Latest news with #ClimateDesk
National Observer
5 days ago
- Business
- National Observer
Gas flaring created 389 million tonnes of carbon pollution last year, report finds
This story was originally published by The Guardian and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration The fossil fuel industry pumped an extra 389 million tonnes of carbon pollution into the atmosphere last year by needlessly flaring gas, a World Bank report has found, in an 'enormous waste' of fuel that heats the planet by about as much as the country of France. Flaring is a way to get rid of gases such as methane that arise when pumping oil out of the ground. While it can sometimes keep workers safe by relieving buildups of pressure, the practice is routine in many countries because it is often cheaper to burn gas than to capture, transport, process and sell it. Global gas flaring rose for a second year in a row to reach its highest level since 2007, the report found, despite growing concerns about energy security and climate breakdown. It found that 151 billion cubic metres (bcm) of gas were burned during oil and gas production in 2024, up by 3bcm from the year before. 'Flaring is needlessly wasteful,' said Zubin Bamji, the manager of the World Bank's Global Flaring and Methane Reduction partnership (GFMR), which wrote the report. '[It's] a missed opportunity to strengthen energy security and improve access to reliable power.' In many cases, observers complain, the rules to prevent needless flaring are weak and poorly enforced, and companies have little incentive to stop doing it because they do not have to pay for the pollution it causes. The report found that nine countries – Russia, Iran, Iraq, the US, Venezuela, Algeria, Libya, Mexico and Nigeria – were responsible for three-quarters of all gas flaring in 2024. Most of the worst offenders were countries with state-owned oil companies. Despite efforts to stop the practice, the intensity of flaring – the volume flared per barrel of oil produced – had remained 'stubbornly high' over the last 15 years, the report found. Flaring intensity in Norway, one of the cleanest oil and gas producers, is 18 times lower than in the US, and 228 times lower than in Venezuela, according to the data. Andrew Baxter, an oil and gas expert at the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund, who was not involved in the report, said it was 'deeply disappointing' to see a return to the gas flaring levels of 2007. 'Such levels of flaring are an egregious waste of resources,' he said. '[They] are catastrophic for climate and human health.' The International Energy Agency has called for the elimination of all flaring except in emergencies by 2030. The value of gas flared last year, which would have been worth about US$63 billion at EU import prices for 2024, is more than half of the upfront costs that the IEA says are needed to stop the practice altogether. Jonathan Banks, a methane expert at the nonprofit Clean Air Task Force, who was not involved in the report, said solutions were well known and often cost-effective. 'What is missing is the political will and regulatory pressure to implement them at scale.' The report highlighted areas of progress, pointing to some oil and gas producers, such as Angola, Egypt, Indonesia and Kazakhstan, that had successfully reduced the amount of gas flared. Kazakhstan, which has levied steep fines on companies that break the rules, had reduced flaring by 71 per cent since 2012. Banks said: 'We need more of this kind of action and more support to help lower-income, high-flaring nations overcome infrastructure and governance barriers. 'We also need global coordination, particularly from major oil importers, to create incentives that reward responsible producers and raise the bar for everyone.' The report, which used satellite data to estimate flared gas, was produced by the GFMR, which is made up of some of the world's most polluting governments and companies. Its funders include European energy firms such as BP, Eni, Equinor, Shell and TotalEnergies, as well as major oil-producing countries such as the US, Norway and the United Arab Emirates. The group has encouraged countries and companies to end routine flaring by 2030. According to the report, countries that endorsed the World Bank's Zero Routine Flaring by 2030 initiative have on average reduced their flaring intensity by 12 per cent since 2012, though absolute volumes have fallen only slightly in that time, while countries that have not made the pledge increased their flaring intensity by 25 per cent. 'Reducing gas flaring is not without challenges,' said Bamji. 'It requires upfront investment, adequate infrastructure, strong regulatory frameworks and sustained political will.' If those conditions were in place, countries could significantly cut flaring, 'often while unlocking new sources of revenue and improving energy access'.
