How the hell does this happen?
How the hell does a state as big and robust as Texas essentially go down for the count because of a winter system?
I’m in a rather unique position, on the outside looking in but on the inside my wife and daughter are there, “enjoying” the situation right this moment. They’ve been lucky. Their electricity hasn’t gone out yet, but as of yesterday their water was turned off.
In-freaking-credible.
They dare not go out to stores since Monday (not that many of them were open) but yesterday they did and later on, when I talked to my wife, she said it was scary driving along the road to a nearby supermarket to get some much needed provisions given they had to drive along some hilly terrain and feared their car would slide on the ice in the road.
This is the city of Austin, a beautiful, wonderful city, but like almost all the rest of Texas, they’ve been gripped by the incompetence of years of deregulation. They also don’t have, it appears, any snow shoveling trucks or other equipment to deal with a winter storm of this magnitude.
It’s amusing -to the point of volcanically infuriating– that governor Gregg Abbott has the cojones to state -on Fox “News”, natch- that somehow the electrical problems were caused by those Green Deal initiatives, including Turbines. Or that Rick Perry, one time governor, stated that… hell, its in the title of the below article, which also presents Mr. Abbott’s head spinning stupidity about Green energy (the article below is by Katie Shepherd and presented on washingtonpost.com):
Never mind, Mr. Abbott, that countries with far harsher winters have turbines that work perfectly fine. Never mind that freaking Antarctica has functioning turbines. Oh no, they simply don’t work in winter weather, right?
Except…
The wind turbines account for some 10% of Texas’ total power grid. The failure is across the board, from fossil fuel to nuclear.
And the reason for this major failure?
Deregulation.
Seems Texas has their very own power grid and they don’t want no bothersome federal regulations intruding on their profits.
You know, the regulations that would have mandated protections to the grids in case of things like… oh… severe winter weather.
This is why wind turbines in places like Antarctica and Norway function despite winter weather which is much more severe and long lasting than that found this week in Texas. Their equipment is winterized while Texas’ equipment is obviously not.
But, hey, it works well on the right wing propaganda sites to blame people like AOC and Bernie Sanders -people who have absolutely zero to do with Texas- for the problems some 20 years of Republican rule have created, right?
Oh, and of course in the middle of all this and not to be outdone, Ted Cruz shows he’s willing to lower the bar even more for Texan Republicans (the below article is by D. Roche and presented on Newsweek.com)…
Ted Cruz accused of flying to Cancun amid Texas outages as photo goes viral
The photo:
Yup, sure does look like our good “friend” Ted Cruz aboard an aircraft heading to Cancun for a pleasant vacation while some of his constituents are quite literally freezing and/or starving to death.
Sheesh.
I really, really hope the people of Texas remember this when elections next come up.
POSTSCRIPT: My daughter in Austin just sent me this. Sounds right!
