Climate & Energy · Monday, 20 July 2026

01 · Briefing · what happened

Heat is quietly taking a cut of India's pay packets

Climate & Energy 7 min 76 sources

New research puts a figure on a cost that never gets counted — while a central bank shuts a door on coal without banning it, and Finland heats its schools with sand.

Key takeaways

Extreme heat cost India's informal workers 6.6% of their pay last year, arriving not as a disaster but as smaller wages and medical bills.
The Bank of England will stop taking coal-linked bonds as security from October, making coal dearer to borrow against without banning anything.
Heat kills more Americans each year than hurricanes, tornadoes and floods combined, and 67% of US voters now link worse heatwaves to climate change.

A heatwave that shows up in a payslip

Extreme heat cost India’s informal workers an average of 6.6% of their pay in 2024. That comes from new analysis by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), a London research group, shared with the Guardian [1]. Outdoor workers — farming, construction, transport — lost close to 9%, about £112 (US$151) across the year [1]. In Rajasthan, the desert state where heatwaves run longest, informal workers lost 8.3% of their income [1].

The study counts 21.1 working days lost to heat each year [1]. India has roughly 550 million people in informal work, about nine in ten workers [1]. They have no sick pay and no employment security. When a site shuts, nobody compensates them [1].

Why it happens. Heat does not only kill; it slows. Past a certain point the body cannot shed heat fast enough. Hard physical work then becomes dangerous, and output drops. The IIED analysis counts three routes to lost hours: illness that stops work, reduced capacity while working, and worksites suspending operations [1]. Added up, the researchers estimate heat costs India at least £58bn a year — about 2% of its economic output [1].

Inder and Laxmi Kumar mix cement on a site in Gurugram, outside Delhi. They earn 800 rupees, about £6, each a day [1]. Both were laid up with fever and exhaustion, and doctors told them to rest. They went back after losing eight days’ wages. “We kept working because if we stopped, we wouldn’t be paid,” Laxmi said [1]. Ritu Bharadwaj, the IIED’s climate finance director, calls heat a “poverty multiplier” [1].

For an ordinary person. This is what a warming climate looks like when it arrives without a disaster. Not a wrecked house — a thinner pay packet and a bill for medicine.

What American voters now say about the weather

About 61% of likely US voters believe extreme weather has grown more frequent over the past five years [4]. That splits 72% of Democrats, 63% of independents and 46% of Republicans [4]. The polling is by Data for Progress, a progressive firm, and was shared with the Guardian [4]. It is one survey from one outfit, so treat it as a reading rather than a settled fact.

Heatwaves topped the list of weather people link to climate change. Some 67% said climate change is making them worse, including 48% of Republicans [4]. That is the highest cross-party share of any weather type asked about [4]. Wildfires came in at 64%, droughts 63%, flooding 62%, hurricanes 59% [4].

Grace Adcox, the firm’s senior climate strategist, put the heat result down to reach: almost everyone in the US has lived through unusually hot weeks [4]. Worth pairing with a fact from the same reporting. High temperatures kill more Americans in a year than hurricanes, tornadoes and floods combined [4].

A central bank shuts a door without slamming it

From October the Bank of England will stop accepting bonds linked to thermal coal as collateral [5]. Thermal coal is the coal burned in power stations to make electricity [5].

The mechanism matters more than it sounds. The Bank routinely lends to commercial banks — Barclays, Lloyds, NatWest, HSBC — so they can settle payments and keep running [5]. Those banks must hand over bonds as security, which the Bank keeps if the loan goes bad [5]. Take a class of bond off the eligible list and it becomes less useful to hold. Demand falls, and borrowing against it gets dearer. Nothing is forbidden. The terms simply move.

The Bank framed it as risk, not policy. Coal companies “can be exposed to potential financial risks connected to the adjustment of the economy towards net zero,” it said [5]. It will also discount the value of bonds in other relevant sectors — a “haircut”, meaning it lends less against them than they are nominally worth [5].

