Way past incremental: What extreme weather events really tell us

Editorial note: The following post was first written and published on Medium in the fall of 2024, after Hurricanes Helene and Milton slammed into the Southeast, leaving devastated communities and billions of dollars in damages in Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia. It was taken down last year, at the request of a former employer who found it too political. I am in New England at the moment, visiting friends and contemplating the knee-deep snow covering the landscape. A new round of plummeting temperatures ─ with winds possibly 30 degrees below zero ─ is being forecast for the weekend, while the local paper has reports on the status of the regional grid ─ holding up admirably thus far ─ and a local gas company’s request for a 23% rate hike. I decided to reprint this piece, with a few revisions and updates, because a year and a half later, we are once again navigating unprecedented conditions ─ meteorological, technological, economic and political ─ and some major leaps in imagination are still urgently needed.

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Unprecedented. Unimaginable.

These are the words used to describe the loss of life, destruction of property and devastation of individual lives and communities caused by Hurricanes Helene and Milton as they flattened villages on Florida’s Gulf Coast and flooded towns and cities across the Southeast.

Media reports have been full of quotes from local officials and survivors, people who have lived in their communities for decades, if not their whole lives, saying they had never seen anything like these storms and were not prepared. The level of destruction also has made recovery difficult in some areas where restoring electricity and other basic services has taken several days or longer.

Utilities have said that some parts of their systems cannot be repaired; they will have to be completely rebuilt. The combined cost of damages from Helene and Milton have been calculated at well over $100 billion.

In the aftermath of so much destruction, questions are inevitable. How can we better prepare to meet the emergency needs of people and communities, to ensure they have safe shelter, food and access to other critical services, especially lower-income and other vulnerable groups? What can be done to minimize power outages? How can we prevent similar catastrophes in the future?

Public hearings will be held; various officials and utility executives will be grilled, and some changes will be made.

But the main problem here is not lack of preparation; it is lack of imagination. How we plan for and respond to extreme weather events of any kind is invariably shaped and limited by the disasters we have already experienced and can imagine.

The next major climate upheavals will likely be as unprecedented and unimaginable as those storms were, which will make them even more difficult to predict or prepare for ― or prevent.

The bottom line on climate change is that it triggers or exacerbates erratic weather – including extreme heat and cold -- that cannot be predicted and will hit people who think that wherever they live will be safe from hurricanes, flooding, polar vortexes, wildfires or whatever catastrophe comes next.

At least one of the lessons of Helene and Milton is that, as we continue pumping carbon pollution into the air and the climate continues to change, no place on earth and no one will be completely safe.

What can we do? First, we can once again take climate change seriously as the immediate, existential threat it actually is, requiring a series of urgent, unprecedented and currently unimaginable actions.

All easier said than done, I know, but still critical.

I recently spent two days at a “clean energy” conference where one Republican lawmaker after another —  all members of the House of Representatives’ Conservative Climate Caucus  —  stood up and declared their support for clean air, clean water and protecting the environment.

What they didn’t say is if they intended to do anything about climate change. Backed by fossil fuel lobbyists and money, these Republicans are peddling a narrative in which climate action has been strategically redefined.

Their main message is that no major or immediate changes have to be made in how we live or in how we produce or consume energy. After all, thanks to our country’s environmental regulations, which the Trump administration is now laying waste to, our fossil fuels are cleaner than anyone else’s. So, by unleashing  —  that all-purpose political verb  —  American innovation, we will eventually figure out how to cut our emissions in a rational, affordable, incremental way.

They make it sound entirely reasonable, except that we’ve been innovating and changing incrementally for several decades ― the first Earth Day was almost 56 years ago ― and it’s not working.

At least it’s not working fast enough. Storms like Helene and Milton – and our current equally unprecedented polar vortex -- should make it painfully clear that we are way past incremental.

In his sci-fi masterpiece, The Ministry for the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson imagines a world in which a blistering heatwave kills 20 million people in India. In response, an underground guerilla network forces a radical, immediate change in global lifestyles, politics and climate action by shooting down planes and sinking ships that run on fossil fuels.

I am in no way advocating anything that drastic or deadly. But I do think that, like Robinson, we have to take some significant leaps in how we imagine the actions we must take to curb and eventually stop our climate from changing.

In some cases, those actions could mean letting go of personal preference and convenience, and doing something different and a bit uncomfortable, like switching out a gas stove for an electric or planning road trips with periodic half-hour breaks to recharge an electric vehicle.

It could mean pressing our state lawmakers and utility commissioners to provide incentives for the buildout of solar, wind and storage and to order natural gas companies to start planning for declining demand by not building new pipelines.

And it could mean communities across the nation welcoming new transmission lines that will provide them with clean, reliable and affordable electricity when they need it ― especially in emergency situations when those lines can bring them power from other regions.

These examples are just a start, low-hanging fruit. Because imagining a world without fossil fuels and making the changes we need to get there will be a whole lot easier, cheaper and more effective than waiting for the next climate disasters we cannot imagine.

My friends Helen and Sandy live Easthampton, Massachusetts, a semi-rural community, where many homes have rooftop solar, and thanks to the state’s generous solar incentives, they haven’t paid an electric bill in a few years.

During my visit, they proudly showed me the monthly electric bill they had just received ─ with $2,153.21 in credits still unused.