Deadly extreme weather events are climate change catastrophes
Ways that you can help hard hit communities in Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana
Across central and southern states last week, communities experienced a deadly “energy crisis.” The extreme cold, combined with prolonged power outages, killed.
The New York Times wrote about an Army veteran named Carrol Anderson, who went by Andy:
“Mr. Anderson, a 75-year-old who breathed with the help of oxygen tanks, knew that a different kind of storm was heading his way. To prepare, he ordered a fresh supply of oxygen that his stepdaughter said never arrived…
While the final tally could be much higher, Mr. Anderson was among at least 58 people who died in storm-affected areas stretching to Ohio, victims of carbon monoxide poisoning, car crashes, drownings, house fires and hypothermia.”
The family of an 11-year-old boy who died in the cold have sued Texas power companies for negligence. Coming on a year marked by profound loss, these individual tragedies brought on by the storm underscore our collective vulnerability.
How You Can Help
Last week’s extreme cold disaster left many of us wondering how we can help. Here are links to several overviews of ways to help:
Texas Tribune (2021, Feb. 19): “How to help and get help in Texas as the winter storm causes power outages.”
New York Times (2021, Feb. 18): “How to Help People in Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana.”
ABC 13 (2021, Feb. 22): “Houston relief fund on the way in wake of historic winter storm.”
The Climate Connection
The U.K.-based Carbon Brief provided a round-up of media coverage of power blackouts in relation to climate change:
Carbon Brief (2021, Feb. 18): “Media reaction: Texas ‘deep freeze’, power blackouts and the role of global warming.”
The Texas Tribune provided a good explainer to refute the claim that wind power was to blame and the New York Times Climate Desk reported on the power grid failures:
Texas Tribune (2021, Feb. 17): “No, frozen wind turbines aren’t the main culprit for Texas’ power outages.”
New York Times (2021, Feb. 18): “A Glimpse of America’s Future: Climate Change Means Trouble for Power Grids.”
Texas Climate News (2021, Feb. 20): “How Texas froze: Neglect of power-grid and climate warnings set the icy stage.”
Yale Climate Connections (2021, Feb. 23): “Climate lessons from Texas' frozen power outages.”
WBEZ Reset (2021, Feb. 23): “A Look At Climate Change And Power Grids In Chicago And Texas.”
In Texas Climate News, senior editor Randy Lee Loftis, and former long-time The Dallas Morning News environmental journalist, took a deep dive into the both the scale of the crisis and political failures that set the stage:
“At the worst, about 4 million households, businesses, and institutions, most in the biggest metro areas, were in the cold and dark. Water failed, too, as pipes and mains burst, and treatment and pumping stations lost power. Whole cities were under boil-water orders. Some places, such as data centers, could not get diesel for backup generators...
Texas went on notice in 2011, after the last polar locomotive crashed the state’s natural-gas and coal-fired power plants for days: Armor those plants and the natural-gas system against the cold, the warning went, and do it soon – because this will happen again when more severe cold snaps arrive.”
The New York Times also reported on the environmental (in)justices that put lower income and communities of color on the frontlines of environmental and climate harms, interviewing environmental sociologist Robert Bullard:
“‘Whether it’s flooding from severe weather events like hurricanes or it’s something like this severe cold, the history of our response to disasters is that these communities are hit first and have to suffer the longest,’ said Robert Bullard, a professor at Texas Southern University and an expert on wealth and racial disparities related to the environment.
‘These are communities that have already been hit hardest with Covid,’ he said. ‘They’re the households working two minimum wage jobs, the essential workers who don’t get paid if they don’t go to work.’”
Dr. Bullard is a Distinguished Professor of Urban Planning and Environmental Policy at Texas Southern University and the former Dean of the Barbara Jordan-Mickey Leland School of Public Affairs. He is considered the “father of environmental justice” for his wide-ranging scholarship on environmental racism.
For more of a round-up of news and links on the aftermath of the winter storm and Texas blackout, I recommend heading over to Hot Take.
The U.S. Rejoins the Paris Agreement
In other climate news, in what felt a little like a Friday news dump at the close of a terrible week dominated by extreme weather-related crises, the United States officially rejoined the Paris Agreement to limit global greenhouse gas emissions.
There is broad public support for U.S. participation in the international agreement on climate change. Nationally representative public opinion research, from 2017, by researchers at Yale and George Mason Universities showed that more than two-thirds of registered voters (69%) think the country should participate in the Paris Agreement. The researchers found that, “Only conservative Republicans are split, with marginally more saying the U.S. should participate (40%) than saying we should not participate (34%).”
More recent research from the Pew Research Center shows that a majority of U.S. adults think that the government should do more to address climate change. Nearly two-in-three respondents (65%) agreed the federal government under former President Donald Trump was doing too little to reduce the impacts of climate change on the country.
The Biden-Harris administration’s focus on climate policy and the expected partisan challenges, as well as recent extreme weather events, underscore the critical nature of communicating on the climate crisis.
With that in mind, I’ll leave you this week with five features of “creative” climate messaging, as spelled out by environmental communication scholar Maxwell Boykoff (University of Colorado Boulder) in his 2019 book Creative (Climate) Communications: Productive Pathways for Science, Policy and Society:
“Find common ground and meet people where they are on climate change.”
“Emphasize how climate change affects us here and now, in our everyday lives.”
“Focus on how climate change engagement makes our lives and livelihoods better.”
“Creatively empower people to take meaningful and purposeful action on climate change.”
“‘Smarten up’ communications about climate change to match the demands of a twenty-first-century communications environment.”
That’s all for this week. Thanks for reading and stay safe.
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The newsletter will be on hiatus next week while I prepare for the spring term. And, with that hang in there. Spring is coming. 🌱