarching goal of creating more well-paying jobs for workers without a college degree. As Podhorzer pointed out, average wages in many industries, including manufacturing, are much lower in red states than in blue.

Almost all the projects funded under the infrastructure bill require contractors to pay higher “prevailing wages,” so that legislation has proved immensely popular with unions representing construction workers. But the UAW union has repeatedly complained that the auto companies receiving massive federal subsidies under the Inflation Reduction Act are seeking to reduce wages and benefits by producing EV batteries and other components in new facilities that are not subject to the union’s national contract. “Why is Joe Biden’s administration facilitating this corporate greed with taxpayer money?” UAW President Shawn Fain complained in a statement late last month after the Energy Department approved a $9.2 billion loan to Ford to construct three new EV-battery plants in Kentucky and Tennessee.

Compounding the union’s concern is that, as the EV share of the overall market grows, the auto companies will inevitably reduce employment at the unionized plants now producing the batteries for internal-combustion vehicles as they gear up production at their EV-battery plants. Given the locations of most of those EV plants, that change will also likely shift jobs from Rust Belt states that Democrats must win, like Michigan, to states such as Kentucky, Tennessee, and South Carolina, where their prospects are dim. “If I am a Democratic Party adviser, why are we giving $9 billion to replace 7,500 Rust Belt jobs with half-the-wage Kentucky and Tennessee jobs?” one UAW source, who asked for anonymity while discussing union strategy, told me. “What’s the political calculus there?”

Biden lost his most powerful tool to promote unionization in the EV transition when Senator Joe Manchin insisted on the removal of a provision in the inflation-reduction bill that would have given consumers a substantial tax break for purchasing electric vehicles built with union labor.

But critics in the party believe that the administration should be more aggressive about challenging companies to provide good wages with the tools they still have, such as the conditions they can attach to the sort of loan Ford received. “We definitely don’t want to be stimulating a race-to-the-bottom dynamic that will be undermining our own goals of ensuring decent livelihoods for workers,” Isabel Estevez, the deputy director of industrial policy and trade at the Roosevelt Institute, a liberal think tank, told me.

Biden has identified with unions more overtly than any Democratic president in decades, so he will likely seek some way to soothe the discontent at the UAW. But he probably won’t veer from his larger course of celebrating how much of the new investment is flowing into red-leaning blue-collar places, even if many of those are communities he is unlikely to win or in states he cannot seriously contest.

Because Bidenomics aims to revive “investments in places that have long been left behind, then it is inevitable” that some of that funding will benefit distressed communities that have turned away from Democrats and embraced Trump, Bernstein told me. For Biden, aides say, that’s not a bug in his plan, but a benefit. “President Biden often says, ‘Whether you voted for me or not, I will be your president,’” Bernstein said. “Now he can stand at the podium and hold up the graphics that show that it’s true.”

For most Americans, voting for a member of Congress is one of their simplest civic duties. Every two years, they pick the candidate they like best—usually the same one they chose last time—and whoever gets the most votes will represent them and a few hundred thousand of their neighbors in the House of Representatives. In nearly every case, the winner is a Republican or Democrat, and whichever party captures the most seats secures a governing majority.

That basic process has defined congressional elections for much of the past century. But according to a growing number of political-reform advocates, it has outlasted its effectiveness and could prove ruinous for American democracy if left in place. They blame the current winner-take-all system for driving U.S. politics toward dangerous levels of polarization. Without radical change, they say, the damage could be irreversible. “Our democracy is on a pretty troubling trajectory right now over the next decade or two,” says Lee Drutman, a political scientist and senior fellow at the left-leaning New America Foundation, “and all of the problems that we’re experiencing are only going to get more intense.”

Drutman is a co-founder of Fix Our House, a group that envisions a new configuration for the lower chamber of Congress in which districts would elect several representatives, not just one. Most states would have fewer but larger districts, and unlike America’s current system, a district wouldn’t simply be won by the party with the most votes; instead, its multiple seats would be parceled out according to the percentage of the vote that each party gets. This means that previously niche parties would suddenly have a shot at winning seats. The system is known as proportional representation. If implemented, its backers believe it could help transform America into a multiparty democracy.

[Lee Drutman: America is now the divided republic the Framers feared]

Advocates for proportional representation acknowledge that such a radical change is a long shot, at least in the immediate future. Multimember House districts actually have an extensive history in the U.S., but it’s not one remembered fondly. Congress outlawed their use at the federal level during the civil-rights era, after southern states exploited the rules to disenfranchise Black voters. Proponents say they’d ensure that the same thing doesn’t happen again, and they’ve won the support of some civil-rights activists who believe that under the right legal parameters, multimember districts could significantly expand Black representation. Another challenge for the movement is that Israel, a frequently cited example of a multiparty system that uses proportional representation, has recently experienced no less political instability than the U.S.

