Nearly 2 million homes across Texas had their power restored on Thursday, Gov. Greg Abbott (R) announced.
Why it matters: Approximately 325,000 Texans remain without electricity after a winter storm brought single-digit temperatures and sub-zero wind chill to most of Texas this week.
The chart above is a wide-angle look at the main sources of electricity generation in Texas, showing how natural gas is by far the biggest and how renewables (largely wind) have overtaken coal.
Yes, but: There's plenty of variation, and blaming wind for the state's crisis misses the mark, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Facebook is expanding the geographic reach of its recently launched online portal to counter misinformation about climate change, and will take new steps to steer users of the platform toward those resources.
Why it matters: Social media platforms have immense reach, and they've come under fire from activists and some lawmakers globally for doing too little to thwart the spread of inaccurate content.
Millions of Americans are still without power during the winter weather emergency that's sweeping the U.S. — including nearly 1.8 million Texans, per utility tracker poweroutage.us. Some have also lost water services.
The big picture: Texas has been particularly badly hit by the deadly storm, with infrastructure damaged and pipes frozen. Officials told some 7 million Texans Wednesday to boil tap water before drinking it.
Economists are urging the U.S. government to adopt a higher number for the social cost of carbon emissions.
Why it matters: The social cost of carbon might be the single most important number on climate change, one that helps decide how much we're willing to invest to slow global warming — and how much we actually value the future.
Nearly 3 million Texans are without power and more than 20 are dead, due to a perfect storm of extreme weather, poor planning and an antipathy toward regulation.
Axios Re:Cap digs into what this experience should teach Texas and other states about the future, with Andrew Freedman, deputy weather editor of The Washington Post.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said at a briefing on Wednesday that the Biden administration is sending emergency generators to Texas amid ongoing power outages and freezing weather.
Why it matters: Huge swaths of Texas have been without electricity for days due to critical failures in the state's power grid. The outages come while a winter storm continues to pummel the state, causing unsafe conditions and a desperate need for heat.
Experts say that communities of color were hit with blackouts in Texas first and are likely to face more hurdles getting help or being able to recover financially.
Why it matters: "These are communities that have already been hit hardest with COVID," Robert Bullard, a professor and expert on wealth and racial disparities related to the environment, told The New York Times. "They’re the households working two minimum wage jobs, the essential workers who don’t get paid if they don’t go to work."
These are busy days for the California-based electric vehicle tech company Proterra, which is soon to go public as part of the SPAC-wave sweeping the sector.
Driving the news: This morning the European company Volta Trucks announced that Proterra will supply batteries for its "Volta Zero" urban freight delivery vehicle.
The clean energy think tank Ember finds India's coal demand may have peaked in 2018 and might never fully return from further declines during the pandemic.
Driving the news: That would break with projections that India's coal thirst will keep rising for a long time as the growing nation's overall energy demand surges.
The crisis gripping Texas' power grid is very different from California's fiery emergencies in recent years, but there's connective tissue there: Electricity grids and infrastructure need to be better equipped for a changing climate or they can have deadly consequences.
Driving the news: Texas is reeling after a bitter blast of Arctic air and a related demand surge led to widespread outages, causing millions of customers to lose power that as of this morning is only partially restored.
More than 5 million people remained without power on Tuesday as a series of deadly winter storms brought snow to Houston and historically low temperatures across the plains states.
The latest: At least 20 people are reported dead, per AP, and snow, sleet and freezing rain pounded the Northeast, leaving icy damage in its wake. Temperatures throughout the middle portion of the U.S. fell to century-lows.
