While Australia doesn’t generally experience such extreme winter temperatures, our electricity systems are still vulnerable to climate change, extreme weather and power outages.
Power to the people, but it will cost you.
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
The weather-related impacts of climate change will increasingly threaten critical infrastructure in the future. Shifting electricity grids towards microgrids could help.
Waiting in line in freezing rain to fill propane tanks in Houston, Texas, Feb. 17, 2021.
AP Photo/David J. Phillip
The Texas electric power market is designed to give energy companies incentive to sell electricity at the lowest possible cost. That focus helps explain why it collapsed during a historic cold wave.
Icicles on a bush in downtown Houston, Feb. 15, 2021.
Mark Felix/AFP via Getty Images
Heat waves, droughts and deep freezes can all strain the electric grid, leading utilities to impose rolling blackouts. Climate change is likely to make these events more common.
At the drive-in: Biden at a rally in Atlanta, Georgia on October 27.
Curtis Compton/The Atlanta Journal/EPA
As Joe Biden and Donald Trump spend the final day of the US 2020 election campaign in key battlegrounds – why a handful of states will be so crucial to the result.
Fishermen on the shore by decommissioned oil rigs in Port Aransas, Texas (March 11, 2019).
Loren Elliott/AFP
Republicans claim that Biden’s clean-energy program would mean massive job losses in the oil-and-gas sector. The figures cited are not supported by the facts.
A surface coal mine in Gillette, Wyoming, photographed in 2008.
Greg Goebel/Flickr
The pandemic recession has reduced US energy demand, roiling budgets in states that are major fossil fuel producers. But politics and culture can impede efforts to look beyond oil, gas and coal.
Hurricane Harvey set up a rare natural experiment to study the effects of fishing.
NOAA via Wikipedia
Lee Smee, Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi e Joseph W. Reustle, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Hurricane Harvey destroyed the fishing infrastructure of Aransas Bay and reduced fishing by 80% over the following year. This removed humans from the trophic cascade and whole food webs changed.
There are functional tests for coronavirus, but not enough of them are being done.
AP Photo/Paul Sancya
Zoë McLaren, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Ideally everyone could get tested frequently for the coronavirus. No state is close to achieving this, but some are doing better than others. What are the challenges in meeting demand for testing?
The U.S. as a whole is facing a huge surge in coronavirus cases, but the differences between states like New York and Florida are striking.
Kena Betancur/1207979953 via Getty Images
The recent spike in new coronavirus cases in the US is not due to a second wave, but simply the virus moving into new populations or surging in places that opened up too soon.
On June 26, Texas’ governor ordered bars to close as COVID-19 case numbers spiked, particularly among younger adults. This Houston bar, photographed in late May, voluntarily shut down shortly before the order after two staff members tested positive for the coronavirus.
Mark Felix/AFP/Getty Images
Texas hospitals are filling up with new COVID-19 cases, and many of the people falling ill are young.
Pumpjacks pump crude oil near Halkirk, Alta., more than a decade ago. Oil prices have plunged into negative territory due to the glut created by the COVID-19 global economic shutdown.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Larry MacDougall
Alberta oil is the collateral damage of the oil war between Russia and Saudi Arabia, with COVID-19 launching an additional attack. The province’s oil industry will struggle to recover.
The operating room at the Whole Woman’s Health clinic in Fort Worth, Texas, Sept. 4, 2019. Texas says abortions are nonessential during coronavirus.
AP Photo/Tony Gutierrez)
Seven states are moving to ban abortions, along with other ‘elective’ medical services, during the coronavirus crisis. But delaying or denying abortions can do serious health and financial harm.
Lucia Orosco holding her daughter, Arely, in Boquillas. Much of the embroidery created here reads ‘no el muro’ (no wall).
Matthew Moran
The Mohave rattlesnake is famous for its variable venom – but the reasons behind that variation are not as straightforward as we thought.
An envelope containing a 2018 census letter mailed to a U.S. resident as part of the nation’s only test run of the 2020 census.
AP Photo/Michelle R. Smith
If undocumented immigrants choose not to fill out the questionnaire, then the official population of several states would deflate, costing them House seats and federal funding.
Louisiana’s refineries require the kind of oil Venezuela produces to operate properly.
AP Photo/Gerald Herbert
Amazon nixed plans to build a headquarters in Long Island City after some New Yorkers questioned the wisdom of offering billions in tax breaks in exchange for job promises. A Texas study suggests they had reason to worry.