While Australia doesn’t generally experience such extreme winter temperatures, our electricity systems are still vulnerable to climate change, extreme weather and power outages.
The weather-related impacts of climate change will increasingly threaten critical infrastructure in the future. Shifting electricity grids towards microgrids could help.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Lee Smee, Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi and 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.