|
Dear NRDC Activist,
The winter storms that barreled through Texas and other states last week are another devastating wake-up call: The climate crisis is here, and we are not prepared.
As snow fell and temperatures dropped below zero in Texas, more than 4 million people lost power, and nearly 15 million have lacked safe water.
Families were burning whatever they could find to keep their children from freezing; heating rocks over fire pits to take inside for warmth; dying from carbon monoxide fumes after leaving cars running for heat; and risking contracting COVID-19 by gathering in makeshift shelters rather than freezing at home.
Low-income communities, Black people, and Latinos in the state have suffered most, in yet another manifestation of the environmental injustice that inflicts the greatest harm on the most vulnerable people.
What's happening in Texas is part of a larger story about the mounting costs and widening dangers of climate change. Here's what you need to know:
- While it might seem counterintuitive, scientists see a strong link between the harsh winter temperatures and the warming of the planet. Higher temperatures are disrupting the jet stream, allowing arctic air to make its way farther and faster southward than normal, bringing icy temperatures that can make winter storms more devastating.
- Climate-busting fossil fuels were to blame for the vast majority of power outages in the state. About 80 percent of the power outages in Texas were caused by systems that rely on gas, coal, or uranium, which provide about three-fourths of the state's electricity. Read more.
- Texas gets about a quarter of its electricity from wind turbines. While some turbines froze last week, when properly equipped, wind turbines perform well in cold temperatures, as they do in Canada, Sweden, and for that matter, Iowa.
- The extreme cold and power outages froze and burst water pipes and shut down water treatment systems, leaving millions of people without safe drinking water. This latest tragic example reveals once again a disastrous lack of preparedness to deal with drinking water emergencies in the United States. The same thing has happened over and over in recent decades — in Louisiana, Puerto Rico, California, Ohio, and elsewhere — after hurricanes, wildfires, floods, and other disasters, with low-income communities and communities of color hardest hit. Read more.
- The outages also caused a tremendous spike in health-harming, climate-warming air pollution. With no power, oil refineries along the Gulf Coast burned gas to prevent damage from taking place in their processing units, sending thousands of tons of dangerous pollution into the atmosphere. In Houston last week, energy facilities burned off over 703,000 pounds of pollutants like carbon monoxide, benzene, hydrogen sulfide, and sulfur dioxide.
This disaster underscores the need for the U.S. to invest even more in clean and reliable renewable energy and to prepare our energy and water infrastructure for the effects of climate change. We know we need to cut our use of fossil fuels like oil, coal, and gas in half by 2030, and stop adding more carbon pollution to the atmosphere altogether by 2050, to avert the worst of raging wildfires, floods, storms, and, yes, frigid blasts of arctic air, going forward.
To prevent massive power failures and resulting devastation to vulnerable communities in the future, we must also invest in a smarter, more resilient electric grid in Texas and across the country that can withstand the extreme weather fueled by climate change.
In addition, states' repeated failure to ensure access to safe drinking water during emergencies proves that our water infrastructure is not equipped to withstand the impacts of climate change, and current emergency response plans are inadequate. We need a massive, systemic overhaul.
President Biden has committed to combating climate change, improving America's infrastructure, growing our clean energy economy, and ensuring clean and safe drinking water for all. Last week's storms demonstrate yet again the urgency of that work.
We need systems that are built to survive severe weather — including hurricanes, flooding, and winter storms — and that have the flexibility to deliver additional power when demand spikes due to heat waves and arctic blasts. We have the technology to do it — now we need to put it into action.
Read more about the devastation in Texas, what it means for our climate future, and how you can help, in my blog post on NRDC.org.
Thank you for fighting alongside us for a just transition to clean energy and a safer, healthier, and better future.
Sincerely,
Mitch Bernard
President, NRDC
|
