I spoke to Nebraska State Climatologist Martha Shulski in January, and she said some things that I had not heard from other researchers.
In recent decades, she told me, winters on average have warmed, globally, and across North America. But across the midwest, there has been an increasing tendency towards super cold Arctic outbreaks in the month of February – so much so that the average temperatures for the month of February in Nebraska, and somewhat in surrounding states, have cooled more than 5 degrees over recent decades, even in the face of the overall warming of meteorological winter, (defined as December, January, February)
She offered last year’s Valentine’s Day Polar Vortex (that resulted in the Texas power grid debacle) as an example – and proved prescient, as we saw a similar mid-continent cold blast come and go over the last week.
David A. Super is a professor of law at Georgetown Law. He also served for several years as the general counsel for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Follow him on Twitter @DavidASuper1
President Biden’s State of the Union address next week will surely focus heavily on Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked aggression against Ukraine. Much of this likely will involve immediate responses to the current crisis. The president also, however, has the opportunity to address the long-term problem of aggressivedictatorships propped up by oil revenues despite otherwise moribund economies. As long as they remain heavily dependent on fossil fuels, western democracies will keep dutifully funding the war machines of Russia and its ilk.
Biden has the opportunity to chart a bold future for the country, simultaneously unleashing the innovation to revitalize our economy, seizing the world lead in a crucial area of technology, defunding petroleum-fueled despots, and demonstrating an idealism that can win admiration around the globe.
He can achieve all of this by declaring that this country will be the world’s leader in combatting climate change.
A determined focus on combatting climate change can transform and re-energize our economy. On the one hand, slowing climate change could head off some of the worst damage that would otherwise impoverish us. The projected one-foot rise in sea level by mid-century would destroypropertyofenormous value and require expensivereclamationprojects to prevent even more losses. The drought in the western U.S. is the worst in over a millennium and only getting worse. It and resultingwildfires, too, are destroying more valuable infrastructure and reducing crop yields. Averting these losses would make us a much richer country.
And on the other hand, developing and implementing the technologies required to slow climate change would produce millions of jobs. Policymakers can cut interest rates and taxes to their hearts’ content, but if business cannot identify productive investments, little will happen. The boom of the 1990s occurred because business had a clear purpose: realizing the new potential of the internet. Although innovation continues in the information economy, the most obvious opportunities have already been exploited. This is why persistently low interest rates and even the massive business tax cuts enacted in 2017 failed to spur significant new investment.
Transforming the ways in which we obtain and use energy will open far greater business opportunities even than the dawning of the Information Age. Installing and maintaining solar panels, windfarms, and the like necessarily must be done in individual communities, ensuring that the jobs created will be broadly shared and cannot be sent overseas. Overall, if we start now we can add an estimated $855 billion per year to the economy by 2070 — more than the combined revenues of Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft. Even in the first five years, the investments pending in the Senate would create an estimated 2.3 million jobs.
