Ask HN: How to prepare for blackouts/other disruptions caused by climate change?

Expend your precocious time on building local community, work in industry that actively seeks to mitigate extant anthropomorphic climate disruption. Use less share more. Vote. Be aware and active in local and regional politics to counter the externally financed divisiveness that brought you to your current frame of mind, they serve as a feeder system for whack jobs further up.

Work on proactive preventive agriculture adjustments (farmers intuition will not be keeping up). plant genetics, alternative tending protocols, land preservation (includes ownership as in who). Don't put all your seeds in one dustbowl.

Find less polluting energy, realistically we don't want to use that much less.

Help get off this rock so we can exploit the whole solar system and give the planet where we live a bit of respite.

I'd consider getting a ham radio license for more distant communications and buy some bulk packs of the family radios. Program your radios to use the local repeaters, and take note of which repeaters have solar+batteries. Join a ham club that maintains said repeaters. Talk to neighbors, discuss your ideas, and offer to give them a family radio with a card of instructions of when to listen, how to listen, what channel, etc to keep neighbors communicating. Contribute towards or host neighborhood watches, bbq's, social events of any kind that involve neighbors. Maybe even start a news letter, maybe online and print them if necessary for anyone without internet/computer.

Get a bike, maintain it yourself, keep a generous number of spares and tools around.

Participate in any "nets" held, emergency prep, get to know the hams in your area, and map out as much as you can how the local city/state orgs plan to communicate with the public. Ideally you can act as a conduit to let neighbors know when there's going to be water trucks, food delivery, shelter, communication of evac orders, etc.

Regularly go camping, note what is useful, what is not, keep notes for next time, involved any friends/family/neighbors as much as possible. Keep a month or two of dried food around just in case. Eat at least one meal of the dried food per camping trip.

Try anything to improve the neighborhood, organize a park/road/sidewalk cleanup, buy a basketball hoop the neighborhood kids can share, etc. Meet people, shake their hands, learn about their family, offer to share yard tools, etc.

Keep at least a few weeks of water (at least a gallon per person per day), food, etc. Buy a UPS or keep an older UPS just for USB devices, so instead of trying to keep a 600 watt PC up for 10 minutes you can keep a phone charged for a week or two. Get a portable solar panel or two and inverter/charger to share phones, family radios, etc. Ideally enough for you AND some neighbors.

Vote in favor of science and schooling (at all levels).

Discuss emergency logistics with more distant friends/family, plan exactly how to evacuate, what is important to take, multiple routes to get where you are going, do not assume that wifi/internet/cell towers are going to work. Consider storing fuel if needed to get to a safe location, rotate it as necessary. Exchange keys and plan on a reciprocal agreement in case either household has an emergency. Install an app on your phone that allows offline maps. Print any important maps and ideally download at least your entire state, and any others you might evacuate to.

You mean like say Texas? Or California?

Fires, storms, even just cold weather can be life threatening. Even simple stuff like knowing how to turn off the water supply to your house and drain the system would have saved MANY households in Texas.

Planning to not have electricity, natural gas, and working cell network makes sense pretty much universally. I'm not talking about spending $100k to go off grid, but making sure you have some essentials around. Even simple things like enough blankets for a family to weather 0F for a week.

> Install an app on your phone that allows offline maps.

OsmAnd is a great app for this.

Thanks for the heads up about that.