The policy is stricter than most Western peers, including the European Central Bank [5]. The Bank made little noise about it, publishing the notice on its website in early June [5]. About 150 of the world’s largest financial firms already restrict business with thermal coal, according to the non-profit Reclaim Finance [5]. Ellie McLaughlin of the campaign group Positive Money called it “a strong signal”, while arguing the exclusions should go wider [5].

Cold air, hot salt, warm sand

The hardest problem in clean power is not making it but keeping it. Sun and wind arrive on their own schedule, not on demand. Several projects are now storing energy without conventional lithium batteries [8].

At Carrington in Greater Manchester, the British firm Highview Power is building a “cryobattery” [8]. Surplus renewable electricity cools air to −196C, shrinking it to one seven-hundredth of its volume. Letting it expand back into gas drives a turbine [8]. Due to start by year end, it is designed for 300MWh of storage and 50MW for six hours — enough for close to half a million homes [8].

In the Nevada desert, the decade-old Crescent Dunes scheme takes the opposite approach. It uses 10,000 panes to heat potassium and sodium nitrate to 560C [8]. That heat holds for 10 hours after sunset, then spins a turbine [8].

In Pornainen, southern Finland, a sand battery stands 13 metres tall and 15 wide [8]. It stores heat for schools, libraries and town halls. In summer it can cover nearly a month of the district’s heat demand, and close to a week in winter [8]. It should end oil use in the local heating network and cut wood chips by about 60% [8].

At scale, the United Arab Emirates has been pairing 5.2GW of solar with 19GWh of batteries [8]. It is the largest such scheme in the world, intended to run the equivalent of half a million homes through the night [8]. Many of these approaches avoid the scramble for lithium, cobalt and nickel, and can be recycled after a service life of around 20 years [8].

Cheaper cars, dearer averages

Battery electric models became more affordable in Germany between 2020 and 2025 [2]. Yet the average price of an electric car sold there rose over the same period [2]. The reason is the mix: carmakers shifted towards larger, pricier models, according to data from the International Council on Clean Transportation and Fraunhofer ISI [2]. The average tells you what carmakers chose to build. It does not tell you what any given car costs.

The weather ledger

A wildfire tore through towns near Fréjus on France’s Mediterranean coast on Sunday [15]. It forced hamlet evacuations and burned about 180 hectares (445 acres) by evening, and trains between Toulon and Les Arcs were suspended [15]. “The fire spread extremely quickly in the context of this heatwave and extreme drought,” the local prefect, Simon Babre, said [15]. The forecast high in Les Arcs was 38C — 11.4C above the normal high for 19 July measured over 1961 to 1990 [15].

In Scotland, more than 100 firefighters surrounded a six-square-kilometre wildfire in the Cairngorms after several days [51]. Lower winds and Saturday’s rain helped, and evacuated residents began returning on Sunday [51]. Off Florida, the US National Hurricane Center gave a low-pressure area over the Gulf of Mexico an 80% chance of becoming a cyclone within 48 hours [14].

And a small one worth ending on. Seagrass planted at Alnmouth in Northumberland last November, feared lost, has come through the winter alive and growing, Durham Wildlife Trust said [60]. Two other trial patches fared worse: the Wansbeck planting failed, and the Jarrow one is uncertain after mud washed over it [60]. Seagrass meadows store carbon and shelter young fish. They were once common along this coast, before human activity and habitat loss thinned them out [60]. “There’s been so many setbacks,” the trust’s research officer Dr Martina Bristow said, calling the one surviving site “really quite promising” [60].

02 · Lesson · why it matters

The damage that leaves no wreckage

Some harm destroys something that was there. Some quietly removes something that would have been. Only the first kind sets off alarms.

Eight days

Inder and Laxmi Kumar mix cement on a construction site outside Delhi. This summer the heat put them both in bed with fever and exhaustion. They lost eight days’ wages, then went back before they were well, because the pay stops when the work stops.

Nothing was destroyed. No building fell down. No river came through the door. If you photographed that site the day they were ill, you would see an ordinary site on an ordinary hot day.