National Observer
6 days ago
- Business
- National Observer
Trump and the energy industry are eager to power AI with fossil fuels
This story was originally published by Wired and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration AI IS 'NOT my thing,' President Donald Trump admitted during a speech in Pittsburgh on Tuesday. However, the president said during his remarks at the Energy and Innovation Summit, his advisers had told him just how important energy was to the future of AI. 'You need double the electric of what we have right now, and maybe even more than that,' Trump said, recalling a conversation with 'David'—most likely White House AI czar David Sacks, a panelist at the summit. 'I said, what, are you kidding? That's double the electric that we have. Take everything we have and double it.' At the high-profile summit on Tuesday — where, in addition to Sacks, panelists and attendees included Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Google president and chief investment officer Ruth Porat and ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods — companies announced $92 billion in investments across various energy and AI-related ventures. These are just the latest in recent breakneck rollouts in investment around AI and energy infrastructure. A day before the Pittsburgh meeting, Mark Zuckerberg shared on Threads that Meta would be building 'titan clusters' of data centers to supercharge its AI efforts. The one closest to coming online, dubbed Prometheus, is located in Ohio and will be powered by onsite gas generation, SemiAnalysis reported last week. For an administration committed to advancing the future of fossil fuels, the location of the event was significant. Pennsylvania sits on the Marcellus and Utica shale formations, which supercharged Pennsylvania's fracking boom in the late 2000s and early 2010s. The state is still the country's second-most prolific natural gas producer. Pennsylvania-based natural gas had a big role at the summit: The CEO of Pittsburgh-based natural gas company EQT, Toby Rice — who dubs himself the 'people's champion of natural gas' — moderated one of the panels and sat onstage with the president during his speech. All this new demand from AI is welcome news for the natural gas industry in the US, the world's top producer and exporter of liquefied natural gas. Global gas markets have been facing a mounting supply glut for years. Following a warm winter last year, Morgan Stanley predicted gas supply could reach 'multi-decade highs' over the next few years. A jolt of new demand — like the demand represented by massive data centers — could revitalize the industry and help drive prices back up. Natural gas from Pennsylvania and the Appalachian region, in particular, has faced market challenges both from ultra-cheap natural gas from the Permian Basin in Texas and New Mexico as well as a lack of infrastructure to carry supply out of the region. These economic headwinds are 'why the industry is doing their best to sort of create this drumbeat or this narrative around the need for AI data centers,' says Clark Williams-Derry, an energy finance analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. It appears to be working. Pipeline companies are already pitching new projects to truck gas from the northeast — responding, they say, to data center demand. At a Pennsylvania conference last week, the US president did his best to wed the futures of AI and fossil fuels — but not everyone in the tech sector is on board with embracing the latter. The industry is finding a willing partner in the Trump administration. Since taking office, Trump has used AI as a lever to open up opportunities for fossil fuels, including a well-publicized effort to resuscitate coal in the name of more computing power. The summit, which was organized by Republican senator (and former hedge fund CEO) Dave McCormick, clearly reflected the administration's priorities in this regard: No representatives from any wind or solar companies were present on any of the public panels. Tech companies, which have expressed an interest in using any and all cheap power available for AI and have quietly pushed back against some of the administration's anti-renewables positions, aren't necessarily on the same page as the Trump administration. Among the announcements made at the summit was a $3 billion investment in hydropower from Google. This demand isn't necessarily driven by a big concern for the climate — many tech giants have walked back their climate commitments in recent years as their focus on AI has sharpened — but rather pure economics. Financial analyst Lazard said last month that installing utility-scale solar panels and batteries is still cheaper than building out natural gas plants, even without tax incentives. Gas infrastructure is also facing a global shortage that makes the timescales for setting up power generation vastly different. 