That such an idea has gained a following is a reflection of just how frustrated election experts have grown with the fractured state of American politics, and how worried some of them are for the future. They believe—or at least hope—that a new season of reform in the U.S. will make possible proposals that were once deemed unachievable.

Supporters of proportional representation—which is used in advanced democracies such as Australia, Israel, and countries throughout Europe—view the system as a prerequisite for breaking the two parties’ stranglehold on American politics. It would foster coalitional, cross-partisan governance, while larger, multimember districts would all but eliminate partisan gerrymandering. “Your enemies are never permanent. And your friends today might be your opponents tomorrow, and maybe your friends the day after,” Grant Tudor, a policy advocate at the nonpartisan group Protect Democracy, explained to me. “So there’s something structural about a multiparty [system] that depresses polarization, depresses the risk of political violence—that depresses extremism.”

Take a medium-size state like Wisconsin as an example. Wisconsin has eight districts that are gerrymandered in such a way that Republicans reliably win six. Under proportional representation, the state would have fewer districts—perhaps only two, say, composed of five and three members. Less reliance on geographic boundaries would make the state harder to gerrymander, and when combined with proportional representation, its elections would likely be far more competitive. The results, therefore, would be more reflective of Wisconsin’s closely divided population.

Larger, ideologically diverse states such as California and New York might elect representatives from the Working Families Party or the Green Party; Texas could send Libertarian members to Washington. In 2020, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told a reporter that “in any other country, Joe Biden and I would not be in the same party, but in America, we are.” In a multiparty democracy, they wouldn’t have to be.

Voters across the country have shown a willingness in recent years to experiment with new ways of electing their leaders. California and Washington State have scrapped partisan primaries. Maine has adopted ranked-choice voting for federal elections—which allows voters to list candidates in order of preference—as have New York City, San Francisco, and many other municipalities for local offices. Alaska uses a combination of nonpartisan primaries and ranked-choice voting, and Nevada has taken the first step toward approving a similar system.

[Read: The political-reform movement scores its biggest victory yet]

The changes that Fix Our House has in mind for Congress are far more dramatic. They’re also much harder to carry out. Drutman knows that the U.S. is unlikely to adopt multimember districts particularly soon. But he believes that other election reforms such as nonpartisan primaries and ranked-choice voting simply don’t go far enough. They can’t save American democracy, he told me. “You’re bringing buckets to a flood.”

Election reformers are a polite bunch. When I asked them about ideas other than their own, they were hesitant to be too harsh. That’s partly out of necessity. When your goal is reducing partisanship and polarization in politics, slinging insults doesn’t exactly help the cause. So they applaud almost any proposal as long as it represents an improvement over the status quo, which to them is pretty much anything.

Yet this public bonhomie masks a vigorous competition of ideas—and a jostling for resources—over the best way to create a more representative government. Perhaps the biggest rival to proportional representation is final-four voting, the system that Alaska adopted through a statewide referendum in 2020. Instead of separate party primaries, all candidates run in a first round of balloting. The top four advance to the general election, which is decided through ranked-choice voting. Developers of final-four voting celebrated when, under the new process last year, far-right candidates lost two key races. Moderate Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski staved off a challenge from the right, and moderate Democrat Mary Peltola defeated Sarah Palin, the right-wing former Alaska governor and 2008 GOP vice-presidential nominee, in a race for the House. Peltola became the first Democrat to hold the seat in 50 years.

In November, Nevadans voted to approve a similar system that will go into effect if another statewide referendum passes in 2024. The initiatives in Alaska and Nevada emerged from an idea developed by Katherine Gehl, a Wisconsin businesswoman who has donated millions to centrist causes and helped bankroll the ballot campaigns in both states. Gehl is adamant that combining nonpartisan primaries with ranked-choice voting is a better reform than proportional representation, both on the merits and for the simple reason that her idea has already shown results. “We’re getting as good a grade as we could possibly get at this point,” she told me.

Gehl and Drutman basically agree on the core problem. Because of gerrymandering and the natural clustering of like-minded people, about 90 percent of House elections are noncompetitive come November, according to an analysis by Fix Our House, having already been decided in low-turnout primaries dominated by the parties’ most ideological voters. Very few Americans, then, have a real say in who represents them in the House. Once elected, politicians tend to be more concerned about losing their next primary than losing their next general election. As a result, they legislate according to the wishes of the small sliver of the electorate that put them in office rather than the much broader pool of constituents who make up their district. This reduces the motivation to compromise and deepens polarization.

