They Thought They Had the Energy | Online Only | n+1https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/they-thought-they-had-the-energy/there is a lot of work currently on climate attribution, but I think it is true that we can absolutely say that we’re more likely to see events that take our systems outside of design parameters.
There are a lot of different kinds of things that can go wrong that all have their own periodicity and all have their own probabilities. You might have a one-in-100-year event of heat one year then have a one-in-100-year event of cold the next year.
With climate change, we are seeing a lot more specific types of weather. There’s some debate on whether these big cold-weather events are likely to become more frequent, more extreme, longer, et cetera. In general, the types of extreme events that we can plan to see are pretty variable and all have slightly different implications for what you would do to prepare. What’s definitely true is that we are likely to see things that are far outside of what we planned on.
But it’s not just climate and weather that make these events bad. A lot of the time, it’s really the intersection between unusual events—events that are outside design parameters—and the fact that on the infrastructure side we have a lot of issues with long-term deferred maintenance and obsolescence.
It’s this intersection between technological problems, climate problems, and governance problems—it’s not usually just one thing that fails.
So Texas was an extreme event on the winter weather front, but also, a lot of the infrastructure that we thought was going to perform under those conditions didn’t. And then in terms of notifications, there was a lot of mix-up in terms of who was supposed to be doing what. We had failures in all three of those arenas, and probably more. It’s not just that it was cold.
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With the energy sector, if we want to mitigate, we actually do have to go build the whole thing back again. That’s a huge window of opportunity for really thinking about what we’re going to build. We’re not just trying to maintain and replace things that break—we’re trying to completely remake that system. There’s this massive need for investment that actually lines up with the timelines that we use for some of these climate goals.
And then to also have a new administration that’s interested in pursuing some of those goals, it really is a very unusual opportunity.