In what is becoming one of the unfortunate signatures of our new climate, what used to be four months of rain fell in four hours. This time, The Washington Post reports from central Texas, where at least 120 people have perished, including 36 children, and over 170 more remain unaccounted for in the worst flash flood ever to hit the region and one of the country’s deadliest floods in the last 100 years. In Hunt, TX, the Guadalupe River rose over 20 feet in only a few hours to its second-greatest height on record. A remarkable video documents the rapid rise of the river. The Conversation describes how the regional topography contributes to the dangers of flash flooding in the Texas hill country (Texas leads the nation in flood deaths), and notes that “around 3 a.m. on July 4, the Guadalupe River was rising about 1 foot every 5 minutes.”

Tropical Storm Chantal caused extensive flooding in central North Carolina. The storm, moving slowly, dropped 10 inches of rain in some locations, and flooding was made more severe by the failure of some small dams. The Guardian reports that a flash flood of the Rio Ruidoso in New Mexico killed three people and destroyed 35 homes, and heavy rains resulted in deadly flooding in New Jersey. Lethal flooding also occurred in Taiwan, China, Hungary and Serbia.

The New York Times reviews how climate change is amplifying the power of extreme storm events. Warmer seas are evaporating more quickly into an atmosphere that can hold more moisture, and this has led (as expected) to more intense downpours. (Andrew Dessler notes on The Climate Brink: “The confidence that the scientific community has that this recent rain event was affected by climate change is based on physics: We understand the physical processes that lead to more intense rain events as the climate warms.”) This trend first started showing up in the 1950s, and it is now a worldwide phenomenon. Dessler quotes the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: “The frequency and intensity of heavy precipitation events have increased since the 1950s over most land areas for which observational data are sufficient for trend analysis ([this is understood with] high confidence), and human-caused climate change is likely the main driver.”

In the face of this reality, the lack of leadership by the Trump Administration and the Republican majority in Congress is frightening, sad and pathetic. Fossil-fuel burning is causing the problem, but they are attempting to lock-in long-term demand for these fuels, while at the same time kneecapping the transition to renewable energy and undermining our ability to respond to weather-related emergencies. And if that’s not enough, Rolling Stone reports that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and other right-wing luminaries are suggesting that the floods were the result of human-engineered “weather modification,” and a cloud-seeding company working in Texas is now receiving death threats.

The former acting Deputy Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security explains in The New York Times how the federal emergency-response system in the United States is being defunded just as extreme weather is generating more emergencies. Our new climate has “faster, stronger and less predictable storms,” including weather that can intensify quickly, and this “demands more from the systems that protect us. And yet, the very system designed to meet this moment is being hollowed out.” She describes the cuts that have decimated FEMA, including the loss of staff (20% of permanent positions since January), training stoppages and the expiration of contracts for evacuation logistics, shelter operations and flood-insurance agents. “The uncomfortable truth is this: With each passing day, the federal government is becoming less prepared to face the next big disaster.”

The Guardian describes how cuts to the National Weather Service (NWS) are impacting the forecasting of extreme weather events, a vital service for public health and safety. The NWS is attempting to bolster its forecasting ranks by reassigning meteorologists from research roles that, over the longer term, would be developing new weather forecasting and reporting techniques. What could go wrong?

Meanwhile, the Trump Administration has announced it will no longer provide microwave analyses from Department of Defense satellites for hurricane forecasting, which will blind forecasters as former FEMA official and meteorologist Michael Lowry describes in New York Magazine. An op-ed in The New York Times notes that the NWS’s warning coordinator in the Austin/San Antonio office, the employee responsible for getting warnings of extreme weather out to the public in that area, was a casualty of the Trump Administration’s DOGE cuts and has yet to be replaced.

The absurdity and cruelty of the Trump Administration’s actions were captured by Salon’s Alex Galbraith: “The people who passed a bill meant to pull the copper wiring out of the halls of the National Weather Service and give the scrap proceeds to ICE agents and defense contractors couldn’t even bother to offer a novel reaction to the flash flooding in Texas, opting for old reliable [thoughts and prayers].”

Besides gutting FEMA, Trump and the Republicans have used the new budget to eliminate our nation’s policy to address climate change. Grist reports that the bill signed into law on July 4 quickly phases out clean-energy production and investment tax credits that were put in place by the Biden Administration’s Inflation Reduction Act. Wind and solar projects must be in service by 2027 (or start construction before July 2026) to qualify for the tax credits. An expedited phase-out of consumer tax credits for new and used EVs means only purchases made by September 30 of this year qualify, instead of the previous deadline of 2032. Nuclear, geothermal and batteries can claim tax credits into the 2030s.

Heatmap notes that this policy change “will have a dramatic effect on the deployment of clean energy in the U.S., including reducing new solar and wind capacity additions by almost 40 gigawatts over the next five years, and by about 300 gigawatts over the next 10. That would be enough to power 150 of Meta’s largest planned data centers by 2035.”

