White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

The ‘New Weather’ Reality Will Change the Nation, Defy Politics

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I have never done political consulting. So it was novel to me when a candidate in the midterms asked me what he should be worried about in 2027. I repeated what Harold Macmillan, British prime minister from 1957 to 1963, is believed to have said, “Events, dear boy, events.”

Actually, I had a little list of crises that I have been gathering and which will come to bear on the political establishment — and we the people. Topping the list is one that is already at hand: the climate, which I call the “new weather.”

We have had weeks of atmospheric disturbance resulting in catastrophic floods, power outages, flight cancellations, oppressive heat and fires. Weather disruptions have been the first or second stories on the networks’ evening newscasts, pushing back the news on the wars in Iran and Ukraine, as well as news from the White House.

Television stations like to tell viewers they have “news you can use.” The new weather is news that will abuse you. It knows where you live and it may call. It has called in Europe and across North America. It is a new reality.

The Southwest is parched and the Colorado River, that life channel, is running dry, severely affecting people in seven states. It also affects the food supply, as much of farming depends on the river’s bounty. Even Mexico receives some of the dwindling Colorado River water supply under a treaty with the United States.

Hundreds of thousands have lost power for hours or days, and others may be choosing between keeping the air conditioning on and spending on other necessities.

Sustained heat of over 110 degrees is a killer, and electricity for air conditioning is a lifesaver. Every year, more than a thousand people die of heat.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports the number of heat-related deaths nationwide. The worst year was 2023, with 2,325 deaths, as measured by death certificate analysis.

But heat-related fatalities are hard to collect. I would wager that the real death toll is much higher.

Liberal politicians will blame the fossil fuel industries — coal, oil and natural gas — for continuing to drive up greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere; conservatives will blame regulation and lack of infrastructure building. Local politicians will attack the data centers and the utilities.

President Trump has called global warming a hoax. But “say it ain’t so” doesn’t work when it is too hot for kids to play outside or streets are rivers, and when the flow of food from farm to supermarket is interrupted.

Huge infrastructure projects will be proposed at a time when there is a growing awareness that the budget deficit is out of control and there is no way America will grow out of it on its present tax trajectory.

If my candidate makes it to Congress, he will find it easier to say no to new expenditures than it is to say yes to new taxes.

Nonetheless, effective pipelines will be proposed to move water from water-rich areas to water-starved states. Some of those, like Texas, drunk on its recent Mecca-like effect on business, will have difficulty accepting that people won’t come if there is no water and inadequate electricity.

Heat, not economics, could curtail the North-to-Southwest flow of people, which has been the population realignment in recent years.

How to live with the new weather will definitely be a new priority that politicians will find difficult to address. It doesn’t fit behind a political slogan. It does favor infrastructure repair and enhancement, from boosting the electric grid to planting water-frugal crops to serious concern about where people live and how they pay their electric bill — a matter of keeping cool and staying alive.

But for the political establishment, other issues are forming, each competing with the weather for attention. For a start, there is integrating artificial intelligence into our economy without severe disruption, dealing with a broken healthcare system, and providing care that is beyond the reach of people facing higher prices for other survival services and products, like electricity and water.

Easier to say your opponent is a rascal, the other party is fascist or communist, and to worry about the use of AI on cellphones in classrooms.

We all have the weather to deal with, Democrat or Republican, and it is still an issue for governance.

Air Conditioning Costs Threaten Summer of Sun Belt Catastrophe

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The summer of our discontent is at hand. When I asked a professional weather forecaster what we might expect this season, he said, “Hades.”

That was as disturbing as everything else in this disturbing year.

America has a summer culture. You could say the whole of the Northern Hemisphere has one, but there is a special reverence, a profound intimacy that Americans have with summer. It is a happy place for healing hurts, meeting old friends, making new ones, and the extraordinary joy of just basking, even romancing.

The British usually make jokes about summer. One goes, “I missed summer. I went to a movie and when I came out, it was over.”

Clearly, they aren’t making jokes like that this summer when temperatures have set records and forced people to do extreme things to cool off. Untold deaths have resulted.

The French have always had their own reverence for summer and, as a nation, down tools in August and head to the beach, often in the South.

They, like the British, are suffering in the current heat wave because there isn’t a lot of air conditioning — almost none in homes and a limited amount in public buildings. Only one in five British homes has air conditioning. In France, there is more in the south, but not in the north around Paris. It was never needed.

I have been in London when it is hot, but not as hot as it has been so far this summer. Sitting in a theater in London in summer was excruciating, made the more so because Britain is humid.

Anyone who lives in America’s coastal regions, especially the South, knows the awful combo of heat and humidity.

Deaths from heat in Europe are widespread and are still being reported.

Air conditioning has shaped America for the last seven decades. It has made living with year-round comfort possible in the South, the Southwest and the West.

If it weren’t for our ability — with enough electricity — to reverse the climate in places like Florida, Texas and Arizona, the migration from the north wouldn’t have happened. Once there was air conditioning, people felt they could live comfortably anywhere in the nation.

Even so, all isn’t well. Indeed, this may be the summer of catastrophe, and deaths from heat and uncontrolled fires. The prognosis isn’t good.

The impending social pushback was pointed up by my colleague Herman K. Trabish, writing in Utility Dive. He was attending the Edison Electric Institute’s annual meeting in Las Vegas in early June, and wrote in a brief, “Protesters shouting affordability claims and chanting slogans interrupted a speech by NV Energy President and CEO Brandon Barkhuff.”

Trabish continued, “The confrontation shows the extent to which rising energy costs have stoked public anger, raising pressure on utilities and their regulators.”

The protests were directed at a demand charge approved by the utility commission that wouldn’t take effect until next year, but it opened deep anxiety in southern Nevada about the cost of electricity in weather that is getting hotter and hotter.

Protest leader Leslie Vega said, after the protesters were escorted out of the meeting, “In Las Vegas, one of the fastest-warming cities in the country, you cannot live without electricity.”

Vega’s remarks might well reflect a truth for the whole of the South, Texas and the Southwest. Cheap electricity has been a factor in the migration of tens of millions from the northern states. It was never mentioned; it was just there.

Now the price of electricity is rising inexorably as temperatures appear to rise with equal, threatening vigor.

The natural response from those facing disaster in the heat zones will be to blame the electric utilities and the ubiquitous data centers. There will be calls to nationalize investor-owned utilities like NV Energy, and calls will go out to curb utilities that are already publicly owned, including rural electric cooperatives and those owned by towns and cities.

Additionally, residents in many states with wildfire exposure will, from time to time, have their power cut off entirely for periods to reduce the risk of new fires caused by sparks from line shorting. That will cause new anger.

Most of the world accepts that extreme weather, now common, is associated with global climate change, which is blamed in part on greenhouse gas emissions. That isn’t accepted by the Trump administration, which favors further use of greenhouse gas-producing fossil fuels. The president has said that global warming is a “hoax.”

Hot people have short tempers. They can be expected to have something to say as they suffer, and death tolls rise.