In response, Texas Governor Greg Abbott said on The Sean Hannity Show: “This shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America,” while the Fox News scroll at the bottom of the screen declared “Green Energy Failure.”  Another Fox News host, Tucker Carlson, chimed in on his show: “The windmills froze so the power grid failed.” 

 

whaaat, whaaaaat.....What?  Those statements are just laughable.

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Tucker also told his audience that “global warming is no longer a pressing concern here,” suggesting that, because it was so cold outside, the earth is obviously not warming. First of all, allow us to let Tucker in on a little secret: Global warming refers to earth’s overall temperature, which is rising. That’s just a fact.  Global warming, in turn, causes the climate to change.  Climate change causes extreme weather patterns, rising sea levels, shifting jet streams, and plenty of other things that are really bad.  As a result of climate change, floods, droughts, ice storms and heat waves become more frequent and way more intense.  Essentially, the extremes become even more extreme.  So, when Tucker uses the fact that Texas had historic cold and icy weather this year as proof that there is no global warming, he inadvertently is proving the exact opposite.

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Back to Texas.  Yes, Tucker, non-winterized wind turbines froze....but only because they were not properly winterized. As did power plants, oil and gas wells, gas pipelines, oil rigs, piles of coal, and even a nuclear reactor water pump.

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People trying to blame this on windmills is just nonsensical. Two-thirds of the winter electricity demand in Texas is generated by natural gas.  One of the main culprits in the Great Texas Blackout of 2021 was the interruption of natural gas getting to power plants…and no amount of spin on Fox News is going to change that fact.

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The truth is this.  The energy catastrophe in Texas was caused by two things and two things only: Texas hubris and energy deregulation.

 

First up, Texas hubris.  Never has a state loathed regulation or government intervention as has Texas. In the midst of the crisis, former Texas governor (and former Secretary of Energy) Rick Perry actually said that “Texans would (happily) be without electricity for longer than three days to keep the federal government out of their business.” 

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In particular, Texas Republicans hate federal government intervention so much (or we should say, they hate federal government intervention until they happily take $11.24 billion from the CARES Act and God only knows how much more after this massive leadership failure) that 90 percent of Texas’ electric grid is not connected to interstate grids.  This means that Texas can largely avoid any oversight by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC).  But is also means that Texas can’t rely on other states to help when its electric grid fails.

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Second up, deregulation. FERC Order 888, implemented in 1996, promoted wholesale electricity competition through open access, non-discriminatory transmission services. Speaking simplistically, companies could now “rent” electric transmission lines and move electricity through them, regardless of who owned the lines.

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Unsurprisingly, Texas went all in!  The state embraced this new opportunity and shifted a great deal of control over the state’s electric delivery system to the private sector. 

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At the same time, electric generation entities were given permission to do pretty much whatever they want in terms of reserve margins for backup power and generation planning, which was another major culprit in the February 2021 disaster.  Want to take your power plant offline for maintenance in the middle of February?  No problem!  Go for it!

In the beginning, and maybe even still today, Texas leadership naïvely believed that market forces would correct for just about anything, making energy shortages and service disruptions virtually impossible in their minds.

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But here’s the inevitable problem: Although competition has kept Texas energy prices low through the years, smaller profit margins and practically no regulation and/or oversight also tempted energy companies to cut corners on necessary capital investments…like say, oh we don’t know, WINTERIZATION PROTECTIONS THAT INCLUDE PROPER INSULATION, HEATERS AND DE-ICING MACHINES.

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What happened in February is all the more unacceptable because it had happened before.  In 2011, Texas experienced a very similar winter blackout that affected over 4 million people.  In the aftermath, the Texas Public Utility Commission demanded that Texas power generators submit annual winterization plans, but that doesn’t seem to have worked out that well.

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Thad Hill, the chief executive of Calpine Corporation, admitted that during the 2021 freeze “two of [Calpine’s] power plants failed because of winterization…That’s my fault.”  Yep, it sure is Thad, because you knew full well what could happen.  After all, two of Calpine’s plants also failed during the 2011 freeze.  NRG, another generation company, experienced power failures at its coal-fired plant in Limestone County and another at Greens Bayou, the same exact two plants that failed in 2011.

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At the end of the day, Texas Republicans chose ideology over reliability. Then, naturally, blamed everyone else when the price of electricity skyrocketed during the crisis.  When we say skyrocketed, we're not exaggerating.  Some consumer electric bills reached well over $16,000.

In response to the high bills, Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick said, “The people who are getting those big bills are people who gambled on a very, very low rate…going forward, people need to read the fine print in those kinds of bills.” 

 

This is also the genius who said of the pandemic lockdowns, “No one reached out to me and said, ‘As a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren?’  And if that’s the exchange, I’m all in.  And that doesn’t make me noble or brave or anything like that.  I just think there are lots of grandparents out there in this country like me ... that what we all care about and what we all love more than anything are those children.  And I want to, you know, live smart and see through this, but I don't want to see the whole country to be sacrificed, and that’s what I see.”

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Another regulation example that sticks in our minds maybe more than any other is attorney Rob Bilott’s courageous fight to regulate polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in American drinking water. 

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It all started when an angry farmer noticed bubbling green water in his creek and blood running out of the noses of his cattle not long after DuPont, the chemical company, began operating a waste landfill near his property. Rob Bilott watched a video the farmer provided, where he “saw cows with stringy tails, malformed hooves, giant lesions protruding from their hides and red, receded eyes; cows suffering constant diarrhea, slobbering white slime the consistency of toothpaste, staggering bowlegged like drunks.” 

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In a study funded by DuPont (lest you think they were acting responsibly, they were pretty much forced to conduct one thanks to the lawsuit Bilott filed), scientists discovered there was a “probable link’” between PFOA and kidney cancer, testicular cancer, thyroid disease, high cholesterol, pre-eclampsia and ulcerative colitis.

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According to the Congressional Research Service, “PFAS include thousands of diverse chemicals, some of which have been used for decades in an array of industrial, commercial, and U.S. military applications.  The chemical characteristics of PFAS have led to the use of various PFAS for an array of purposes such as fighting fuel-based fires and for processing and manufacturing numerous commercial products (e.g., stain-resistant and waterproof fabrics, nonstick cookware, and food containers).” 

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In 2016, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reported that “PFOA and/or PFOS were detected in at least one public water system in 24 states.  Four other PFAS were also detected in some systems.” 

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Rob Bilott started his fight in 1999.  On February 20, 2020, the EPA announced preliminary decisions to develop Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) regulations for the two most frequently detected PFAS, perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) — TWENTY-ONE YEARS after Bilott filed his first federal suit against DuPont chemical company.

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Now, we have a question for the people who ask, “are you for more regulation or less?”  Are you cool with this poison in your drinking water?  Because we are absolutely not.

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