Objective  Under the background of global climate change, extreme climate events have become more frequent, intense, and compound, posing severe challenges to the safe and reliable operation of energy systems and transportation infrastructure. In recent years, multiple extreme cold waves, heatwaves, wildfires and hurricanes in the United States have caused large-scale power outages, fuel supply disruptions, and public transportation shutdowns. Through the strong coupling between energy and transportation systems, these events have generated cascading effects, exposing structural vulnerabilities in conventional infrastructure planning and design standards, critical load identification, and cross-system coordinated governance under extreme scenarios.

Method Using representative U.S. extreme events from 2010 to 2025 as samples, this study developed an analytical framework of "climate shock–critical node failure–cross-system coupled propagation–recovery capacity constraints" to systematically examine the temporal evolution of energy and transportation system disruptions under extreme climate conditions.

Result On this basis, three representative cases: the Texas extreme cold wave, California wildfires with Public Safety Power Shutoff (PSPS) and Hurricane Sandy are comparatively analyzed to identify three coupled failure modes: energy-dominated failure, governance trade-off failure, and compound failure.

Conclusion Finally, in light of China's "dual-carbon" goals and the development needs of a new power system and a transportation powerhouse, policy and engineering implications for enhancing system resilience are proposed, including the integration of extreme scenarios into planning, emergency energy supply for transportation hubs, deployment of distributed energy and microgrids, and coordinated meteorological–energy–transport decision-making. The findings provide references for the coordinated planning, operation, and emergency governance of energy and transportation systems under extreme climate conditions.