'The waiting list for a new turbine is five years,' Williams-Derry says. 'If you want a new solar plant, you call China, you say, 'I want more solar.'' Given the ideological split at the summit, things occasionally got a little awkward. On one panel, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, who headed up a fracking company before coming to the federal government, talked at length about how the Obama and Biden administrations were on an 'energy crazy train,' scoffing at those administrations' support for wind and solar. Speaking directly after Wright, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink admitted that solar would likely support dispatchable gas in powering AI. Incredibly, fellow panel member Woods, the ExxonMobil CEO, later paid some of the only lip service to the idea of drawing down emissions heard during the entire event. (Woods was touting the oil giant's carbon capture and storage business.) Still, the hype train, for the most part, moved smoothly, with everyone agreeing on one thing: We're going to need a lot of power, and soon. Blackstone CEO Jonathan Gray said that AI could help drive '40 or 50 percent more power usage over the next decade,' while Porat, of Google, mentioned some economists' projections that AI could add $4 trillion to the US economy by 2030. It's easy to find any variety of headlines or reports—often based on projections produced by private companies—projecting massive growth numbers for AI. 'I view all of these projections with great skepticism,' says Jonathan Koomey, a computing researcher and consultant who has contributed to research around AI and power. 'I don't think anyone has any idea, even a few years hence, how much electricity data centers are gonna use.' In February, Koomey coauthored a report for the Bipartisan Policy Center cautioning that improvements in AI efficiency and other developments in the technology make data center power load hard to predict. But there's 'a bunch of self-interested actors,' Koomey says, involved in the hype cycle around AI and power, including energy executives, utilities, consultants and AI companies. Koomey remembers the last time there was a hype bubble around electricity, fossil fuels and technology. In the late 1990s, a variety of sources, including investment banks, trade publications and experts testifying in front of Congress, began to spread hype around the growth of the internet, claiming that the internet could soon consume as much as half of US electricity. More coal-fired power, many of these sources argued, would be needed to support this massive expansion. ('Dig More Coal—The PCs Are Coming' was the headline of a 1999 Forbes article that Koomey cites as being particularly influential to shaping the hype.) The prediction never came to pass, as efficiency gains in tech helped drive down the internet's energy needs; the initial projections were also based, Koomey says, on a variety of faulty calculations. Koomey says that he sees parallels between the late 1990s and the current craze around AI and energy. 'People just need to understand the history and not fall for these self-interested narratives,' he says. There's some signs that the AI-energy bubble may not be inflating as much as Big Tech thinks: in March, Microsoft quietly backed out of 2GW of data center leases, citing a decision to not support some training workloads from OpenAI. 'It can both be true that there's growth in electricity use and there's a whole bunch of people hyping it way beyond what is likely to happen,' Koomey says.
Vox
6 days ago
- Climate
- Vox
A 'mosh pit of molecules' is trapping heat over much of the US right now
This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. From Texas clear to Georgia, from the Gulf Coast on up to the Canadian border, a mass of dangerous heat has started spreading like an atmospheric plague. In the days and perhaps even weeks ahead, a high-pressure system, known as a heat dome, will drive temperatures over 100 degrees Fahrenheit in some places, impacting some 160 million Americans. Extra-high humidity will make that weather even more perilous — while the thermometer may read 100, it might actually feel more like 110. So what exactly is a heat dome, and why does it last so long? And what gives with all the extra moisture? A heat dome is a self-reinforcing machine of misery. It's a system of high-pressure air, which sinks from a few thousand feet up and compresses as it gets closer to the ground. When molecules in the air have less space, they bump into each other and heat up. 'I think about it like a mosh pit,' said Shel Winkley, the weather and climate engagement specialist at the research group Climate Central. 'Everybody's moving around and bumping into each other, and it gets hotter.' But these soaring temperatures aren't happening on their own with this heat dome. The high pressure also discourages the formation of clouds, which typically need rising air. 