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What Would It Take to Eliminate Storm-Related Power Outages?
New Republic • Jan 29, 2026

What Would It Take to Eliminate Storm-Related Power Outages?

Hundreds of thousands of households, mostly in the Southeast United States, were without power when a dangerous cold snap hit this week, just days after the previous weekend’s winter storm buffeted large swathes of the country. Officials in several of the affected states have warned that these outages could linger for some time—in Mississippi, one emergency management coordinator told CNN that they might last “weeks, not days.” Power outages during severe weather events are increasingly common. And they can easily be fatal, particularly when paired with extreme temperatures. What would it take to at least reduce the frequency of these outages, even as the severe weather driving them increases?“There are several points of failure that lead to these kinds of widespread power outages,” Gudrun Thompson, senior attorney and energy program leader at the Southern Environmental Law Center, told me by phone. She pointed not just to the most recent storm but also to Winter Storm Elliott, which hit the Southeast hard in 2022, and Winter Storm Uri, which devastated Texas in 2021.Getting electricity into homes happens in a few stages: It begins with power generation, then transmission (where it goes to substations), and finally distribution to the homes themselves. Here, the amount of power demand also plays a role. “Each of these need to be tackled, and some of the solutions won’t address all three of these,” said Adam Kurland, a federal energy attorney with the Environmental Defense Fund.But both Thompson and Kurland pointed to a few things that could make a difference. “On the supply side, the biggest thing is just having a portfolio of diverse resources,” Kurland said. Renewables aren’t just good from a climate and environment perspective, he said, “they are also usually the most reliable during extreme weather events, and that’s been proven out by a number of studies that have found that both gas and coal have resulted in bottlenecks during extreme weather events.”That’s particularly true in some of the regions suffering from outages this week. “You’ve got this legacy power system where the electric grid is still in this very twentieth-century model of big central station power plants,” said Thompson. “You’ve still got coal plants running in the South, you’ve got some nuclear plants, you’ve got a lot of new and old gas plants.” And “in some of these winter storms, we’ve literally seen these piles of coal freeze, so they couldn’t run the coal-fired plants.” Gas supply networks are similarly vulnerable, and were a major factor in the Texas outages in 2021. Initial analysis from the energy and climate policy firm Energy Innovation suggests gas generation within PJM Interconnection—the country’s largest grid operator, serving over 65 million people across the mid-Atlantic to the upper South and Midwest—fell by 10 gigawatts during this most recent storm.This contradicts everything that conservative politicians, in particular, tend to say in the wake of these events—certainly after the Texas outages in 2021. “I often get asked by reporters, ‘What do you say to what the electric utility is saying about how this winter storm event just proves they need more gas?’” Thompson said. “It’s a false narrative. Clean energy resources are more reliable, more affordable, less risky for consumers, when you kind of put them all together as a portfolio. You can’t rely on any one source, so you’ll hear fossil industry apologists saying, ‘Well, the sun doesn’t always shine, the wind doesn’t always blow.’ That’s true,” she said, but no one’s advocating relying on a single source. And that points to another thing that could be done to eliminate these outages: a more interconnected grid. This was one of the main factors in 2021 in Texas, Kurland noted. “Texas’s power grid, ERCOT, is primarily islanded from the rest of the United States, so there weren’t a lot of connections there to be able to bring power into Texas during that storm.” If the goal is to build resilience to severe weather events, we need “an electrical grid that’s bigger than the weather,” Kurland said. With better transmission lines connecting different regions, it won’t matter if the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing or severe cold is kneecapping fossil fuel generation in a particular location, because “you’re now able to dispatch power from one side of the United States to the other.” Microgrids tied into the main grid, as well as better