Hundreds of thousands of households, mostly in the Southeast United States, were without power when a dangerous cold snap hit this week, just days after the previous weekend’s winter storm buffeted large swathes of the country. Officials in several of the affected states have warned that these outages could linger for some time—in Mississippi, one emergency management coordinator told CNN that they might last “weeks, not days.”

Power outages during severe weather events are increasingly common. And they can easily be fatal, particularly when paired with extreme temperatures. What would it take to at least reduce the frequency of these outages, even as the severe weather driving them increases?

“There are several points of failure that lead to these kinds of widespread power outages,” Gudrun Thompson, senior attorney and energy program leader at the Southern Environmental Law Center, told me by phone. She pointed not just to the most recent storm but also to Winter Storm Elliott, which hit the Southeast hard in 2022, and Winter Storm Uri, which devastated Texas in 2021.

Getting electricity into homes happens in a few stages: It begins with power generation, then transmission (where it goes to substations), and finally distribution to the homes themselves. Here, the amount of power demand also plays a role. “Each of these need to be tackled, and some of the solutions won’t address all three of these,” said Adam Kurland, a federal energy attorney with the Environmental Defense Fund.

But both Thompson and Kurland pointed to a few things that could make a difference. “On the supply side, the biggest thing is just having a portfolio of diverse resources,” Kurland said. Renewables aren’t just good from a climate and environment perspective, he said, “they are also usually the most reliable during extreme weather events, and that’s been proven out by a number of studies that have found that both gas and coal have resulted in bottlenecks during extreme weather events.”

That’s particularly true in some of the regions suffering from outages this week. “You’ve got this legacy power system where the electric grid is still in this very twentieth-century model of big central station power plants,” said Thompson. “You’ve still got coal plants running in the South, you’ve got some nuclear plants, you’ve got a lot of new and old gas plants.” And “in some of these winter storms, we’ve literally seen these piles of coal freeze, so they couldn’t run the coal-fired plants.”

Gas supply networks are similarly vulnerable, and were a major factor in the Texas outages in 2021. Initial analysis from the energy and climate policy firm Energy Innovation suggests gas generation within PJM Interconnection—the country’s largest grid operator, serving over 65 million people across the mid-Atlantic to the upper South and Midwest—fell by 10 gigawatts during this most recent storm.

This contradicts everything that conservative politicians, in particular, tend to say in the wake of these events—certainly after the Texas outages in 2021. “I often get asked by reporters, ‘What do you say to what the electric utility is saying about how this winter storm event just proves they need more gas?’” Thompson said. “It’s a false narrative. Clean energy resources are more reliable, more affordable, less risky for consumers, when you kind of put them all together as a portfolio. You can’t rely on any one source, so you’ll hear fossil industry apologists saying, ‘Well, the sun doesn’t always shine, the wind doesn’t always blow.’ That’s true,” she said, but no one’s advocating relying on a single source.

And that points to another thing that could be done to eliminate these outages: a more interconnected grid. This was one of the main factors in 2021 in Texas, Kurland noted. “Texas’s power grid, ERCOT, is primarily islanded from the rest of the United States, so there weren’t a lot of connections there to be able to bring power into Texas during that storm.” If the goal is to build resilience to severe weather events, we need “an electrical grid that’s bigger than the weather,” Kurland said. With better transmission lines connecting different regions, it won’t matter if the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing or severe cold is kneecapping fossil fuel generation in a particular location, because “you’re now able to dispatch power from one side of the United States to the other.”

Microgrids tied into the main grid, as well as better power storage, could also play a role. And then there’s the option of burying power lines, which would address the problem not only of the lines sagging under ice in the winter but also of stray sparks causing wildfires in other seasons. This isn’t feasible everywhere, Kurland emphasized, pointing to water tables and local geology. But even for such inhospitable locales, there are different, more advanced types of wires that are less vulnerable to sagging and the like. “There are some incentives that the federal government and the states can apply to be able to unlock those types of advanced technologies on the transmission system.”

When it comes to federal incentives, though, both Kurland and Thompson noted that a lot of the policies that could make households and the electrical grid less vulnerable in severe weather have been recently reversed, or the associated funds delayed. That’s true not just for, say, offshore wind projects but also for the weatherization programs that could both help reduce strain on the grid during cold snaps and help people survive brief outages when they occur. “As of last month, there were still a number of states trying to get that funding for cold snaps and extreme weather events like this,” said Kurland. He pointed to funds already designated to states via the Weatherization Assistance Program, slated to be released in June 2025, which still hadn’t arrived as of late December. Under the Trump administration, the Department of Energy has proposed scrapping the program altogether.