Canary Media reviews a large group of climate/clean-energy programs that were eliminated by the legislation: the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (which helped fund local emissions-reducing projects), the decarbonization of federal buildings, using low-carbon materials in new transportation-infrastructure construction, grants for states, municipalities and tribes to make and implement emissions-reduction plans, a program to help gas and petroleum companies reduce waste and methane emissions, transmission development (including for offshore-wind projects), tribal energy loans, a low-emissions electricity program to help states, tribes and municipalities lower electricity use and emissions and clean-energy heavy-duty vehicles.

Quartz notes that “the bill also curbs tax credits for residential homes and commercial buildings that made them more energy efficient,” and many analysts expect it to raise electricity costs by 2030. The AP points out that over 3 million families claimed more than $8 billion in credits for upgrades such as windows, insulation, improved heating and cooling systems, solar installations, solar water heating, geothermal heat pumps, battery storage and other improvements in 2023.

The Washington Post visits a residence in Maryland where solar panels are being installed now to take advantage of the credits that the Trump Administration has eliminated. Without the tax credits, it takes much longer for a residential solar system to pay for itself with the average cost being above $25,000. “Analysts have predicted huge contractions in the solar industry. In an analysis last month, Morgan Stanley predicted that a full phaseout of solar tax credits would cause demand for rooftop panels to drop by 85 percent over the next 10 years. Other research groups have estimated that installations will fall by 40 to 50 percent.” Grist explains how to qualify for the soon-to-be-gone credits if you are considering a qualifying purchase.

Grist also notes that the Inflation Reduction Act tax credits and additional incentives for green energy from the bipartisan infrastructure act were projected to reduce the United States’ greenhouse-gas emissions by 42% by 2030. When combined with additional action from states, cities and private companies, these efforts would have met our country’s emissions-reduction target under the United Nations Paris Agreement. Of course, by next year we won’t have such a target, as Trump has pulled us out of the Paris Accord.

The New York Times explains that the bill has many provisions to support the use of fossil fuels. “The legislation mandates oil and gas lease sales in Alaska, the Gulf of Mexico and the American West. It lowers the royalty rates that coal companies pay to mine on federal lands. It provides additional tax breaks to oil and gas producers for intangible drilling and development costs. It delays for 10 years a hefty fee on oil and gas companies that leak methane, a potent greenhouse gas, from their operations. In a surprising last-minute change, Senate Republicans added a 2.5 percent tax break for U.S. production of metallurgical coal, a form of coal that has been used for decades in steel-making and is mainly exported to countries like India and Brazil.” Rolling Stone quotes the President of the American Petroleum Institute, the fossil-fuel industry’s largest lobbying group, who said the legislation “includes almost all of our priorities.”

A punitive excise tax on renewables was briefly in the Senate bill, but removed before passage. Also removed was a proposal to sell off millions of acres of public lands, and an effort to reverse the U.S. Postal Service’s investment in EVs. Given the policy devastation that has occurred, these successes are small consolation.

Much more encouraging is the mind-boggling growth of solar energy, as discussed in The New Yorker by Bill McKibben. The statistics are astounding, and I can only share a few here. Around the world, a gigawatt of solar is now being installed every fifteen hours. The growth of battery installations has resulted in a 40% decline in the use of natural gas for electricity generation in California compared to 2023, which McKibben calls “the single most hopeful statistic I’ve seen in four decades of writing about the climate crisis.” Texas now has more battery storage than California, and this is producing a more reliable grid despite higher electricity demand.

Meanwhile, China is installing half of the world’s solar energy within its own borders, and cheap Chinese solar panels are revolutionizing the electrical grid of countries from Asia to Africa. “In 2020, China set a goal of producing twelve hundred gigawatts of clean power by 2030; it hit that target in early 2024, six years ahead of schedule.” Electrical demand on the national grid of Pakistan has been falling over the last year because so many Pakistanis have installed solar panels (in many cases, the metal brackets that hold the panels are more expensive than the panels themselves, and so panels laying on the ground are a common site in Pakistan). Sales of diesel fell 30% in 2024 as solar electricity replaced it as the source of power for pumping water from wells.

The breadth and speed of this transformation is a key driver of the backlash to renewable energy being engineered by the Republican party and the fossil-fuel industry. Despite these political efforts, the basic economic logic of solar and wind power is relentless, and continuing to burn fossil fuels is a “self-imposed financial penalty” which will “ultimately degrade a country’s long-term global competitiveness.” Thus, even the gulf states are installing so much solar that half the region’s electricity generation will be solar by 2050. The International Energy Agency now projects that “by 2026, solar will generate more electricity than all the world’s nuclear plants combined. By 2029, it will generate more than all the hydro dams. By 2031, it will have outstripped gas and, by 2032, coal.”

This is very good news, and will be a dominant reality in the world long after Donald Trump is gone.

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