The doors aren’t open, but the line already wraps around the building at the Lowernine Levee Food Pantry in New Orleans. They come early, even on a Saturday, to avoid the worst of the August heat. It’s just before 9 a.m., and it’s already 85 degrees and rising.
Huddled in the shade of the building, Charles Johnson waits for canned goods and fresh produce. The 65-year-old said the heat feels familiar.
“This heat feels like after a hurricane passed,” Johnson said. “But it was never like that before. After a hurricane pass, man, you’ve got tremendous heat. And that’s how it feels sometimes.”
Across the street from the food pantry is the Industrial Canal Flood Wall. A mural painted by teenage artists depicting scenes of Hurricane Katrina covers the section where the levee breached after the storm, flooding the entire Lower 9th Ward neighborhood.
Climate change helped make Katrina the devastating storm that it was. Research from Climate Central, an independent climate research group, shows it increased the storm’s maximum sustained wind speed by 5 miles per hour.
It’s also driving up temperatures in New Orleans today, making summers more than four degrees hotter since the 1970s, forcing air-conditioners to work harder and use more power. This increase also makes it harder to cool off and recover, leading to greater heat stress and health risks.
Electricity bills in New Orleans are also rising with the temperature. The average bill has increased by at least 60% since 2019, with customers also paying additional fees for upgrades and repairs to infrastructure damage caused by hurricanes. Base rates alone — not including fuel costs or storm recovery charges — are up more than 28%.
Rising rates combined with extreme heat and older, less-efficient homes place a heavier “energy burden” — the ratio of income spent on energy costs — on seniors with lower, fixed incomes, like Johnson.
“That’s why I’m here in this line,” Johnson said. “With the prices of food and all the utility bills and stuff like that. Kind of have to cut back on other things.”
For seniors like Johnson, the solutions can’t come soon enough. It’s not just about how the heat affects his health — it’s changing how he lives in New Orleans. He doesn’t go to restaurants, second lines or parades anymore.
“There’s been times when I was to catch the bus to go somewhere, then turn around, like damn it’s too hot,” he says. “I used to be jumping around here and there, but I don’t do that anymore.”
Seniors at higher risk
Heat affects seniors differently, and extreme heat can mean life or death for people over 60.
As our bodies age, they become less efficient at cooling down. We sweat less, get dehydrated more easily and aren’t as able to adjust to sudden changes in temperature. Seniors are also more likely to have a chronic medical condition and take prescription medications that can affect how the body responds to heat.
Katrina destroyed around 200,000 trees in New Orleans, creating “heat islands” in places like the 9th Ward, where the baking concrete can make it feel more than eight degrees hotter.
The heat often feels inescapable, as the city is also seeing increasing nighttime temperatures driven by factors such as heat islands, humidity and heat-trapping pollution. Since 1970, the average summer minimum temperature has gone up 5.8 degrees in New Orleans.
Johnson said he tries to use less AC at night to help lower his utility bill. But the heat wakes him up.
“I do get up sometimes and just ramp it back up because it’s too hot. And most of the time when it wakes me up… I can’t go back to sleep,” Johnson said. “And I know that a lack of sleep affects other things in your body. I'm not a doctor, but I know I'm being affected.”
With a whole-home HVAC system, Johnson has it easier than some of his neighbors. Many in the Lower 9th Ward rely on window units, which are less efficient and less effective at cooling. Some, like Nell Lewis, who lives in the home his grandfather built, have no air-conditioning at all.
Lewis volunteers at the food pantry, helping stock shelves and distribute food. But in an irony not lost on him, he works for an air-conditioning repair company.
“A lot of homes don’t have AC. It’s a luxury,” Lewis said. “And you can lose your AC from overrunning it. You have your AC on all day, and now you’re calling the AC man out every month because you’re overrunning.”
Johnson and other seniors, however, say they don’t have a choice. Turning their AC off or using less means it will take longer and use more power to cool their home to a safe and comfortable level. And with New Orleans’ humidity, turning off the AC lets heat build up even more and moisture collects inside.