Gehl argues that to fix the system, a reform needs to both increase the number of people who cast meaningful votes for their representatives and motivate those legislators to deliver results on issues that matter to most people. Proportional representation, she told me, achieves the first goal but not the second. In a multiparty system, Gehl said, many lawmakers would feel just as beholden to a tiny portion of their constituents as do today’s primary-obsessed legislators. “If you just get better representation but you don’t look at why we’re not getting results, people will feel better represented as the Titanic sinks,” she said.

Advocates for Gehl’s system also point out that proportional representation would do nothing to alter incentives to legislate in the U.S. Senate, where hyperpartisanship and filibustering have stymied action on a range of issues. And they question Drutman’s push for more parties at a time when more and more Americans are identifying as political independents. “It’s actually a fanciful and incorrect assessment of American politics to believe that there’s a huge demand for more parties,” says Dmitri Mehlhorn, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute who, along with his business partner, the LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, has invested in Gehl’s reform efforts. Her vision, Mehlhorn told me, “is not quite a magic bullet,” but it has more promise than the other reforms.

Drutman doesn’t see it that way. The final-four system might work well for Alaska, he said, but Alaska, with its relatively depolarized politics and unusually large number of independent voters, is not a representative state. Nor is it clear, he noted, that the new system made a decisive difference in Murkowski’s and Peltola’s victories last year. “I think those reforms are pushing up against the limits of what they can achieve,” Drutman said. “Nonpartisan primaries have not really changed anything at all.”

Beyond the friendly rivalry with other reform proposals, advocates for proportional representation must confront the much peskier problem of getting it enacted. In interviews, champions of the idea were excited to inform me that all it takes to allow states to experiment anew with multimember House districts is an act of Congress, not a constitutional amendment—as if approving a major election reform will be a piece of cake for a legislature that regularly struggles to keep the government open.

[Nick Troiano: Party primaries must go]

States have been required to elect only one representative per district since 1967, when Congress banned multimember districts to stop southern states from using a version of the system to ensure that white candidates won House seats. Fix Our House wants Congress to amend the law in a way that allows states to adopt multimember districts without returning to the racist practices of the Jim Crow era. The organization’s allies in the civil-rights community argue that if properly designed, multimember districts would increase representation for communities of color, including in places where they have struggled to win elections because they are dispersed throughout the population rather than concentrated in neighboring areas.

For the moment, the idea has gained little momentum on Capitol Hill. Republican leaders have become reflexively opposed to reform efforts aimed at reducing polarization, seeing them as Trojan horses designed to topple conservatives. Democrats in recent years have prioritized other election-related proposals focused on expanding access to the ballot, tightening campaign-finance rules, and banning partisan gerrymandering.

The closest legislative proposal to what Fix Our House has in mind is the Fair Representation Act, a bill that Democratic Representative Don Beyer of Virginia has introduced several times to combine multimember districts with ranked-choice voting. But Beyer has struggled to win more than a handful of co-sponsors even within his own party.

Most election-reform victories have come through citizen-driven ballot initiatives, which exist only on the state and local levels, as opposed to national legislation that would require support from leaders of the major parties. An idea like proportional representation, Beyer told me, is more popular with whichever party is out of power. “It appeals to Republicans in Massachusetts who’ve never gotten elected, and Democrats in Oklahoma,” he said. “So the appeal is to people on the outside, not the people who are making the laws.”

Adding to the difficulty is the fact that advocates for proportional representation don’t necessarily share the same vision for what a new system would look like. For example, Beyer is reluctant to embrace Drutman’s ultimate goal of multiparty, coalition government in the House, viewing it as a step too far in the U.S. “It’s emphatically not the specific goal,” he said. “Talking European-type coalition governments would be a deal killer here.”

Advocates for proportional representation also disagree on whether it needs to be paired with a perhaps equally ambitious reform: significantly increasing the number of seats in the House. (Drutman has advocated for adding House seats to account for substantial population increases since the number was set at 435 nearly a century ago, but Fix Our House believes that proportional representation would be beneficial even at its current size.)

Despite scant support among politicians, proportional representation has been gaining momentum within the reform community. The groups Protect Democracy and Unite America recently published a report examining the idea, and another advocacy group, FairVote, has begun to reemphasize proportional representation after years of focusing mostly on ranked-choice voting. Last year, voters in Portland, Oregon, approved the use of multimember districts (and ranked-choice voting) for the city council. Multimember districts have also generated discussion among Republican state legislators in Wyoming, one of the nation’s most conservative states, although the idea has yet to move forward there.

