The Texas cold weather disaster is a global warning of climate change

But when cold weather hit Texas, the popular independent southern state in America, the early modernity of snow and ice quickly evaporated. With temperatures dropping for low teenage days, the state, despite its dominant energy sector, saw rolling blackouts transform into prolonged power outages that left more than 4 million people in the dark and cold. For many, it was shocking to see One of them is the wealthier countries of America suffer from such conditions. Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts, whose state has experienced smaller energy problems, said it was “unacceptable” for power outages to occur in this country. I mean, this is the USA. “We are not some developing countries,” Ricketts told KETV News in Omaha. However, some have suggested that this was not a foreign problem but a symptom of apparent discomfort in Texas. “Sometimes, something will happen in Texas to remind the people who live here that we live in a failed state,” Samantha Grasso wrote to the Discourse Blog, adding that leaders believe that “it is more important to prioritize short-term gains than investing in people for their own sake.” Long-term gain. ”The scenes in Texas are broadcast around the world, another blow to America’s global image, already tarnished by the pandemic and the January 6 insurgency. But there may be lessons for everyone in what is happening to the Lone Star state – and a warning for anyone unprepared for climate change. At this point, it is difficult to provide a simple answer as to why this energy-producing state is so fast. Turned into a belt of power outages. Some Republicans in Texas have already indicated the switch to renewable energy, saying the state’s wind turbines have failed due to icy conditions. “The biggest mistake in Texas was learning so many renewable energy lessons from California,” Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Tex) said Tuesday. But experts noted that Texas was only receiving about 10 percent of its energy from wind turbines, and most importantly, wind turbines can operate in the cold. In Germany, where temperatures are so low and wind energy generates nearly a third of the energy used during the first half of last year, power cuts rarely occur. There are working wind turbines in colder climates, including Alaska, Greenland, and Siberia, and there are turbines within the Arctic Circle that can operate in temperatures as low as -22 degrees Fahrenheit. Newer models of wind turbines have carbon fibers attached to the wings, allowing them to be heated automatically in cold weather, and Texas does not use these models for an obvious reason: They generally do not experience this cold. What happened this week is really extraordinary. The temperature in Dallas on Monday was 14 degrees Celsius, about 50 degrees lower than normal for the month of February. Experts attributed the weather to the mass of cold air coming from the Arctic, as Texas, which many boast of low taxes and small government, was not on the budget for a strange cold. But this was not only felt in renewables. Jinjoo Lee pointed out in the Wall Street Journal that natural gas and coal powered power supplies have not been fully equipped for the winter, while the “somewhat market-driven” approach the grid uses, known as the Texas Electrical Reliability Board, offers little An incentive is excess electricity generation: In another, useless strangeness, the Texas power grid has only minimal connection to the two major electrical grids in the United States. The move, designed to circumvent federal oversight, also makes energy provision difficult by neighbors, and some experts say a wider investment pull has hit the US electricity production sector. Edward Hirs, an energy fellow at the University of Houston, told the Washington Post this week that he had reminded him of the last days of the Soviet Union or the Venezuelan oil sector today. “They hate it when I say it,” he said, and Texas is not alone in facing these problems. Fourteen states in the Southwest Power Bowl, which includes small parts of Texas, have experienced constant power outages in cold weather this week. In Europe, there were major concerns about energy supplies last month, as countries including France asked consumers to limit their use during the cold snap, and the problems don’t just come when the mercury drops. Last year, California suffered summer blackouts as demand surged in the heatwave. Even without power cuts, high temperatures can be very dangerous: Nearly 1,500 people died in France during the 2019 heatwave, according to some estimates, and we tend to think of climate change in terms of warmer weather, rather than winter storms. That we saw this week. But the science is more complex than that: As Tom Neziol writes in Capital Weather Gang, some research suggests that melting Arctic sea ice may be responsible for turbulent weather patterns in the Northern Hemisphere, and scientists are expecting more cold weather. “We used to not worry too much about such extreme cold weather in places like Texas, but we might need to prepare for more in the future,” Le Xie, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Texas A&M University, told the Tribune. “We will have more severe weather conditions across the country.” Texas’s inability to conserve energy during a strange winter storm is understandable. But many regions now have to prepare for the unexpected. In Siberia, where energy continues in extremely cold waves, record heat waves have led to alarming forest fires in recent years and destabilized buildings constructed on the thaw of permafrost, and preparing for this new era of climate unpredictability will not be fun. But the epidemic showed the folly of not being prepared for an unexpected crisis. As Sam White, a professor of history at Ohio State University, noted last year about the economic problems caused by the Coronavirus: “Historically, people have not had the luxury of dealing with their disasters one by one.”