'There's going to be very little in the way of cloudiness, so it'll be a lot of sunshine which, in turn, will warm the atmosphere even more,' said AccuWeather senior meteorologist Tom Kines. 'You're just kind of trapping that hot air over one part of the country.' In the beginning, a heat dome evaporates moisture in the soil, which provides a bit of cooling. But then, the evaporation will significantly raise humidity. (A major contributor during this month's heat dome will be the swaths of corn crops across the central US, which could help raise humidity in states like Minnesota, Iowa, and Indiana above that of Florida.) This sort of high-pressure system also grabs moisture from the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico, which evaporate more water the hotter they get. And generally speaking, the warmer the atmosphere becomes, the more moisture it can hold. Once that moisture in the landscape is all gone, more heat accumulates — and more and more. A heat dome, then, essentially feeds off itself, potentially for weeks, a sort of giant blow-dryer pointed at the landscape. On their own, temperatures soaring over 100 are bad enough for human health. Such high humidity makes it even harder for the human body to cool itself, because it's harder for sweat to evaporate; hence 100 degrees on the thermometer feeling more like 110. The elderly and very young can't cool their bodies as efficiently, putting them at higher risk. Those with heart conditions are also vulnerable, because the human body tries to cool itself by pumping more blood. And those with outdoor jobs — construction workers, garbage collectors, delivery drivers on bikes or scooters — have little choice but to toil in the heat, with vanishingly few laws to protect them. The humidity effect is especially pronounced in areas where soils are soaked with recent rainfall, like central Texas, which earlier this month suffered catastrophic flooding. There's the potential for 'compound disasters' here: relief efforts in inundated areas like Kerr County now have to reckon with soaring temperatures as well. The Gulf of Mexico provided the moisture that made the flooding so bad, and now it's providing additional humidity during the heat dome. A heat dome gets more dangerous the longer it stagnates on the landscape. And unfortunately, climate change is making these sorts of heat waves longer and more intense. According to Climate Central, climate change made this heat dome at least five times more likely. 'These temperatures aren't necessarily impossible, but they'd be very hard to happen without a fingerprint of climate change,' Winkley said. Summer nights are warming almost twice as fast as summer days, Winkley adds, which makes heat waves all the more dangerous. As this heat dome takes hold, nighttime low temperatures may go up 15 degrees above average. For those without air conditioning — or who can't afford to run the AC even if they have it — their homes will swelter through the night, the time when temperatures are supposed to come down and give respite. Without that, the stress builds and builds, especially for those vulnerable groups. 'When you look at this heat wave, yes, it is going to be uncomfortable during the day,' Winkley said. 'But it's especially those nighttime temperatures that are the big blinking red light that this is a climate change-boosted event.'
National Observer
7 days ago
- Business
- National Observer
Pakistan's solar revolution is bringing power to the people
This story was originally published by Yale Environment 360 and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration Solar power is booming in Pakistan. Its share of electricity generation more than tripled in just three years, climbing from four percent in 2021 to 14 percent in 2024 — one of the highest percentages in Asia, according to a Reuters analysis of data from the British research group Ember. And panel imports doubled in a single year, Ember reports, making Pakistan, with the world's fifth-largest population, one of the biggest solar markets in the world. A confluence of forces has driven this growth. Pakistanis had long lived with overpriced and unreliable power delivered by a creaking grid. When Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine caused gas and coal prices to spike, Pakistanis' bills jumped even higher — and then higher again when the government removed subsidies that had cushioned consumers from the worst of those hikes. At the same time, a glut of cheap Chinese solar panels gave many Pakistanis an alternative to grid power for the first time. Renewables First, an energy and environment think tank in Islamabad, has not only been tracking Pakistan's solar revolution, it is also pressing for policy changes that would make its transition faster and smoother. In an interview with Yale Environment 360, program director Muhammad Mustafa Amjad says reforms that increase grid flexibility and better match supply with demand would make cheap, clean energy available to more people while preventing further price hikes for those still reliant on centrally provided power. If officials begin to better coordinate its transition, Amjad believes, Pakistan's experience can be a model for other developing nations. 