Reformers tend to downplay the long odds of their campaigns, but the leaders of Fix Our House are surprisingly candid about their near-term chances of success, or lack thereof. “It’s clear that there’s no path to major structural reform in Congress right now,” a co-founder of the group, Eli Zupnick, told me. He said that Fix Our House wants to “lay the groundwork for this policy to move when the moment is right.” That means promoting the idea to other advocates, lawmakers, and opinion makers so that if there’s, say, a presidential or congressional commission to study different ideas, proportional representation makes it into the conversation.

One of the group’s models is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which began as an idea that Elizabeth Warren, then a Harvard professor, promoted for years before Democrats included it during their package of banking reforms following the 2008 financial crisis. “It’s funny how things can go from off the wall to on the shelf,” Drutman said.

Left unsaid is the fact that it took an economic collapse to muscle the new federal agency into law and that the CFPB remains a target for Republicans more than a decade later. Fix Our House launched about a year after January 6, 2021, when the nation’s polarization triggered a violent attempt to overturn a presidential election. Supporters of proportional representation acknowledged that the moment they are preparing for, when the country is finally ready to overhaul the way it elects its leaders, might not be a happy one. “The most obvious way you get big change,” Beyer told me, grimly, “is catastrophe.”

A heat dome in Texas. Wildfire smoke polluting the air in the East and Midwest. The signs are everywhere that our children’s summers will look nothing like our own. In this episode, we talk with the climate writer Emma Pattee about how hot is too hot to go outside. The research is thin and the misconceptions are many—but experts are quickly looking into nuances of how and why children suffer in the heat, so we can prepare for a future that’s already here.

Pattee grew up partly in a tent in the woods with the trees as her friends. And she expected her kids would do the same. But as a climate writer, she is realizing more quickly than the rest of us that we already need to let go of what we imagined summer might look like for our children.

“What climate change does is: It makes us realize that our blueprint is fantasy. It is no longer reality. And our children will not live the lives that we have lived. Our children are gonna live drastically different lives than we have lived.”

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The following is a transcript of the episode:

Emma Pattee: In the 30 minutes between when the bus drops off all the kids and the parent picks up their kid, they’re just pouring water consistently over these kids to stop them from getting heat illness.

Do I want that for my kid? These become the difficult questions.

Hanna Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin, and this is Radio Atlantic. We have a lot of romantic ideas about childhood, and especially about what childhood should look like in the summer. Kids mucking around in ponds, finding tadpoles. Nature camp. City kids learning outdoor skills so they won’t be totally useless in the apocalypse.

But then, like a lot of romantic ideas, they sometimes run up against … reality. Which these days means it’s too hot to muck around in ponds, or even go outside sometimes. This summer: 107 in Texas. 105 in Louisiana. And a couple of summers ago, a freak heat wave so dangerous that Emma Pattee, who is a climate writer, got trapped in her house with a new baby for days. And her fellow moms in Portland basically never recovered.

Rosin: So Emma, you told me that you were on your Facebook moms’ group one day. And what happened?

Pattee: So, you know, I’m a mom. Obviously you cannot be a mom without being part of your local Facebook moms’ group. And last summer we would have these hot days, and I would just see these Facebook groups explode. You know, “How hot is too hot to have my kid outside?”

Or the summer-camp counselors saying that they’re sending the kids home because of the heat: “But I don’t think it’s that hot. You know, what do I do?” Or the opposite: “The summer camp is saying 104 is the cutoff. That’s too hot.” Moms are posting photos of their kids, you know, these sweaty little kids, like, “Is this heat stroke?”

And it just was this big moment for me; nobody knew what was happening. Nobody knew what to do. Something dangerous was occurring, and nobody had any answers.

Rosin: Well, it sounds like people didn’t know if it was dangerous or not. Like before they could even get to dangerous, they were just in information-less panic. Because people essentially have this idea in their heads: Well, it’s nice. Kids are supposed to be outside. It’s summer; they’re not in school.

And yet, there were all these indicators that that was maybe not the right thing to do. So you’re trapped between this idea you have of what kids should be doing in the summer—and your worry and panic that this is really harmful. So is that the first time you’d seen the moms’ group get activated in the summer like that?

Pattee: Yeah. And I live in the Pacific Northwest—we have a very outdoor culture. And I’ve just started seeing, year after year, that culture is changing. Now my kids get invited to indoor birthday parties. You drive by a playground in the middle of summer, and it’s empty. I started to see these kinds of indicators all around me. And it became clear to me this was a topic I was really interested in.

In places where it’s very, very hot, there are behavioral adaptations that have taken place over centuries and lifetimes. The culture itself has developed around extreme heat.

Rosin: You mentioned that you had a new baby during the heat wave. So can you say more? Like what happened?

Pattee: Yeah. I had a baby. A/C blasting. The issue was: Would the A/C be sufficient enough that I could stay home? It was 99 degrees, and the next day it was like 95 degrees, and the next day it was like 100 degrees. The next day it was like 102 degrees. And it just kinda went on like that.