The entire grid feels the effect when homes aren’t weatherized, Kurland said. Weatherization is “one way that you can reduce that demand so there isn’t a big draw on the system.” If homes are drawing a large amount of energy, it can actually prolong outages. “When you have all the customers with the thermostats turned all the way up waiting for the power to come on, that can just trip that system again.”

Thompson also pointed to the Trump Environmental Protection Agency “unlawfully” canceling grants that had already been awarded for community solar programs and similar projects, in the Southern states where she works. “The Trump administration, even though they say they have this energy affordability agenda, is actually working to undermine successful policies and programs that would actually help households to afford their electricity bills,” Thompson said.

Survey results released this week by Yale Climate Communication find 61 percent of Americans underestimate how worried their fellow Americans are about global warming.

Time for some courage in the climate fight, too

I’ve been reading a lot of good essays from climate writers watching and troubled by the events in Minnesota in the last few weeks. Emily Atkin’s essay, over on Heated, is definitely worth your time, as is Bill McKibben’s reflection on just how wrong politicians have been, time and time again, when guessing what ordinary people care about.

… it’s not just the Trump administration that those brave people faced down, it’s the pundit class too, who insisted over and over that progressives should avoid talking about immigration because it wasn’t politically popular. The other subject we’ve been told to sideline is “climate change,” for fear of offending voters more interested in “affordability.” (Former energy secretary Jennifer Granholm told an industry audience Monday that “on Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs, climate does not rise as much as how much I’m paying for my electricity bill,” which is one of those things that sounds clever until you meet someone who lost their home to a wildfire.)

I actually have no problem with the advice to focus on electric bills—as I wrote a couple of weeks ago, I think affordability, especially of electricity, is an issue that helps both elect Democrats and reduce carbon emissions, since anyone interested in the cost of power is going to be building sun and wind. But I also don’t think that talking about global warming is a mistake—most Americans, polls show, understand the nature of the crisis, and want action to stem it. It isn’t the single most salient issue because all of us live in this particular moment (and in this particular moment the fact that federal agents are executing citizens who dare to take cellphone pictures of them is definitely the most salient issue) but it is nonetheless a net plus for politicians, especially in blue states.

Read Bill McKibben’s full newsletter at The Crucial Years.

This article first appeared in Life in a Warming World, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Heather Souvaine Horn. Sign up here.

On Wednesday, President Trump traveled to Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum and delivered a speech that was unusually unhinged, even by his standards.

He claimed to have solved the energy requirements of the AI boom. He said, “There are windmills all over Europe, there are windmills all over the place, and they are losers.” He claimed would-be drillers had come to him asking for his help against the radical left so they could extract oil in the North Sea. He said China sells wind turbines to fools, but “I haven’t been able to find any wind farms in China.… They sell them to the stupid people, but they don’t use them themselves.”

He claimed the United States deserved to get Greenland now after defending it in World War II. He said the U.S. has even better battleships now than it did then. He mixed up Greenland and Iceland, saying Iceland “loved me. They called me Daddy.” He said the U.S. needed ownership of Greenland because “you can’t defend it on a lease.… Psychologically, who the hell wants to defend a license agreement or a lease which is a large piece of ice in the middle of the ocean, where, if there is a war, much of the action will take place on that ice? Think of it, the missiles will be flying right over the center of that piece of ice.”

He talked about young soldiers’ heads being “blown off” in the war in Ukraine. He threatened to prosecute people over the results of the 2020 election. He boasted about his chauffeur being able to do a better job than NATO generals, “and he makes slightly less than 50[k].” He mentioned Emmanuel Macron’s sunglasses, and affected a French accent while relating a conversation he and Macron had about prescription drug pricing. He said he was working “to ensure the U.S. remains the crypto capital of the world.” He said Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar “comes from a country that’s not a country.” He said he could destroy the U.S. housing market if he wanted to.

