By Tom Schuster, Director, Sierra Club Pennsylvania Chapter
Spring has always been my favorite time of year. The convergence of the start of baseball season, warmer weather, my birthday, and the transition of everything from gray and brown to green has always lifted my spirits.
Lately, though, my annual upswing in mood has been tempered by something more serious –dangerous weather. On April 29th, a wall of intense thunderstorms plowed through western Pennsylvania, causing destruction that Duquesne Light Company called “unprecedented in DLC’s history.” There were over 20,000 reports of broken utility poles and trees crashing onto power lines, causing more than half of that utility's customers to lose power for an extended period. My co-worker didn’t get his back on until five days later.
The damage was widespread – I live 90 minutes east in Cambria County, and 40% of our electric customers were without power. One of our neighbors had a tree crash on their house, damage their roof, and knock out their electricity connection – the part that the customer, not the utility, is responsible for fixing. Because they couldn’t afford the deductible for their insurance, we started a GoFundMe for them.
It would be one thing if this were an isolated incident, but a mere two days later, the same region experienced another round of storms almost as intense. On May 6, a front passed through the Poconos that sent my coworker to the basement when a tornado touched down not far from their house. Several days later, as I write these words, she has just received a flash flood warning on her phone.
It’s not unusual for there to be storms in the spring. As the air starts to warm up, there tends to be an atmospheric shoving match with the cold air masses left over from winter. The boundary between warmer and cooler air is where storms happen – the system is trying to reach equilibrium, just like water flows down a hill. But something is changing. The warm air masses are getting warmer, which also makes them wetter. And when the difference between the warm and cool air is more pronounced, that flow of energy becomes more violent. The gentle stream becomes Niagara Falls.
They say you can’t do anything about the weather, but the fact is that we are. By continuing to pump huge amounts of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere by burning coal, oil, and gas, we are adding to the blanket that traps heat and supercharges these storms, turning what would have been run-of-the-mill scattered thunderstorms into a widespread emergency.
We’ve seen this up close and personal in the last few weeks – higher winds, sheets of rain driven sideways, quarter-sized hail, damaged roofs, and many, many more broken trees and utility poles. That makes power outages not only more frequent but longer-lasting. In turn, we suffer through more fridges full of spoiled food, more life-threatening situations for people with power-dependent medical devices, or even simple exposure to heat and cold, and days spent just hoping for life to get back to normal.
The good news is that we have the technology to stop forcing this climate destabilization, and it is more affordable than ever. Wind and solar power are now the cheapest sources of new electricity generation, including in Pennsylvania. In fact, one study found that it would be cheaper to replace 209 out of the 210 remaining coal-fired power plants with local wind and solar power than to continue operating those plants. Even with favorable economics, though, our energy system is more like a supertanker than a bicycle – it is slow to turn around. And with every ton of pollution pumped into the sky, the problem worsens. So we need policies to accelerate the shift.
One such policy is the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), which places a cap on climate-disrupting carbon dioxide pollution from electric power plants, which gets lower every year. A limited number of pollution allowances are auctioned off until the cap is met, and the proceeds from the auction are reinvested in ways that further decrease pollution. The RGGI program has significantly reduced carbon dioxide pollution from power plants from Maine to Virginia for nearly two decades, while keeping electricity affordable and creating nearly $5 billion in net economic benefits across the region.
In 2019, Governor Tom Wolf directed the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) to draft regulations allowing Pennsylvania to link to RGGI, and these were finalized in April 2022. Unfortunately, fossil-fueled power plant owners and their allies in the PA Senate immediately sued to block the rule, kicking off a years-long legal fight that culminated in oral arguments at the PA Supreme Court on May 13, with a ruling expected later in 2025. Sierra Club has joined PennFuture, Clean Air Council, and Environmental Defense Fund to intervene in the case in defense of RGGI.
Ironically, one of the most common arguments we have heard against RGGI, and other efforts to bring more clean energy online in general, is that we can’t do it because electric reliability will suffer. Defenders of fossil fuels claim that since you can’t turn the sun and wind on and off on demand, you risk not having enough power supply when you need it. This argument sounds simple, but it is wrong on many levels.
First, fossil fuels are not nearly as reliable as their proponents claim. During Winter Storm Elliott in December 2022, we came close to having widespread power outages because 24% of our regional generation was unable to deliver, and 70% of the failures were gas-fired power plants. Similar gas performance issues in Texas during winter storm Uri in 2021 actually did knock out power for days, and hundreds died from hypothermia. (Incidentally, both winter storms were the effects of a disrupted “polar vortex”, a phenomenon that is also increasing in frequency due to climate change.)
Second, other states and countries have already proved the theory wrong by incorporating huge percentages of renewable energy into their grids with no issues. A recent report by Environment America shows that seven states already get more than half of their power from wind, solar, and geothermal, with South Dakota leading the way at 93%, followed by Iowa at 83%. This is even before widespread deployment of battery storage, which is already cost-competitive with gas-fired power plants as a backup. Meanwhile, Pennsylvania is plodding along at 4%, and Gov. Shapiro’s proposal to get to 35% over 10 years is somehow deemed by some to be controversial.
Finally, the argument that fossil fuels are required for reliability gets the most important point completely backward. Extreme weather, not supply shortage, was responsible for 80% of major power outages in the United States so far this century. The more fossil fuels we burn, the more we prime our atmosphere for extreme weather. To ignore that reality, and to double down on fast-tracking or subsidizing fossil fuels in the name of reliability, is a fool’s errand that will fail catastrophically. We need to cap climate-disrupting pollution with programs like RGGI, get serious about building more renewable energy, and invest in grid modernization and resiliency to adapt to the changed world in which we already live.
This blog was included as part of the June 2025 Sylvanian newsletter. Please click here to check out more articles from this edition!