Now put that next to a flood. A flood takes the house. There is a before and an after, a date, a photograph, a number of homes.

Both are losses. Only one leaves anything behind to look at.

Two shapes

It helps to separate them.

Destruction removes something that already existed. A burnt hectare, a washed-out bridge, a wrecked car. It leaves evidence, and the evidence sits in one place at one time.

Subtraction removes something that would have existed. Hours not worked. Wages not earned. A harvest smaller than it would have been. Nothing is broken, because the thing never got made.

Arithmetic does not care about the difference. Six-and-a-half per cent of a year’s pay, taken from hundreds of millions of people, is larger than almost any single disaster. In one country, in one year, it runs to about two per cent of everything the economy produces. But there is no rubble anywhere.

And here is the fact that shows how strange this is: in the United States, heat kills more people each year than hurricanes, tornadoes and floods put together. One of those gets the emergency broadcast.

Our instruments only read one shape

This is not carelessness. It is the design of the machinery.

Nearly every system we built to notice harm needs a moment before it will do anything.

A disaster declaration needs an event with a date. An insurance claim needs a damaged object. A relief fund needs a boundary — who is inside the affected area and who is outside. A news story needs something that happened today rather than something that has been happening. A death certificate needs a cause, and it was too hot for three weeks is not one of the boxes.

Subtraction has none of that. No date, no perimeter, no object, no photograph. So it passes straight through every filter — not because anyone decided to ignore it, but because it never trips a switch.

The machinery is working exactly as built. It was built for the other shape.

What the silence decides

The missing alarm is not neutral. It quietly settles who pays.

When a harm sets off the alarms, the cost gets spread. Insurers pay, relief funds pay, governments pay, and the weight ends up distributed across many shoulders — most of them belonging to people who were nowhere near it. When a harm sets off nothing, it stays exactly where it landed.

So the heat bill lands on the person standing in the heat, and stays there. A bricklayer in Gurugram carries the whole of their own nine per cent. Not because anyone selected them for it, but because there is no mechanism to move it, and no mechanism means it does not move.

Underneath that sits an arrangement so ordinary it looks like a fact of nature: no work, no pay. It behaves sensibly when the reason for not working is a choice. On a day when the air itself stops the work, the same rule hands the entire weather risk to the person least able to absorb it. It does so silently, because nobody has to decide anything for it to happen.

Rules that pose as physics are usually the ones doing the most work.

The slow lever

There is a mirror image of this, and it showed up this month in a place nobody watches.

The Bank of England will stop taking coal-linked bonds as security for the loans it makes to commercial banks. Coal is not banned. Nobody voted. There is no date on which something stops. A class of asset simply becomes slightly less useful to hold, so it becomes slightly dearer to borrow against, so over years the money drifts elsewhere. The notice went up on a website in June with almost no noise.

That is the symmetry worth holding. A harm with no moment usually gets no response — and on the rare occasion it gets one, the response has no moment either. Both are invisible for the same reason. We miss them in both directions.

Where you are standing

The habit runs through ordinary life too. Most of what has actually been taken from any of us did not arrive as an event. The hour that dissolved in a room too hot to think in. The bill that drifted up by a little every year. The plan quietly made smaller. We keep close count of what breaks and almost none of what thins out.

And nobody has the full view. The worker sees a short week. The site manager sees slower output. The economist sees a productivity figure with no faces in it. The central banker sees a haircut on a bond. Each of those is an honest reading of one small part, and none of them adds up to the total, because there is no seat where the total is visible. The two-per-cent figure is not something anyone felt. It is something somebody had to go looking for.

Which puts the rest of us in an awkward and fairly permanent position. Our instruments read one shape of loss well and the other shape barely at all. Whatever number we currently hold for how much is being taken is not a measurement. It is a floor.

03 · Lab · your turn

The Response Desk

Allocate relief across reports that carry a number and reports that don't, and watch which losses your instruments never saw.

04 · Hope · carry this

The heat was taking those wages long before anyone put a number on it. What changed this week is that someone went and counted — and counting is where nearly every fix has had to start.