Climate Point: Climate change could mean more tornados

Welcome to Climate Point, your weekly guide to climate, energy and the environment. I’m Erin Rode, writing from Palm Springs, California, where we had our wettest day in months on Tuesday with a whooping 0.29 inches of rain — part of a much-needed winter storm in our drought-stricken state. 

Widespread tornadoes caused damage and devastation in Kentucky, Illinois, Tennessee, Missouri and Arkansas this week, and some scientists say climate change could mean more tornado outbreaks on the horizon, Doyle Rice reports for USA Today. 

"The latest science indicates that we can expect more of these huge (tornado) outbreaks because of human-caused climate change," Penn State meteorologist Michael Mann told USA Today.

Warmer spring-like temperatures in much of the Midwest and South last week helped bring the warm and moist air that formed the thunderstorms that spawned the tornadoes. Some of this is due to La Niña, a natural climate pattern that usually brings warmer-than-normal winter temperatures across the southern U.S., but scientists also expect atypical warm weather like this to become more common in the future due to climate change. 

In addition to warmer winters, "Tornado Alley" is shifting farther east away from Kansas and Oklahoma and into the states where this weekend's tornadoes hit. Earlier this year, USA Today reported that millions of Americans living in the South are at an even greater risk for tornadoes than those in the Plains.

Must-read stories 

Biomass loophole. In North Yorkshire, England, the Drax plant has spent the last few years transitioning from burning coal to "sustainably sourced biomass," or wood pellets. In spite of the Drax Group calling itself "the biggest decarbonization project in Europe" that is "enabling a zero-carbon, lower-cost energy future," Drax emitted more than 16 million tons of carbon dioxide in 2020, with 13.2 million tons from biomass. 

This difference between the company's language and its carbon emissions can be attributed to what many scientists call the "carbon accounting loophole," as Sarah Miller reports in the New Yorker. Back in the late 1990s, the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change decided to count emissions from harvesting trees, but not the emissions from burning wood pellets, out of fears that counting both would be duplicative. Biomass is also technically renewable since trees can grow back, although there's no requirement that companies replant trees. 

Since then, the biomass industry has expanded, now accounting for 59% of renewable energy in the E.U., as the industry emits "enormous amounts of carbon that don't officially exist," Miller writes. 

SOS. Jacobabad, Pakistan, reached 126 degrees Fahrenheit with humidity in June, a level of heat that can cause organ failure or death within just a few hours. In Dakar, Senegal, three months' worth of rain fell on a single day in September 2020. Mexico City is sinking due to the aquifer below the city drying up from overpumping and climate change. Swedes have added the word "flygskam," or "flight shame," to their vocabulary to describe the guilt from flying in airplanes and its carbon emissions. 

These are just some of the examples of climate change’s effects on 193 countries in an interactive piece from New York Times Opinion.

All about energy 

Golden State solar changes. Changes are on the way for California's 26-year-old net metering program, which allows residential solar customers to sell the energy they don't use back to power companies at the retail rate for power. Under the program, the number of homes with solar installations in California has grown to over 1.3 million, more than any other state. 

But utility companies say solar customers are selling their energy back for more than it's worth, and that solar customers aren't paying their fare share for the other costs associated with power rates, such as transmission and distribution, pushing more of those costs onto other customers, often renters and those who can't afford to install solar. A proposal from the California Public Utilities Commission this week would lower the amount of money that residential solar customers make from selling back their extra energy, and would add a "grid participation charge" of about $40 per month for solar households. 

Red state goes green. Nebraska, a state that last backed a Democrat in a presidential election in 1964 and voted for Donald Trump with a double-digit margin in 2016, just became the first and only Republican-controlled state to plan to fully decarbonize its electricity sector by mid-century, reports Zoya Teirstein for Grist.

And the plan didn't come from the governor's office or the statehouse, but instead from the board of directors of the Nebraska Public Power District, the largest electric utility in the state, which voted to adopt a nonbinding decarbonization goal of net-zero emissions by 2050. Nebraska is the only state in the country where electric utilities are publicly owned, meaning Nebraskans vote for the people on the boards of its power utilities. 

“That gives voters in Nebraska quite a bit of power to determine the future of our electricity generation” independent of their opinions on “other issues that often go into election decisions,” Chelsea Johnson, deputy director of Nebraska Conservation Voters, told Grist. 

Federal lands, renewable energy. U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland visited the California desert this week to promote solar farms and other renewable projects on public lands in the West, my colleague Janet Wilson reported for the Desert Sun. 

Haaland and other federal officials see vast federal lands as an opportunity to build renewable energy projects that can help cut fossil fuel emissions, including in California's desert. On Saturday, Haaland said the Bureau of Land Management is currently processing a total of 49 onshore clean energy projects proposed on public lands in the western United States, including 36 solar projects, four wind projects, four geothermal projects and five "gen-tie" lines.

Hot takes

Lake Powell pipeline. A new report claims that three states in the Colorado River’s Upper Basin are already using more water from the river than is their legal right, and calls a project that would pipe up to 28 billion of gallons of water each year to St. George, Utah, from Lake Powell “a good example of a bad idea threatening other water users,” Joan Meiners with the St. George Spectrum and Daily News reports. 

100.4 degrees. An all-time Arctic high temperature of 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit in the northern Russian town of Verkhoyansk in 2020 was certified as accurate by the United Nations’ weather agency on Tuesday, Lindsey Botts reports for The Arizona Republic. 

Climate equity? As climate change disproportionately impacts poorer communities, governments in California are developing tools like San Diego's Climate Equity Index to determine where to best spend money to combat those effects. But these tools are not perfect, as MacKenzie Elmer reports for Voice of San Diego. 

Goodbye gas stoves. New York City on Wedensday banned gas-powered stoves, space heaters and water boilers in all new buildings, becoming the nation's largest city to enact such a ban. Other cities with variations of gas bans include Berkeley, San Jose, Seattle, Sacramento, and Brookline, Mass., reports Anne Barnard in the New York Times. 

And another thing

Alex Wolfe takes long walks, but he doesn't hike. Instead of walks through the wilderness, he covers long distances in cities and suburbs, such as walking the entire length of the island of Manhattan or all 24 miles of Western Avenue, a major thoroughfare in Chicago. Eve Andrews writes about Wolfe, and the act of walking in cities and neighborhoods built for cars, in this thoughtful story for Grist. 

“I have just such a deep desire to connect with my surroundings, and I found that walking is the most intimate way to experience your surroundings for better or for worse,” Wolfe told Andrews. “There’s a beautiful thing of watching your surroundings unfold in front of you. Going from Queens to Montauk and watching that subtle progression of strip malls and parking lots to nature to the ocean — it’s so powerful.”

That's all for this week. Take a long walk around your neighborhood this week, and stay in touch @RodeErin on Twitter or via email at erin.rode@desertsun.com. You can sign up to get Climate Point in your inbox for free here.