Government agencies are scrubbing climate change from power outage planning

At state and federal level, there’s considerable resistance to planning for the various impacts of extreme weather events linked to climate change.

To be sure, climate change is exacerbating the impacts of events like hurricanes. While the economic toll of this year’s storms is being calculated, the U.S. Department of Energy estimated in 2013 that weather-related power outages cost the economy between $18 billion and $33 billion each year.