Already, having a baby is a very intense experience. Big weather events can bring up really intense emotional and mental challenges. And I had this experience of having my second kid —I, as a climate writer, obviously had incredibly conflicted feelings about having a second kid.

I’m holding this tiny little baby, and I’m sitting in the dark, and all the shades are drawn and the A/C is blasting. It’s so loud. And I just sat that way all day, every day thinking, What have I done?

Rosin: Yeah. I mean, it’s been a while since I had my babies, but why can’t you go outside with the baby in the heat?

Pattee: Babies cannot regulate their own temperature, and they don’t sweat efficiently the way that older children learn to and that adults then obviously can. I could only go outside with the baby at 6 a.m., and we would come back in at 7 a.m. And we would not leave the house again until the following day at 6 a.m.

Rosin: Oh my God. That is very claustrophobic. Do you remember your state of mind during that period?

Pattee: Dark. Yeah. I mean, I think it was exacerbated by having this older kiddo who is like, I wanna go to the park. I wanna go play. And he’s in our living room, he is looking through the window, and he’s watching the neighbor kids jumping on a pogo stick.

And I’m having to explain to him, “You cannot go outside.” And he doesn’t understand. And I’m like, “It’s too hot.” Even now he does this—you know, he will open the front door and put his little hand out and say, “Mom, it’s not too hot.”

You know, I’m not gonna obviously exaggerate. People will go through a lot of worse things every single day. But it was not something I had expected. And I think that took me by surprise.

Rosin: Yeah, I mean when we had the smoke come in from the wildfires in Canada recently, we got an email from the school saying “All outside activities have been suspended.” So I guess we on the East Coast also had our first taste of Maybe our kids’ summer is not gonna look like the ones we had.

Can you tell me a little bit about how you grew up and what your relationship with nature in the woods was?

Pattee: Sure. I grew up on 40 acres in southern Oregon. I grew up deep in the woods, and for about one long summer, we lived in a big army tent on a wooden platform. And then, sort of slowly, my dad built a wood cabin. And at first there wasn’t running water. For a while there wasn’t a great working toilet.

So I spent my entire summer just kind of wandering in the woods, and I would go on hikes. I was really into tracking animals. Nature was very alive. I have this strong connection with this particular tree, and, you know, this particular field.

And I had this also this sense of like, Oh, this is my land. As everyone says in their Tinder profiles: “I love nature.” Instead of this kind of large, anonymous “nature,” it was so specific to this piece of land.

Rosin: You think of little kids having relationships with stuffed animals. Like, This tree has a personality. It knows me. I know it. Like, it was as intimate?

Pattee: Exactly. That it was like the stuffed animals of childhood.

Rosin: As you said, you had your own kids. And how did you transfer this upbringing to them?

Pattee: Now I live in Portland, in a pretty urban area. And it’s been very interesting, because I did not ever question that my kids would grow up the way that I had. I always thought, Of course they’ll wander alone in the woods. Of course they’ll run around barefoot, and we’ll go camping, and we’ll go hiking, and we’ll go swimming. But so far really that has not been the experience.

My [first] kiddo was born in 2018, and in 2020 COVID happened and we all went inside. And then we had our worst wildfire season. And I think since we have had a worse one, and I stayed inside for almost a week on end—like duct-taping the windows because the smoke was so severe.

And then we had, in 2021, the heat dome, and hundreds of people died. A heat dome is essentially when you have extremely high temperatures that do not go away—that stay consistently high. So, a key to surviving extreme heat is that it will cool off, and your body will be able to cool off before it gets hot again the next day.

And once again, children really could not leave the house at all. And then the following summer, I had a baby in a heat wave. So, you know, it’s been … not the childhood I had imagined for them.

Rosin: It’s not clear what you would’ve done without all these disasters, but it sounds like you didn’t even have the chance to ask yourself that question.

Pattee: Yeah; I sort of came to reality when I had my second child and realized, Oh, they’re gonna spend the majority of their summers indoors, and I need to prepare for that now emotionally and logistically. The question really is like: Who are we without nature? Who are my kids going to be if they do not spend their summers walking through trees?

And then I think you can expand that question to humanity at large and ask: Who are we going to be as we start to sever our relationship to the natural world?

Rosin: Okay; before we get to those big philosophical questions, I would like to take care of some of the basics. Because people are experiencing a heat dome in Texas this summer. Like: What do we actually know about “How hot is too hot for children?”

Pattee: So the data that we have shows that ER visits go up, obviously, during extreme heat. There’s certainly, you know, cognitive performance issues that come up in extreme heat. Medical professionals in emergency rooms and clinicians don’t always know what they’re looking at when they see heat illness.