Heavier energy burdens
New Orleans has some of the highest energy burden rates in the country, especially for people with lower incomes, according to a report from the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE).
Energy burden is calculated as the percentage of household income spent on energy bills. A household that spends more than 6% of its income on energy is considered “highly burdened.”
In New Orleans, a quarter of low-income homeowners pay more than 27% of their income on utility bills — more than four times the threshold. Seniors with lower incomes feel the weight even more.
“It really does not affect everyone equally,” said Forest Bradley-Wright, state and utility policy director at ACEEE. “If you're on a fixed income, with less income to begin with, that's a much larger percentage of your total financial resources paying that energy bill.”
A greater energy burden means tradeoffs, like spending less on groceries and skipping doctor visits or medication refills. For seniors, that can put health — already at risk from extreme heat — in even more jeopardy.
Compounding the issue is the fact that many homes in New Orleans are older and less efficient. They weren’t built to be sealed tightly, but for airflow. As heat becomes more extreme, keeping a home cool becomes even harder as conditioned air escapes and outside air flows in.
Efficiency wasn’t widely pursued in New Orleans until after Katrina. Bradley-Wright came to the city to help rebuild and helped start the “Energy Smart Program,” designed to make homes more efficient and reduce energy costs.
But some barriers make it harder for people with lower incomes to make energy efficiency improvements. Many households face high energy bills but lack the resources to make upgrades that could lower them.
“If the energy efficiency program is counting on you first making the improvement and then receiving a rebate incentive, you may not get to participate at all,” Bradley-Wright said.
Derek Mills, manager of the Energy Smart Program at Entergy New Orleans, the city’s utility provider, said air conditioning and heating account for about 55–60% of a home’s utility bill. Since its founding, the Energy Smart Program has had more than 150,000 participants and provided over $70 million in incentives and rebates.
The program provides rebates for central AC and window units, as well as small upgrades like switching to LED bulbs. For low-income residents, upgrades can be free. This year, Entergy began hosting events and distributing flyers in neighborhoods where the heat-island effect is most severe.
“It’s a large number that have taken advantage of it,” Mills said. “But we’re still pushing on until everybody has taken advantage of it.”
Rising rates
A more efficient home can help lower energy use, but it can’t solve rising rates — those are proposed by Entergy.
Logan Burke, executive director of the Alliance for Affordable Energy, said the increases seniors like Johnson feel stem from deeper, systemic issues in how Entergy operates and how the city regulates the utility.
Since 2019, base rates in New Orleans alone have increased more than 28% — not including fuel costs or storm recovery charges. The company has also historically underspent on maintenance because, unlike new infrastructure, those costs don’t generate profit.
The result has been a cycle of unreliability, higher bills and new surcharges as Entergy seeks to recover costs from storm damage and new infrastructure.
“These things just kind of pancake up together,” Burke said. “And obviously, the more Entergy spends, the more goes on our bills for us to have to pay again.”
In 2024, Entergy made more than $1 billion in profit.
Burke said the city and Entergy could take steps to relieve that burden, from investing more in efficiency programs that reach renters, to creating a “percentage of income” payment plan that caps utility bills at a fixed share of household income.
“If you’re on a fixed income, rather than your bill being tied to exactly how much you use, your rate is tied to how much you make overall,” Burke said. “So rather than the burden being 25%, it can only be 6% of your income.”
She also pointed to models in other states, like North Carolina, where utilities or even health insurers have invested in weatherization because they recognize the link between energy costs, extreme heat and health outcomes.
“It really shows that health companies understand there is a connection here,” Burke said. “And that there’s potentially a way to address this challenge with some money that would, in the long run, be much cheaper.”
Climate Central’s Helen Brush and Melba Newsome contributed to this report.
This story was produced by the Gulf States Newsroom, a collaboration between Mississippi Public Broadcasting, WBHM in Alabama, WWNO and WRKF in Louisiana and NPR. Support for public health coverage comes from The Commonwealth Fund.