It wasn’t so long ago that traditional media outlets felt obligated to pretend that the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos had something to do with saving the world. Even after financial executives crashed the economy into the Great Recession, the technocratic optimism of the Obama years drove the myth forward. (U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner was treated like something between a genius and a Hollywood philanthropist.) We were meant to believe that the CEOs weren’t there to lobby politicians, the politicians weren’t there to shop for lucrative post-political gigs, and the academics weren’t there for the caviar or to see Charlize Theron. Instead, all of them were there to solve malaria—or global poverty, war, HIV, and the climate crisis.

The climate crisis was always the issue that most thoroughly exposed the absurdity of this conceit. With malaria, poverty, HIV, and world peace, leaders could at least pretend that getting everyone together in the same ski town for a big party was like buying a lot of athletic wear for a New Year’s resolution to go to the gym.

With climate change, however, it was more like buying a lot of athletic wear and then taking a cab across town in the opposite direction from the gym. Oil companies were formal partners for the event, which was marketed as being carbon-neutral while it involved a bunch of corporate and governmental executives flying via private jet to an Alpine town whose signature sport climate change is currently decimating. The confab hyped “solutions” like carbon credits and carbon capture that would allow corporations to keep polluting as usual—even as rigorous reporting showed a lot of carbon credits weren’t backed by real reductions and carbon capture wasn’t yet feasible at scale. Panelists who pointed out the problems with this approach, as TNR’s Kate Aronoff noted in 2023, were patronized and dismissed. The companies that were bragging about their net-zero goals in those years have now abandoned them altogether.

Now Trump has dropped this wild, threat-filled tirade into the mix. He’s demanding ownership of Greenland, threatening catastrophic trade wars, hinting at military takeover, all while asking world leaders to pay $1 billion to join some sort of security racket that’s presumably intended to replace NATO, which he seems determined to destroy. There’s a rich tradition in media of treating Davos as an entertainment story, but that may be hard when there’s a credible risk of armed conflict or economic destruction.

Yet as off-the-wall as Trump’s speech was, it’s hard to argue that he fundamentally misunderstood the assignment. Yes, this is different in kind from what has gone before. But Davos has always been a racket—albeit one that’s usually a little more veiled by civil discussion and closed doors. Maybe this is the year that finally exposes the Davos myth. Trump’s tirade was terrifying, but we all should have been scared much, much earlier.

That’s how much extra land would be needed, according to a recent estimate reported by The Guardian, if Americans were to modify their diets even part of the way toward RFK Jr.’s new food pyramid—increasing meat consumption by 25 percent.

A California Climate Expert Is Working to Restore Climate Risk Scores Deleted by Zillow

Last fall, the real estate platform Zillow quietly stopped publishing climate risk ratings on its listings. Having one’s home wiped out tends to ruin people when it doesn’t kill them, but talking about that is apparently too much of a bummer for the real estate industry. Now, Inside Climate News reports, there may be a way to DIY it:

Neil Matouka, who previously managed the development and launch of California’s Fifth Climate Change Assessment, is developing a proof of concept plugin that provides climate data to Californians in place of what Zillow has removed. When a user views a California Zillow listing, the plugin automatically displays data on wildfire and flood risk, sea level rise and extreme heat exposure.

“We don’t need perfect data,” Matouka said. “We need publicly available, consistent information that helps people understand risk.” … Both independent academic research and research conducted by Zillow has found that disclosing flood risk can decrease the sale price of a home. “Climate risk data didn’t suddenly become inconvenient. It became harder to ignore in a stressed market,” First Street said.

Read Claire Barber’s full report at Inside Climate News.

This article first appeared in Life in a Warming World, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Heather Souvaine Horn. Sign up here.

The Trump administration will stop counting lives saved in its cost-benefit analyses of air pollution regulations, and instead will only consider the cost to businesses. “It’s a seismic shift that runs counter to the [Environmental Protection Agency]’s mission statement, which says the agency’s core responsibility is to protect human health and the environment,” The New York Times reported this week. “The change could make it easier to repeal limits on [fine particulate matter and ozone] from coal-burning power plants, oil refineries, steel mills and other industrial facilities across the country.”

Declaring the demise of climate policy is practically a weekly media event these days. “The climate agenda’s fall from grace over the past year has been stunning—in scale and scope,” wrote Axios’s Amy Harder in this week’s installment, noting that the president recently withdrew from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. “Whether this collapse in climate-change ambition proves permanent or temporary will shape the planet—which is still warming in unprecedented ways—and trillions of dollars in global energy investment.”

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