It is possible that we are missing some heat deaths, because they don’t look how we expect. And I predict that over the next 10 years, our understanding and sophistication about tracking heat death is gonna change, and the numbers are gonna be higher than what we had understood.

Rosin: And so is there any data that gives us guidance on what to watch for or what to avoid?

Pattee: What I found was there’s so much that we do not know about kids and heat. And the pediatrician whom I interviewed described it as being in the dark ages, [with] what we understand about children in heat. And the main reason for that is just because it’s very hard to justify doing heat studies on children. Like, we cannot stick them in a sauna and see who comes out.

So much of our data is like being extrapolated from other areas, and that leaves a lot of room for confusion.

Rosin: Yeah. So have there been any studies done that we could look at?

Pattee: No, there have not been studies done that would give us an exact answer of how hot is too hot. I spoke with Dr. Aaron Bernstein, who’s a pediatrician and is also an expert on children and climate.

He talked about this frustrating challenge—when you know something is happening as an expert, but you cannot locate it in the data. He has gone back and looked through emergency-room visits through many, many, many heat waves. And he cannot locate what he knows is happening, which is that more kids are getting sick.

Is that because their parents aren’t taking them in? Is it because their parents aren’t identifying it as heat illness? Is it because they’re not getting that sick? And so, what’s best is for them to just stay home, and then there’s no record of it. So there is not, right now, reliable data around exactly what happens to kids during heat waves and during extreme heat. What we are starting to understand is that for a long time the medical field thought that only children who were athletes and only very ill children were sensitive to heat, and that you had to be running around outside to be sensitive to heat. That is not true.

There also was for a long time this idea that one size fits all: “If my kid did fine in 95 degrees, then your kid should do fine.” And really, what doctors are starting to understand is that there’s so much nuance in that. It’s like, What’s the humidity? Is the child walking through a city or a forest? How hydrated were they the day before? What was the temperature of their bedroom the night before? Like, that’s gonna play into if your child gets heat illness. And so, of course some children are going to be much more sensitive than others.

I didn’t realize if you were taking a stimulant, you are much more sensitive to heat illness. And you might think, well, what does that have to do with kids? But there’s millions of kids who are being medicated for ADHD taking stimulants every single day, and whose parents may not even realize that there is this sensitivity.

Rosin: Wow. I mean, listening to you, I feel simultaneously more educated and more confused. If I were a camp director, or even a parent of little children, is there any reliable guidance or line that they can stick to to make these kinds of decisions?

Pattee: Yeah; I was impressed by how the camp directors that I spoke with, even though they were not following any sort of government rule, they were all very savvy. They follow something called the heat index, and that combines the humidity level with the temperature to let you know when it’s too dangerous to be outside.

There is a lot of great knowledge about very dangerous heat: heat that’s dangerous for everyone. I think it’s the gray area where you start to get a little bit more iffy, like, “At what temperature are we gonna start seeing behavioral issues from kids?” Or, “At what temperature are 15 percent of the kids gonna be susceptible to heat illness, but the rest are gonna be fine? Is that enough to send all kids home early?” You know, these are very big logistics challenges.

Rosin: Got it. Is there a number, by the way? Like, is there a bright line at 104 degrees which is not good for anyone?

Pattee: There really is not a number. And I can see that my insistence on finding that number was speaking to my misunderstanding of this issue—that I think it would be more dangerous to have a set number.

Rosin: Oh, interesting.

Pattee: Because it would allow people to think this is a simple issue, and it’s not. What we need is more education around extreme heat and what heat illness looks like. I think that’s gonna be more important than trying to come up with a hard and fast number that will work across all situations, all ages, and all regions. Because we will never find that.

Rosin: Just as we’re talking about heat, we’re only talking about kids in nature — but actually the things I have read talk a lot about city kids. Particularly kids of color, kids who are poor, kids who don’t have air conditioning. That’s a heat issue, which is very relevant to what you talked about in terms of education and how hot is too hot.

Pattee: Yeah. Researchers have found something called an “urban heat island,” which is essentially what happens when people live in areas where there is so much asphalt, and there are no trees. And what they found is that in one city the temperature can vary as much as 20 degrees.

And so if in Portland we had a 95-degree day, there might be a child who’s being exposed to 20 degrees above that—and his parent is thinking, Well, it’s 95 degrees. Go out and play.

Rosin: So the question is: What’s the number on your street? Do you have air conditioning?

Pattee: I mean, air conditioning is a perfect example of inequality in action, because families of color are much less likely to have air conditioning. And so then you reach this double whammy—where you’re living in an area that is so much hotter than the rest of your city, and you don’t have access to air conditioning.