power storage, could also play a role. And then there’s the option of burying power lines, which would address the problem not only of the lines sagging under ice in the winter but also of stray sparks causing wildfires in other seasons. This isn’t feasible everywhere, Kurland emphasized, pointing to water tables and local geology. But even for such inhospitable locales, there are different, more advanced types of wires that are less vulnerable to sagging and the like. “There are some incentives that the federal government and the states can apply to be able to unlock those types of advanced technologies on the transmission system.”When it comes to federal incentives, though, both Kurland and Thompson noted that a lot of the policies that could make households and the electrical grid less vulnerable in severe weather have been recently reversed, or the associated funds delayed. That’s true not just for, say, offshore wind projects but also for the weatherization programs that could both help reduce strain on the grid during cold snaps and help people survive brief outages when they occur. “As of last month, there were still a number of states trying to get that funding for cold snaps and extreme weather events like this,” said Kurland. He pointed to funds already designated to states via the Weatherization Assistance Program, slated to be released in June 2025, which still hadn’t arrived as of late December. Under the Trump administration, the Department of Energy has proposed scrapping the program altogether.The entire grid feels the effect when homes aren’t weatherized, Kurland said. Weatherization is “one way that you can reduce that demand so there isn’t a big draw on the system.” If homes are drawing a large amount of energy, it can actually prolong outages. “When you have all the customers with the thermostats turned all the way up waiting for the power to come on, that can just trip that system again.”Thompson also pointed to the Trump Environmental Protection Agency “unlawfully” canceling grants that had already been awarded for community solar programs and similar projects, in the Southern states where she works. “The Trump administration, even though they say they have this energy affordability agenda, is actually working to undermine successful policies and programs that would actually help households to afford their electricity bills,” Thompson said.Stat of the Week61%Survey results released this week by Yale Climate Communication find 61 percent of Americans underestimate how worried their fellow Americans are about global warming.What I’m ReadingTime for some courage in the climate fight, tooI’ve been reading a lot of good essays from climate writers watching and troubled by the events in Minnesota in the last few weeks. Emily Atkin’s essay, over on Heated, is definitely worth your time, as is Bill McKibben’s reflection on just how wrong politicians have been, time and time again, when guessing what ordinary people care about.… it’s not just the Trump administration that those brave people faced down, it’s the pundit class too, who insisted over and over that progressives should avoid talking about immigration because it wasn’t politically popular. The other subject we’ve been told to sideline is “climate change,” for fear of offending voters more interested in “affordability.” (Former energy secretary Jennifer Granholm told an industry audience Monday that “on Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs, climate does not rise as much as how much I’m paying for my electricity bill,” which is one of those things that sounds clever until you meet someone who lost their home to a wildfire.)I actually have no problem with the advice to focus on electric bills—as I wrote a couple of weeks ago, I think affordability, especially of electricity, is an issue that helps both elect Democrats and reduce carbon emissions, since anyone interested in the cost of power is going to be building sun and wind. But I also don’t think that talking about global warming is a mistake—most Americans, polls show, understand the nature of the crisis, and want action to stem it. It isn’t the single most salient issue because all of us live in this particular moment (and in this particular moment the fact that federal agents are executing citizens who dare to take cellphone pictures of them is definitely the most salient issue) but it is nonetheless a net plus for politicians, especially in blue states.Read Bill McKibben’s full newsletter at The Crucial Years.This article first appeared in Life in a Warming World, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Heather Souvaine Horn. Sign up here.

