A few months back, because I really know how to live, I spent a night reading “The Green Swan: Central banking and financial stability in the age of climate change.” The report, released in January 2020 by the Bank for International Settlements, argued that central banks, concerned as they are with the stability of prices and financial systems, were negligent if they ignored climate change. The economies we know are inseparable from the long climatic peace in which they were built. But that peace is ending. There are no stable prices in a burning world.
This is one of those papers where the measured language preferred by technocrats strains against the horrors they are trying to describe. What emerges is almost an apocalyptic form of poetry. One line, in particular, has rung in my head for months. “Climate-related risks will remain largely unhedgeable as long as systemwide action is not undertaken.” If you know anything about financial regulators, you know the word “unhedgeable” is an alarm bell shrieking into the night. Financial systems are built to hedge risk. When a global risk is unhedgeable, the danger it poses is existential.
The point of the report is simply this: The world’s economic systems teeter atop “backward-looking risk assessment models that merely extrapolate historical trends.” But the future will not be like the past. Our models are degrading by the day, and we don’t understand — we don’t want to understand — how much in society could topple when they fail, and how much suffering that could bring. One place to start is by recognizing how fragile the basic infrastructure of civilization is even now, in this climate, in rich countries.
Which brings me to Texas. Two facts from that crisis have gotten less attention than they deserve. First, the cold in Texas was not a generational climatic disaster. The problem, as Roger Pielke Jr., an environmental analyst at the University of Colorado at Boulder, wrote in his newsletter, is that the Electric Reliability Council of Texas’ worst-case scenario planning used a 2011 cold snap that was a one-in-10-year weather event. It wasn’t even the worst cold Texas experienced in living memory: in 1989 temperatures and electricity generation (as a percentage of peak demand) dropped even further than they did in 2011. Texas hadn’t just failed to prepare for the far future. It failed to prepare for the recent past.
Second, it could have been so much worse. Bill Magness, the president and chief executive of ERCOT, said Texas was “seconds and minutes” from complete energy system collapse — the kind where the system needs to be rebuilt, not just rebooted. “If we had allowed a catastrophic blackout to happen, we wouldn’t be talking today about hopefully getting most customers their power back,” Mr. Magness said. “We’d be talking about how many months it might be before you get your power back.”
This was not the worst weather imaginable and this was not the worst outcome imaginable. Climate change promises far more violent events to come. But this is what it looks like when we face a rare-but-predictable stretch of extreme weather, in a rich state in a rich country. The result was nearly 80 deaths — and counting — including an 11-year-old boy found frozen in his bed. I can barely stand to write those words.
Texas will not prove unique, or even all that bad, in terms of how fragile the assumptions beneath its critical infrastructure really were. Most of its mistakes are familiar to anyone who has ever covered the politics of infrastructure and disaster preparation. Shalini Vajjhala, who worked on climate resilience in the Obama administration and is now the chief executive of re:focus partners, a firm that helps cities prepare for climate change, put it sharply to me. “When I am successful, that means something hasn’t happened. That’s good policy, but it’s lousy politics. The first year, you’re applauded. The second year, your budget is cut. The third year, your staff goes away.”
It is not just our energy infrastructure that is unprepared for climate change. It is our political infrastructure. It is our social infrastructure. It is our psyches. There’s long been a hope that repeated climate crises will force Republicans to enlist in the fight to stop, or slow, climate change. How can you ignore the crisis when it is your constituents who are frozen, your home that is underwater? But what we saw in Texas is the darker timeline — a doom loop of climate polarization, where climate crises lead, paradoxically, to a politics that’s more desperate for fossil fuels, more dismissive of international or even interstate cooperation.
The state’s Republican leaders immediately blamed renewable energies as the lights flickered off across their communities. “This shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America,” Gov. Greg Abbott told Sean Hannity, going on to say that “it just shows that fossil fuel is necessary.” Abbott was lying — the Green New Deal hasn’t passed, and the largest drop in electricity generation came from frozen natural gas and coal lines, not frozen wind turbines — but fact-checking his statement is like trying to knock the moon from the sky with a Wiffle bat. Climate politics long ago became culture war, and Abbott’s comments were simply stating which side he’s on. Honestly, I preferred Senator Ted Cruz’s impulse to quietly jet off to Cancún.