These are incredibly troubling things that are gonna become sort of the reality of our summers, if they aren’t already. And in these transition years is when things, I think, are gonna get pretty weird.

Rosin: You mean, climate change is already warping our reality? And our kids’ realities? But we just haven’t psychologically caught up to that yet?

Pattee: Absolutely. Yes. This is about adaptation happening in real time.

Rosin: Okay; so here you are, coming to consciousness that things are happening and things are changing. And that we’re just a little behind in adapting. And you visited a summer camp with an environmental educator. Can you tell us more about that?

Pattee: Yeah. So I had the chance to meet with Tony Deis, and he is the co-founder of Trackers. Trackers is one of the biggest summer camps in Oregon. And they had made the decision to rent out an empty department store in a large indoor shopping mall, into a summer camp haven.

Rosin: No!

Pattee: And we’re walking through the linoleum floors and the fluorescent lighting, and it’s completely empty. There’s still clothes hangers here and there, and some signage up and stuff. It was interesting, because I had gone to the shopping mall as a teenager with my friends. And so I’m walking through this empty department store, and I suddenly realized that it is the Marshall’s that I shopped at as a teenager and that I bought makeup at.

And I’m having this intense memory of being a teenager in this store. And of course, now it’s a summer camp. And he’s saying, like, “Here’s the ax-throwing range, and here’s where we’re gonna do art, and here’s the climbing wall.”

It was chilling, because I, at the same time, was looking for summer camps for my kid. So I was all too aware that I was going to be that customer who sent my kid to that camp.

Rosin: Ugh. I mean, I can just imagine the scene of like, he’s juggling and trying to make it seem fun—“And we’re gonna have art over here”—and you’re slowly dying inside.

Pattee: He’s in an impossible situation.

And I felt for him—this person who, you know, is a savvy outdoor survivalist. And I could tell that this was a very, very hard decision for him. And I respected that.

I think that he sees the future, and he’s trying to get ahead of it. And I think that it’s actually a really smart plan, which is, you know, “Let’s adapt.” Now they have this backup location—so they’re still gonna have outdoor camps, but if there’s bad wildfire smoke, their kids can go throw axes.

I mean, you got that message from your school last week saying there won’t be any outdoor activities. But what if they said, “Oh, we’re moving all of our outdoor activities into this awesome, giant play space.” Of course you would prefer that for your kid.

Rosin: I guess? Maybe?

Pattee: I think that there’s a part of us that does not wanna face what is happening in our world. And so we don’t face it by ignoring it, and we end up in much more dangerous and messy situations.

And it is incredibly painful to face it. And you get pushback from people who do not wanna face that summer is different, right? Like, if you host an indoor party for your child in August, which I have done, you will hear from everyone: “That is crazy.” And your own kid will ask you, “Why can’t I have it at the park?”

And so I think that it takes a brave person to say, This is the future. You may not like it, but it’s here, and I’m going to plan for it.

Rosin: When I read your writing about children and heat and summer camp, the first place my mind went, without even knowing you, was, Oh, Emma’s an environmentalist who’s looking for ways to make us all pay attention to climate change. Because she knows by invoking the children and worry about the children, we’ll all jump to attention.

True or false?

Pattee: I’m that mom at the playground who talks about climate change, and nobody will stand by me.

But if you talk about, you know, “My kiddo’s birthday is in August; are you guys doing indoor or outdoor parties?”—you can get into a one-hour-deep discussion that will end with climate change, that will end with a parent saying, “Man, I have an August birthday, and I always had an outdoor birthday party.” Or like, “Man, I wonder about the future.” And so I’m always looking for an inroad.

And if you meet people with the concerns of their everyday life, like summer camp, you can grab a moment of their attention.

Rosin: Oh, that’s so interesting. It’s absolutely true. You’re getting them at a place where they care and can pay attention, and where it’s really under their skin. It’s close to home. And then you can sort of tiptoe your way through the bigger issues.

You said earlier that you grew up in the woods and then moved to the city. When did you start to care about climate change as an adult?

Pattee: I mean, I’ve always been pretty aware of climate change. You know, I was a teenager in the years of the Prius. And my mom once actually backed our van down a hill trying to pick up a piece of Styrofoam and completely totaled the car, because that was her dedication to getting that Styrofoam off the road. So I grew up with An Inconvenient Truth, the documentary that Al Gore did about climate change, and this idea that we need to get off fossil fuels. And yet, climate change never really bothered me in the sense of—I never shed a tear about it. It didn’t keep me up at night. I didn’t spend a lot of my time thinking about it.

Rosin: Like it felt far away. Like it felt like a thing that, you know, you should rally—like picking up trash on the street—but not anything with emotional heft.