Mark Carney Took the Stand the Rest of the World Must Now Take
New Republic • Jan 29, 2026

Mark Carney Took the Stand the Rest of the World Must Now Take

Last weekend’s summary execution of Alex Pretti by Customs and Border Protection agents in Minnesota highlighted to millions of Americans the nature of the Trump administration. First, they killed a disarmed man in cold blood after these poorly trained thugs with a badge freaked out, or simply decided they could do it with impunity. Afterwards, the administration issued bald-faced lies about what happened, while taking the line that no one would get hurt if everyone simply shut up and stopped resisting. This is the easiest thing to do when the other side has all the power, which makes Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s defiance all the more remarkable. The Trump administration has given the same mafioso ultimatum to Canada that it has to protesters, but on a grander scale—with the threat of annexation.At the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland, Carney’s speech was a pointed, stinging rebuke of Donald Trump and his jingoistic foreign policy. He referred to Trump as a “hegemon” and called for a break in existing U.S.-Canadian relations. “This bargain no longer works,” he declared. This speech is historic, as it represents the most open, direct rebuke of and break with Trump and the United States by former allies to date. Carney mentioned the writings of Václav Havel, which explored how corrupt systems that clearly no longer work sustain themselves through fear, compliance in advance, and people refusing to contradict what is clearly a lie. However, the system (communism, in Havel’s analogy) crumbles when the first person refuses to go along with the lie and suffers no consequences as a result. In essence, Carney is doing exactly what you need to do to break the bystander effect.Trump responded to Carney’s temerity with his typical petulance. He stated on Truth Social that Canada was no longer invited to the “Board of Peace” he created, many of whose members are horrid dictatorships like Belarus, Saudi Arabia, Hungary, and Egypt. None of the U.N.’s other Security Council members have signed on, and it is doubtful that Canada was that interested in being a part of such an organization, either.This break with the United States is historic; Canada does not appear to have any hope that the two neighbors’ irreconcilable differences can be overcome. It is a tacit acknowledgment that a right-wing, authoritarian movement in the United States is ascendant, and unlikely to be removed anytime in the foreseeable future. Even if a different administration comes to power in three years, the United States has proven to be an unreliable partner and cannot be trusted not to fall into idiotic despotism every four years.This break will have long-term impacts for both the U.S. and Canada. It is difficult to overstate how closely intertwined the two countries are, economically, militarily, and administratively. Even though Canada’s population is one-ninth of America’s, Canada is our second-largest trading partner, and the U.S. accounts for 70 percent of all Canadian imports. Travel between the two countries is trivially easy, and you can spend up to 180 days per year in either country with little oversight. Canada and the U.S. have a shared airspace agreement, and NORAD is a joint U.S.-Canadian command.Carney’s speech represents a profound shift in this relationship. Disentangling Canada from the U.S. is a monumental undertaking. It will be incredibly and increasingly disruptive, to Canada even more than the U.S. The prime minister did not make his comments at Davos lightly. To use a metaphor, it is like an abused spouse deciding to leave a relationship even if it means temporary hardship and poverty: It is not done on a whim.The Canadian plan appears to be to power through whatever tariffs and punishments Trump metes out, shifting its alignment to more reliable trading partners like the European Union and China. Carney’s primary goal is closer integration with the EU. There has even been discussion about whether Canada is eligible to join the EU.If Carney is successful in leading the democratic world in writing off the U.S. as a lost cause, it will initiate a cascade of consequences that will devastate the U.S. long term. When other countries cease kowtowing to the whims of a powerful but mad king, he loses his power. The United States is on the cusp of becoming a pariah state, ruled by a spoiled man-child who is increasingly and openly mocked for his obvious failings. It only takes one person to say the emperor has no clothes to give others the courage to act. The gross domestic product of the European Union rivals that of the U.S. as a percentage of world share when calculating using purchasing power parity, which takes into account relative currency value and cost of goods. Recent U.S. GDP growth has been distributed unequally, and much of it is based on the AI bubble. The global economy also revolves around the American dollar. Eighty-eight percent of global foreign exchange transactions are in dollars, as are 58 percent of foreign reserve currency holdings. The second-largest holdings? They are in the euro. Should there be a significant shift away from the dollar to the euro, this would be catastrophic for the U.S. economy. Hyperinflation would be triggered, exacerbated by Trump’s attempts to remove Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and replace him with someone committed to the loose money policy the administration desires in order to “juice” the economy.Carney’s speech has been covered extensively in the press outside the U.S., which recognizes it for the titanic shift in policy that it is, and the open invitation to Europe to join him in defiance of Trump, consequences be damned. In it, Carney also mapped out what a post–American democracy world order looks like: Canada openly turning its back on the dysfunctional, unreliable, bullying kakistocracy that the U.S. has become and integrating with Europe as both economic powers move on.In 1938, the strongest nation opposed to Hitler accepted a disgraceful surrender to a bullying monster. When history is written, I believe this may be remembered as the anti-Chamberlain moment: a leader of a (relatively) powerless nation throwing down the gauntlet and proposing to the democracies of the world that they band together as a unified front against a juvenile, narcissistic would-be hegemon who has never been effectively stood up to in his pampered life. It takes a great deal of courage to say “Slava Ukraini” to the man with a gun pointed at you. Mark Carney looked at Trump and his threats, and essentially said, “True North strong and free,” daring him to do his worst, knowing that Trump likely isn’t joking about pulling an Anschluss on Canada. The U.S. is likely to learn a hard lesson economically about what happens when the world no longer revolves around it and the dollar. It is also about to learn what it means to be an international pariah, as former allies walk away and wash their hands of the entire sordid American mess.

The War Intervention: AI, Data Centers, and the Environment
Scheer Post • Jan 28, 2026

The War Intervention: AI, Data Centers, and the Environment

By: Aaron Kirshenbaum for Codepink Early on Saturday, January 3rd, Venezuela was attacked on behalf of oil, mineral, tech, andweapons profiteers in a regime change operation. Since then, the Trump administration hasthreatened Iran, Greenland, Cuba, Colombia, and Mexico. What unites these threats? TheU.S.’s quest for endless resource extraction to power its increasingly deadly global empire. […]

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