The most common mistake in politics is to believe there is some level of suffering that will force responsible governance. There isn’t. We saw this during the coronavirus crisis, when some Republicans blanched before the lockdowns and masking, and repositioned themselves as the tough, sacrificial defenders of normalcy. “As a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren?” Asked Texas’ lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick. “And if that’s the exchange, I’m all in.”
Similarly, once climate change can no longer be ignored, Republicans may tighten their embrace of fossil fuels rather than admitting decades of policy error. I have covered climate policy for years, so I was appalled to hear Republicans call to burn more coal as their energy system failed. But if I were cold and scared and looking for a familiar answer from people I already trusted, I can imagine it making sense to me. Unchecked climate change promises a future of scarcity and emergency, and that can create demand for politicians and solutions who falsely promise a return to simpler, better times.
“When people are presented with a crisis like in Texas, they often grasp for stability,” Julian Brave NoiseCat, vice president of policy and strategy at Data for Progress, told me. “This is something the right is good at — they offer the security of tradition, of the familiar.” The irony is that on this issue, it is progressives who are the true conservatives. We are the ones who want to conserve the climate that the entirety of human civilization has known, who believe that the planetary conditions that fostered all of our institutions and social structures are worth preserving. “If you want to stand athwart the history of emissions and yell ‘stop,’” NoiseCat says, “you need to do really transformational things.”
Transformation at that scale requires cooperation — between individuals, and cities, and industries, and regions, and countries. But there is reason to believe a warming world will be a less cooperative world. Here, something former Gov. Rick Perry of Texas said is instructive. “Texans would be without electricity for longer than three days to keep the federal government out of their business.” Perry, I should note, most recently served as head of the federal Department of Energy — the same agency whose name he had forgotten when he tried to mark it for elimination in a 2011 Republican presidential debate. You can’t make this stuff up.
The mind aches for the comforts of snark here, but I think Perry’s words carry deeper, broader truth. Texas kept its grid disconnected from the regional grids so it didn’t have to follow federal regulations. In a world of aggressive climate action, it’s easy to imagine more states, and countries, receding from compacts and multilateral institutions because they don’t like the new rules, or the loss of sovereignty. Indeed, America just experienced this dance as President Donald Trump withdrew us from the climate accords, before President Biden signed us back up. A global crisis that demands cooperation and even sacrifice will be fertile soil for nationalists and demagogues.
In Omar El Akkad’s novel “American War,” it’s a bill banning fossil fuels that leads to a second civil war. That may be fiction, but there’s a growing array of studies showing that hotter weather leads to more violence, both between individuals and between countries. “We estimated that 11 percent of civil conflicts in Africa since the 1980s can be attributed to warming that has occurred,” Solomon Hsiang, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley who has been a leader in this work, told me. “Or, in a different study, looking at El Niño, we found that the timing of about 20-25 percent of civil conflict since 1950 can be connected to El Niños.” I sometimes wonder whether climate change will kill more people through war than weather.
This isn’t a case where the mechanism is mysterious. I am tetchier on hot days. So are most people. There’s a famous 1986 study called “Ambient Temperature and Horn Honking: A Field Study of the Heat/Aggression Relationship.” In it, Douglas Kenrick and Steven MacFarlane simply let a car idle at green lights in Phoenix during the spring and summer, and measured how long it took the driver behind to honk. The hotter the day, the faster the honks came. The most aggressive honkers were the drivers with the windows rolled down, as they were most exposed to the heat. It’s an amusing study, but subsequent research was bloodier: hotter days bring more assaults, gang violence and murders.
Cooperation is humanity’s superpower, and the way we have enlarged our circle — from kin, to tribes, to religions, to countries, to the world — is miraculous. But the conditions under which that cooperation has taken hold are delicate, and like everything else, part of the biophysical system in which we live. We are changing that system in ways we do not understand and with consequences we cannot predict.
The New York Times