Pattee: Absolutely. And I think you can always compare it to your hair. Like, Do I spend more time worried about my hair or climate change? And when I look at that, nope: definitely cared more about my hair all those years. And so I think that’s always a good bar to know how much you care about current topics.

And then I had a child and I went to a moms’ group, a postpartum moms’ group. My kid was three weeks old. And a woman said, “I grew up in Miami, and I’m realizing that by the time my child is an adult, Miami will be underwater.” I was like, What is she talking about? That’s not true. These crazy moms.

And then that night I woke up and I thought, like, Is that true? And I Googled it, and I can say that within about five minutes, I found out that that was true. And that her concerns were not a mom being crazy, but were very legitimate, scientifically backed concerns.

And I felt such existential panic. I saw in this brief moment so clearly that climate change is completely real and terrifying. A very profound threat to our species. And that I had been doing lip service to it all those years.

And so I had this very profound wake up, and once you see it, you really can’t unsee it.

Rosin: Yeah; I’ve been around people who have gone through that. There’s just such profound loss in My children will not have access to the things that I had access to. Like, the continuity of generations is suddenly broken. And there’s just something really scary about that. Is that why it happened in that kind of atmosphere with other moms?

Pattee: I think there is something about having a child that can bring you very face-to-face with climate change. Because I think it gives you a context to think about the future. Like before I had a kid, I never thought about 30 years from now. What? Who even knows what’s gonna happen? That’s bizarre.

And as soon as you have a kid, you think, I wonder what the world’s gonna be like in 30 years. I wonder what my kid’s gonna be doing. I wonder where my kid’s gonna live. You have this urgency to thinking about the future, but you also have this blueprint for the future.

And I think what climate change does is: It makes us realize that our blueprint is fantasy. It is no longer reality. And our children will not live the lives that we have lived. Our children are gonna live drastically different lives than we have lived. And having a child can put that into sharp focus.

Rosin: Maybe we should end on the coyote story? I’m not sure if it will inspire people or depress them. For me it did both. So, can you retell the story that the camp director told you as you were walking around that fluorescent-lighting place that used to be a Marshall’s?

Pattee: So, you know, toward the end of our tour, I kinda sheepishly asked him, “You’re like this total outdoors guy. Isn’t there a part of you that kind of flinches at the idea of keeping kids inside this fluorescent-lit, air-conditioned indoor shopping mall?” And he said that at first he was like, Oh, no way. A team member had suggested it.

And he said, “There’s just no way that will ever happen.” And then he kind of came around to the idea, because of all this severe weather. And then he’d had this realization, which is that a coyote doesn’t look at things as “nature” or “not nature.” Right? A coyote looks at everything as nature. And so what he was gonna do is just be that coyote, and look at the Marshall’s as nature.

Rosin: Wow. It’s a really calming and beautiful idea. It has a lot of resignation in it, but it also has a little bit of optimism in it. And I don’t know how to feel about it. Have you thought about it more since he said that?

Pattee: Yeah. I thought it was beautiful. I instantly thought He’s right—but standing in that Marshall’s, you know, every cell in my body was saying “No.”

Rosin: Of course. I bet. I mean, the big, big philosophical question that’s in your head was, Who are we without nature? And so hearing that coyote story, I feel like that is an answer to that question. Like possibly, we’re people who live in a different kind of nature, or we have redefined nature.

And I wonder about these camps, thinking about adaptation, if you’ve landed anywhere with a “Who are we without nature?” question.

Pattee: You know, as part of my journey through climate grief to some kind of reconciliation, I think I have had to become very resigned and excited about the concept of adaptation and evolution. And to see that things that I thought of as forever—things like nature, things like walking in the woods—that I cannot really see as separate from my identity.

To see that those are just temporary states of being, and that things that I think of as absolute are not absolute, and to try to find some excitement about what the future might hold, even if it looks nothing like anything I’ve ever known.

Rosin: I love it, because I feel like it takes something natural, which is this idea of the cycles of nature. Like, everything changes; everything becomes other things. We’re obviously mutually inhabiting a very optimistic space right now, but it takes that “cycles of nature” idea and it rolls with it. So I feel like that’s maybe the best choice we have right now.

Pattee: Yeah. I mean it is, right? Like, I was thinking today about how we all think of adaptation as this kind of sexy thing some tech bro is gonna create for us. Like, This was the past, and now we’ve adapted, and this is the future. And they unveil whatever it is: the AI garden.

But this is adaptation. Adaptation is a summer-camp headquarters in Marshall’s. Adaptation is moms on a Facebook group saying, “Is it too hot to go to the park?” Like, it’s messy. It’s brutal. And we’re in it.

Rosin: Yeah. And it’s done day to day. And we’re in it, exactly. We’re in it.