The image above comes from a Washington Post article that was posted online on September 13, 2024. The Post's article was titled, "The Disaster No U.S. City Is Prepared For." The type is pretty small, in the image above, but the legend under the image says that on July 8, 2024, 71% of the homes within Houston, Texas were without power.
The paywall that will probably face most readers of this blog posting may well prevent non-subscribers from getting the full story. In essence, The Post tells us that it's not just Houston that has a problem. The power grid, in the United States, is not capable of maintining widespread electric service as the grid is assaulted, ever more frequently, by weather-related outages. And, of course, as global warming continues to change the conditions that we tend to "take for granted," our world is increasingly dependent on the electrical power that is ever more at risk:
FOR DAYS, RESIDENTS OF HOUSTON STRUGGLED to survive as temperatures rose. They shared generators, filled buckets and bathtubs with ice, packed air-conditioned hotels and emergency rooms. The most vulnerable struggled to get the care they needed. Many died. But in some ways, Houston was narrowly spared. Temperatures rose to the high 90s, but only for a couple of days. If the heat had stayed, the human toll could have been far worse. Experts warn this type of catastrophe — a combined power outage with a heat wave — is a scenario that cities and states are unprepared for.
I am increasingly coming to believe that we are going to have to make major changes in how we operate our world - and we are going to have to make those changes quite quickly. "Radical" changes are going to be needed. That could be exciting, and I think we will have a better chance to do well, with the challenges ahead, if we think of all the necessary changes as a positive opportunity for a social, economic, and political transformation that will make the next twenty-five years a time worth celebrating. Resisting and resenting the changes we need to make - and those changes will require genuine sacrifices - are going to be counterproductive.
These were my thoughts, as I read the article in The Post.
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