Guest column: Corporations, utilities feeling pressure from climate change

Michigan’s ice disaster fits that pattern.

Senator John Damoose, a Republican representing the tip of the Mitten to the Eastern UP, told interviewers “We had about five days of this storm, successive waves, that got worse and worse and worse each time.”

In just that way, stalled weather systems make an ordinary, one day storm into an extraordinary three or five day disaster.

Major utilities and corporations are feeling pressure from more damaging weather.

“We’ve definitely seen a 20 year trend of increasingly severe weather, worse winds. This year we had our first tornadoes in February,” Greg Salisbury, Consumers Energy’s Vice President for Electric Distribution Engineering told Michigan Public Radio.

In 2023, Consumer’s CEO Garrick Rochow said an earnings call, “Over the last 20 years, we’ve seen an increase in both the frequency of storms and higher wind speeds, some of the most extreme winds within the last four years. We’re clearly seeing the effects of climate change.”
According to Rochow, ratepayers will pay the price, as the design standard for transmissions lines, originally built to withstand 40 mph winds, has now been raised to 80 mph.

In addition, insurance companies, and their customers are taking a hit. The New York Times recently reported that “In 2023, insurers lost money on homeowners coverage in 18 states, more than a third of the country” – including Michigan.

The effects of these climate extremes can last for years.

Mid-Michigan is still waiting for a rebuilding process on two dams that collapsed like dominoes in 2020 after heavy rains.

Likewise, Michigan’s forests will show damage from this year’s storm for decades.

“The damage from the storm will have a significant impact on our planning and operations for the next 40 or 50 years,” according to the DNR’s Merrick.

“These tree tops and branches, they will begin to dry out,” he said,  “and the potential for intense ground fires will increase throughout the next several years.”

This is ominous considering the increasing incidence of damaging wildfires in eastern North America.

One response to this would be forest management that included prescribed burns, but will communities in threatened areas be willing to go along with the disruption, smoke and inconvenience?

In a climate changed Michigan, average temperatures will be warmer, rains may be more intense, but more erratic, especially in summer, according to modeling by the University of Michigan’s Julia Cole. She told me this might mean a greater frequency of droughts, and conditions for wildfire.

If future storms continue to damage our forests, we may see how climate extremes build on, and amplify each other in unexpected, and potentially devastating ways.

Peter Sinclair is a Midland resident and internationally-recognized videographer who studies climate change and renewable energy issues.