As the world endured its four hottest days on record last week, meteorologists in South Carolina warned of continuing extreme weather events due to climate change.
“You can’t blame global warming for every event because weather is cyclical,” said Rob Fowler, a longtime meteorologist at WCBD in Charleston. “But the earth is clearly getting warmer and these extreme occurrences are going to be happening more frequently.”
He likens the effects of heat to a pot of water on the stove.
“You turn that stove on, the atmosphere starts to bubble and boil,” Fowler said. “So everybody in the state is going to see more extremes – hurricanes, tornados, storms and flooding.”
According to climate experts, efforts to respond to climate change take two principal forms: mitigation, which seeks to lower future temperatures by reducing greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, and adaptation, which works to prepare communities for the challenges of rising seas and extreme weather.
South Carolina has made efforts in both areas, but to date most real progress in the state has been on the adaptation side of the ledger.
Mitigation: A ‘mixed bag’ on greenhouse gas emissions
According to climate activists and policy makers, South Carolina’s mitigation efforts boil down to two major missed opportunities and a pair of happy accidents.
The first missed opportunity came in 2007, when then-Gov. Mark Sanford announced the formation of a high-level state climate commission, with a goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the state.
“Climate change is real,” Sanford told The State newspaper at the time. “We’re looking at this as an opportunity to lead.”
But according to commission member and Coastal Conservation League founder Dana Beach, the effort fizzled after a promising start.
“We met for about a year, and the group came up with strategies that were very well thought out,” Beach said. “But at the last minute, Sanford decided it was too controversial and then nothing happened.”
The second major lost mitigation opportunity was the spectacular collapse of the V.C. Summer nuclear project in 2017, which ultimately led to prison sentences for top utility executives, including then-SCANA CEO Kevin Marsh, and wound up costing ratepayers $9 billion. With a B. Had the project been completed, it would have added 2,200 megawatts of energy to the S.C. grid with zero greenhouse gas emissions. That’s enough to provide reliable power for about a million homes, which is necessary in a state growing by bounding leaps.
“We’re in such a crisis with climate and carbon, we need to pick our poison,” Beach said of the environmental controversies surrounding nuclear power generation. “But that [project] would have been a mammoth step forward … and we failed to do it because SCANA’s top management was inept and secretive and deceitful.”
But environmentalists also say South Carolina has gotten a couple of things right on the mitigation front, even if unintentionally.
First, the state’s existing nuclear infrastructure, built without climate in mind, is unusually robust, providing more than 50% of the state’s power generation. That’s the third-highest level in the nation.
The second major positive on mitigation has been South Carolina’s emergence as a national leader in land conservation with more than 3 million acres – or more than 15% of the state’s total land – under protection. And S.C. Gov. Henry McMaster has committed to doubling that number to 6 million acres by 2050.
“The single most important mitigation strategy we’ve adopted in this state is forest conservation and restoration,” Beach said. “Every day, we sequester thousands of tons of carbon in the growing forests.”
A ‘regional leader’ on adaptation
Despite the state’s struggles on the mitigation side, climate experts say South Carolina has become a regional leader on climate adaptation – an effort that began in earnest after Hurricane Florence ripped through the state in 2018, causing more than $2 billion in damage.
As a result of those efforts, the S.C. Office of Resilience was created in 2020 to identify the state’s major climate vulnerabilities and assets. As its first major project, the new office began collecting data for a statewide resilience and risk reduction plan that was completed and published in 2023.
“The Resilience Plan is intended to serve as a framework to guide state investment in flood mitigation projects and the adoption of programs and policies to protect the people and property of South Carolina from the damage and destruction of extreme weather events,” SCOR spokesperson Hope Warren said in a statement.
The report contains a total of 54 recommendations for climate adaptation programs, policies and projects.
“What we appreciate about the plan is that it’s giving specific recommendations for funding programs, creating policies and better equipping our state and communities to prepare and adapt,” said Alys Campaigne, climate initiative leader for the Southern Environmental Law Center. “Having this framework is critical to creating needed coordination across agencies and communities to adapt and respond.”
Already, environmentalists say, the plan is having an impact across the state, with new rules requiring homeowners to disclose previous flooding incidents to prospective buyers, and local government projects such as Columbia’s municipal solar and smart surfaces initiatives.
Moreover, data collected by the resilience office has begun to unlock federal dollars for critical state adaptation projects.
Specifically, climate activists point to the $3 million South Carolina received in 2023 to begin work on a climate pollution reduction plan, which is expected to be finalized in 2027. They also note the recently-announced $421 million Environmental Protection Agency grant that South Carolina will share with Virginia and North Carolina to restore coastal wetlands and forests, improve water quality, and reduce risks of floods, fire and heat.
Nevertheless, climate experts say that these adaptation efforts are insufficient without major action on greenhouse gas reductions.
“We need to be doing much more to deliver clean energy and clean transportation options that would ultimately be the most important factors in keeping us out of harm’s way and reducing risk,” Campaigne said.
The S.C. General Assembly is expected to take up a new energy bill in January. Climate activists are vowing once again to stop any effort to fast-track a large-scale new natural gas plant in rural Colleton County – and to fight for a more market-oriented energy policy that treats all sources, including renewables, equally.
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