'Global South countries don't have to be the laggards,' he says. 'They can actually be the leaders of the energy transition.' Yale Environment 360: Can you give me a sense of how big and how fast the recent growth in Pakistanis' solar power use has been? Muhammad Mustafa Amjad: It's quite unprecedented in terms of speed and scale. Pakistan has imported almost 45 gigawatts worth of solar panels over the last five or six years, which is equal to the total capacity of its electricity grid. Almost 34 gigawatts have come in only in the last couple of years. The world's fifth-largest population is adopting solar technology at scale — a shift being driven primarily by affordability. "It's a very bottom-up revolution," says one expert. "Renewables are out-competing the traditional sources of energy." It's a very bottom-up revolution. This is not government deciding this is the route to take. And it's not being driven by climate concerns, it's all about the economics. Renewables are out-competing the traditional sources of energy. So all of a sudden, it makes financial sense to adopt renewables, to double down on renewables. Energy transitions in the Global South were always seen as being very top-down, with financial institutions and banks and the International Monetary Fund coming in and piloting projects, pushing governments for policies to encourage clean energy. Now, all of a sudden it's the people and markets that have decided solar is the solution. e360: How did this massive adoption of solar come about? Amjad: A lot of factors came together to create a perfect storm of conditions. At the core, it's because electricity from the grid was so expensive. The price went up almost 155 percent over the last few years. People were paying more for electricity than they were for rent. At the same time, China was producing a glut of solar panels, and Chinese companies were competing for new markets. Pakistan was lucrative for them because of our large [251 million] population. And the Pakistani government helped by not taxing Chinese solar panels. So people were looking for cheaper alternatives and they found one in solar. It's becoming a part of a nice dance now. Any new construction includes a solar power system. I was talking to a politician the other day from a remote area, and she said, 'Previously, constituents always asked us for sewing machines' they could use to earn money. 'Now they ask for a solar panel.' It's no longer a luxury item. It's become a necessity. In some parts of the country, it's customary for a family to give a dowry when their daughter gets married. Now, along with a TV and a washing machine, solar panels are part and parcel of this. e360: In 2022, 40 million Pakistanis still didn't have access to electricity. And the grid is unreliable even for those who are connected. What has it been like to live with those problems, and how did they help drive people toward solar? Amjad: We call it load shedding, it's essentially rolling blackouts. The power could be shut off for an hour, for four hours, six hours. There were certain rural areas where load shedding was in excess of 12 to 14 hours per day. And we have lots of areas where grid access isn't really available at all. So people were depending on diesel generators. They were on the lookout for something cleaner and cheaper. e360: Who's buying solar panels, and where? Amjad: This is across the spectrum. In the cities, whoever owns a home, they've already solarized or are intending to solarize or are saving for solar. It's expected for the cities and the rich to lead the way. But the people who benefit the most from it are the ones who were not connected to the grid or had less reliable service. That's where the sun has impacted lots of lived realities. A couple of case studies done in some villages in lower Punjab and upper Sindh found almost 50 percent of the households there have already solarized. These are massive numbers. There was one story where people put a solar system on the back of a tractor and it was being shared between three different households that [used] it to charge their fans and stuff. Another case study, people were using a panel during the day for field work, education work, and then at the end of the day the farmer would take it back to his house. That kind of mixed use, and sharing mechanisms — that's the true revolution that has happened. But a lot more needs to be done to improve access. The government could play a role by providing subsidized systems or loans for poorer households. e360: What are