For those with power and rich donors – the AC is always on, even if it’s melting outside

Florida has an estimated 1.8 million outdoor workers, predominantly migrants, who are exposed to increasingly brutal weather conditions in a state where business interests dominate policy making. Photograph: Thalia Juarez/The Guardian

A staple of dystopian science fictions is an inner sanctum of privilege and an outer world – chemical desert/airless waste/District 12 – peopled by the desperate poor. The insiders, living off the exploited labour of the outlands, are indifferent to the horrors beyond their walls. Well, here we are.

Even as extreme heat raged across the southern United States this summer, the governors of Florida and Texas struck down heat protections for outdoor workers. Construction companies and agricultural firms lobbied against the rights of workers to water, shade and rest breaks when temperatures soar – and Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott, two men also lavishly funded by the fossil fuel industry, gave them what they wanted.