QUESTIONS NOBODY IS ASKING: Would an occasional blackout help solve climate change?

What’s more important: Keeping the lights on 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, or solving the climate crisis?

That is in many ways a terrible question, for reasons I’ll discuss shortly.

But it’s been on my mind as a ferocious heat wave roasts California and other states — and as I’ve watched Glendale respond to a Sierra Club lawsuit over the fate of the city’s gas-fired power plant, just across the L.A. River from Griffith Park.

I sat in a dimly lit courtroom in downtown Los Angeles last week as the lawyers squared off. An attorney representing the Sierra Club argued that Glendale officials had exaggerated the need for the gas plant as they urged the City Council to spend an estimated $170 million to keep burning fossil fuels. An attorney for the city countered that the investment — which the council approved in a 4-1 vote — is desperately needed to provide reliable electricity to Glendale’s roughly 190,000 residents, and avoid blackouts.

It’s a highly technical dispute. But it’s part of a larger conversation about how much blackout risk we consider acceptable in modern society — and whether our expectations should evolve in the name of preventing climate catastrophe.

(Bolding in original article.) Flashback: Are you ready for the climate lockdowns?