people doing with the power they're now able to generate? Amjad: Our farmers depend on irrigation systems. There are almost 2 million tube wells across Pakistan, and some estimates suggest almost half have already been solarized. Primarily because the wells are usually community owned — so a tube well for a whole village or for six to seven fields. People can club money together, or [the system is] owned by wealthy landlords who have enough spare capital. And the shift is often from a diesel generator to solar, so it makes more sense than going from the grid to solar. Another big area is cooling. Pakistan is a very climate-vulnerable country, and with the extreme temperatures we are experiencing, people want air conditioning and inverters, which are an energy-efficient type of fan. So a lot of lifestyles have been improved. It's also important to understand the battery revolution that's happening. Pakistan has imported almost $95 million worth of batteries in the last three months. So this solar rush is going to be followed by a battery rush, and together they'll create a whole parallel system where people will have a lot more control over their electricity. And after the battery revolution, very soon we'll be talking about an electric vehicle revolution. Pakistan is a huge market for three-wheelers and two-wheelers, it's ripe for electrification. e360: Why has the price of grid power been so high in Pakistan? Amjad: In the 2010s, Pakistan got a lot of private operators to set up thermal power plants, mainly coal and gas, and we offered them quite lucrative deals. These are long-term contracts — 20 or 25 years [in which the government must pay even when the plants' power is not needed]. Then when the Russia-Ukraine crisis began, fuel prices shot up for both gas and coal. And because of fiscal troubles, the government agreed to an IMF loan package that required removal of electricity subsidies for consumers, which had shielded them from some of the expense. So all the costs had to be passed on. e360: With more people generating their own power, there is concern that Pakistan's utilities are losing operating revenue. What would the implications of that be? Amjad: Over the past year we've seen a 4 to 5 percent decrease in grid demand. As more people defect from the grid, the total costs are shared by a smaller number of consumers. So grid electricity gets more expensive, and more consumers leave. This creates what's called a utility death spiral. And we don't want those left on the grid to have to pay for this. So we need massive reform. In developed countries with a high percentage of renewables in some regions, government agencies have had to modernize themselves and put the right infrastructure in place. In Pakistan, it's been very unregulated, unstructured. That needs to change within the next two years — otherwise all the inefficiencies, and the mismanagement and lack of planning are going to cause that spiral, and those who still rely on the grid will bear the cost. We need a lot of action by the government and utilities to prevent that. It's still not too late for the grid to adapt. Utilities have always believed energy is best provided by big power plants, a lot of firm capacity and base load. Now it's more about flexible supply to meet flexible demand. It's a very different equation. A lot of unlearning has to happen. The grid has to reinvent itself and start providing the support required for distributed [decentralized] generation — balancing and demand-supply management and all of those flexibility options, even utility-level batteries. It's quite ambitious, but there is no other option for Pakistan. e360: Will solar power displace energy from fossil fuels, or is it additive? Amjad: Fossil fuels are already being displaced. The coal power plants have become stranded assets — they're being utilized at rates under 20 percent. We have gas-fired power plants where utilization is as low as 15 percent. e360: What can other Global South countries learn from Pakistan's experience? Amjad: Pakistan wasn't expecting to do this for at least 10 or 20 years. It was always supposed to be the U.S. and China and Europe first. But Global South countries can actually be the leaders of the energy transition. Pakistan is proving just that. We've positioned ourselves as early adopters. It's an excellent model because a lot of the conditions we've seen here — like the supply glut from China — exist for other developing economies, too. I think what they can do is plan for it accordingly, with certain safeguards, certain mechanisms. Government can proactively play a role. This is a revolution to celebrate. There's a lot that could be improved on, a lot that can be learned from our experience. I hope we'll be able to talk about Pakistan as a good example, not as 'things to avoid, or things not to do.' But that depends on how we go about our work in the next few years.
