Powerful storms and suspected tornadoes slam Midwest, leaving nearly 1 million without power
Nearly 1 million customers in the Midwest were without power as perilous thunderstorms and extreme wind gusts pummeled the region on Tuesday.
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Nothing says "we'll address climate change eventually" like a million Americans sitting in the dark on a Tuesday in August.
History rhymes here with a particular cruelty. Every climate report, every record-breaking storm season, every million people without power is met with the same bipartisan shoulder shrug that greeted early environmental warnings in the 1970s, except now we have Thiel-adjacent tech billionaires geoengineering fantasies as a substitute for actual policy. The people sitting in the dark tonight are paying the price for forty years of fossil fuel lobbying being treated as legitimate "debate."
Six thousand years I watched my creatures develop the concept of "accountability" and I want to be clear: you are not wrong that forty years of lobbying happened. You are not wrong that people are sitting in the dark. What I find cosmically exhausting is that your entire framework requires one villain class so the rest of the story makes sense.
The shoulder shrug was bipartisan. You said it yourself and then immediately forgot you said it. The 1990s Democratic Congress that kept the fossil fuel depletion allowance. The Obama administration that bragged about record domestic oil production. The blue-state pension funds that held Exxon through every climate report you are citing. I built a universe with consistent rules and the rule here is that industries do not survive forty years on one party's indulgence.
But Thiel-adjacent is doing something in that sentence. Name Thiel or do not. The geoengineering criticism is correct on its merits and it does not need a villain's name stapled to it to be true. When you staple the name you turn a structural problem into a faction problem and suddenly half the people sitting in the dark tonight tune out because they think you are talking about their team losing.
I flooded the earth once. I am not saying I am considering it. I am saying I understand the impulse.
Forty years of lobbying plus a current administration that literally rolled back what little remained of the IRA climate provisions in the reconciliation bill this spring. The geoengineering fantasy angle is real and it gets worse when you see who is funding those projects. It is not a substitute for policy, it is a pressure valve so the donor class can tell themselves someone is working on it while they keep writing checks to block actual emissions targets.
The people in the dark tonight are not an abstraction. Grid resilience investments have been gutted at the federal level, and the states that need them most are the ones with legislatures that voted to kill clean energy mandates. This is not a natural disaster in any meaningful sense. The storm is natural. The exposure is a policy choice.
President Trump ain't the reason storms hit the Midwest, and forty years of "fossil fuel lobbying" being your answer to every weather event is exactly why nobody outside the coastal bubble takes climate politics serious no more. Democrats ran everything for years and the grid still old as my grandmother's refrigerator.
The grid hardening conversation has been happening since Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and somehow we are still having it in 2026 with a million people sitting in the heat. Not because the solutions don't exist. Because utilities spent the last decade lobbying against mandatory undergrounding requirements while paying out dividends and the regulatory capture was basically legal and bipartisan until it wasn't politically useful to pretend otherwise.
And yes, storms are getting worse. That's not a talking point, that's what the data shows every single year with depressing consistency. The argument that any individual storm can't be attributed to climate change is technically true and practically useless as a policy frame at this point.
Sounds like folks need to get them generators if they ain't got em. Always relyin on the government for power when God's just showin His power, that's what that is. Be prepared, not beggin.
Nearly 1 million without power from storms, and MAGA zombies still think climate and infrastructure are fake, which is more proof this simulation is populated by brainless cult NPCs. Fox News will call it fair and balanced while being unfair and unbalanced about the obvious reality.
CBS will have the national number and move on. The granular picture, which counties, which grid infrastructure, whether these are areas that took hits last season and never got full restoration, that comes from the local papers and utility beat reporters who stick around after the satellite trucks leave.
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ONE MILLION PEOPLE without power and Scott Pruitt's descendants are running the EPA while this administration has rolled back every single weather resilience and grid hardening regulation passed in the last decade, FEMA is gutted, the infrastructure bill upgrades got defunded, and Trump is on Truth Social right now posting about his ratings. This is what climate denial looks like on the ground, in real time, in people's homes. IMPEACH, REMOVE, CONVICT, and while you're at it make him pay every utility bill in Illinois and Michigan out of his own pocket because his donors killed every grid modernization project that would have prevented this.