Mother Nature is entering a dissenting opinion on last month’s Supreme Court decision that weakened the federal government’s ability to combat climate change.
With record heat in Texas that is testing the state’s power grid, a California wildfire that has threatened an ancient grove of sequoias considered a foundation stone of the national-park system, and persistent drought across the West that is forcing unprecedented cutbacks in water deliveries from the Colorado River, the summer of 2022 already is shaping up as another season of extreme and dangerous environmental conditions.
The paradox is that precisely as these events are dramatizing the rising costs of inaction on climate change, Washington faces more difficulty to act. That’s not only because of the Supreme Court but also because of the resistance to sweeping legislation in the Senate from every Republican as well as Democratic Senator Joe Manchin, who represents one of the top coal-producing states, West Virginia. Adding to the strain: The states most integrated into the existing fossil-fuel economy—almost all of them controlled by Republicans—are escalating their efforts to block action on climate change from the federal government and even the private sector.
In all of these ways, both the magnitude of the threat and the difficulty of responding to it are simultaneously rising—a trend that climate scientists find equally frustrating and frightening.
“In a world where facts are no longer the currency, it actually is very hard to make arguments in favor of doing what seems very logical,” Kathy Jacobs, the director of the Center for Climate Adaptation Science and Solutions at the University of Arizona, told me. “People are questioning really fundamental scientific principles and/or just choosing to ignore them. This post-fact world we are operating in makes dealing with this problem much more difficult.”
In 2021, the American West struggled through what I called a “summer of extremes”: record high temperatures, pervasive drought, widespread wildfires. The year before that, California endured a record season of wildfire damage. Now, unprecedented events are already stacking up at an ominous pace across the region again this summer.
In Texas, the story is unrelenting heat. The National Weather Service recently reported that the period from June 1 through July 8 was the hottest ever recorded in both Austin and San Antonio. In June, Dallas/Fort Worth recorded nine days of at least 100-degree temperatures (tied for the fourth-most-ever). After a relative break to 95 on July 1 and 99 on July 2, the area has recorded another 11 consecutive days at the century mark or above from July 3 through Wednesday; the city has already registered more 100-degree days this year than the past three years combined. The state’s power-grid system is buckling under this strain; officials are urging families to avoid blackouts by turning up the temperature in their home despite the suffocating heat. “They said the grid failed last year when it was too cold, but now the grid is failing because it is too hot,” Elida Castillo, the program director for Chispa Texas, a grassroots environmental group that is a project of the national League of Conservation Voters, told me. “We can’t even use these utilities that we pay a high price for.”
Even this could be just the beginning of what’s ahead for Texas. Jay Banner, the director of the Environmental Science Institute at the University of Texas at Austin, told me that models prepared for the latest U.S. national-climate assessment forecast that the average number of 100-degree days in Texas could triple from about 40 a year over the past decade to 120 annually toward the end of this century if carbon emissions are not curtailed.
While Texas is roasting, California is burning. Again. A large wildfire that started last week threatened…
Read More: Mother Nature Dissents – The Atlantic