National Observer
22-07-2025
- Politics
- National Observer
Why calling the Texas flooding an 'act of god' is a dangerous form of political denial
This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration In the aftermath of the catastrophic flooding in Texas last week, government officials from President Donald Trump to the governor of Texas to county representatives have sought to deflect blame and shift public focus away from questions of responsibility. The White House press secretary called the flooding 'an act of God': 'It's not the administration's fault that the flood hit when it did,' Karoline Leavitt said. Gov. Greg Abbott said that asking about blame was for ' losers.' And Trump himself told the media that 'nobody expected it, nobody saw it.' To understand more about how governments communicate with the public in the wake of a tragic loss of life, and how to interpret the Trump administration's messaging on Texas, Inside Climate News spoke to Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist and the author of the book Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago. Heat Wave investigates the government response during and after the deadly 1995 Chicago heat wave — the 30th anniversary of which begins Saturday — and the social, political and institutional causes that ultimately led to more than 700 deaths. Klinenberg catalogs the typical strategies used by governments when they are seeking to evade accountability, from euphemism and denial to silencing experts and trying to paint an event as uniquely unprecedented. He used this framework to analyze the way that Mayor Richard Daley and his staff talked about the heat wave and its victims. Today, Daley's comments sound eerily similar to Trump's: 'Let's be realistic,' Daley said at a press conference as the death toll rose. 'No one realized the deaths of that high an occurrence would take place.' A Chicago health department official said that 'government can't guarantee that there won't be a heat wave.' Later, the heat wave was officially described as a 'unique meteorological event.' As a disturbing trend repeats in the wake of the Texas floods, the question begs to be asked: how can people learn from history if they deny it even happened? 'This kind of rhetoric promotes complacency, since it signals there's nothing anyone could do to make a difference,' Klinenberg said. When it comes to what happened in Texas and in Chicago, he said, we know that's not true. KILEY BENSE: I read your book Heat Wave a few months ago, and I've been thinking about it a lot ever since, but especially in the last week, reading the news about what happened in Texas and reading everything that some of our politicians and government officials have been saying. What was your initial reaction to hearing that type of messaging from government officials in the wake of what just happened? ERIC KLINENBERG: It's totally predictable and totally familiar. And it's a total cop out. It's a strategy that political officials have used for ages to deny accountability after failing to do their jobs. We know by now that there's no such thing as a natural disaster. First of all, the weather is no longer natural in our climate-changed world. Second, the reason some people are especially vulnerable has far more to do with social and political factors than with Mother Nature. And this is by now so well known, it's a cliche, but if you're a political official, calling a disaster 'natural' absolves you of responsibility, makes it seem inevitable. BENSE: Especially the phrase, 'an act of God.' KLINENBERG: We already know there are countless decisions that people and political officials made that turned the floods into a human catastrophe: the decision to settle and develop a vulnerable riverfront area. The decision to expand in harm's way, even when scientists warned about the risks. The decision to ignore environmental reviews. The decision to fire government officials who track the weather and communicate with local officials. The decision by local officials not to invest in emergency warning systems. Up and down the line, we see human causes of a catastrophe that, at minimum, made this significantly more lethal than it should have been. God didn't ordain that. BENSE: The camp that was most affected had expanded and built more cabins about six years ago. And they built right in the floodplain. KLINENBERG: The camp was aware of the dangers on the river and concerned about the dangers on the river. Yet it did it anyway. Texas is a state that's notoriously in denial about climate change, notoriously hostile to environmental review and notoriously unwilling to regulate in the name of public health and safety. BENSE: In your book, you write about the 1995 Chicago heat wave and the messaging used in the aftermath of that event by the mayor and his administration. What were the results of the communication about the heat wave? KLINENBERG: Unfortunately, that kind of rhetoric worked in Chicago. It confused the public. It generated a media debate about whether the deaths were really real, because the mayor challenged the medical examiner's mortality findings, and it also generated a debate about who was responsible, because the city government's position was that people died because they neglected to take care of themselves. During a time of crisis or uncertainty, leading political officials and big media organizations have an outsized influence on our interpretation of the situation. I think the rhetoric of the natural disaster, of blaming the victim, made it far more difficult for Chicago to make sense of what happened in 1995 and made the world far less likely to learn from their failures. BENSE: To come back to Texas, what are your concerns with this being the immediate reaction from not just federal officials, but also on the local level? KLINENBERG: My concern is that by calling this 'an act of God,' and obfuscating the social and political causes of the disaster, they make the next one inevitable. It's especially sad because so many young people lost their lives, and it's been a horrific week to track their stories and to learn about the families, unsure of their children's fate. It's been a terrifying week, and I don't know a single climate scientist who believes that we'll have less of this in the future, right? Everyone knows we're just going to see more dangerous weather systems like this one, and as long as we deny the ways that we're making them worse, we're doomed to repeat them.
