For the last several years there's been a different kind of weather pattern: a terrible "polar vortex" that brings freezing temperatures down into places like Austin, Texas, where it got as low as 0 degrees, and warm toasty weather to Anchorage, Alaska, where it was 20 degrees warmer.
Every year there are articles that ask whether climate change is responsible for this or that particular freeze. And the answer from scientists is maddening to laymen: maybe not this one, but it's responsible for the increased frequency of such events.
The mechanism is pretty obvious: the jetstream, which usually keeps arctic air bottled up at the north pole, has been weakened by the warming atmosphere over the last several years. When a warm front breaks through the weakened jetstream, bringing balmy weather to Alaska, cold polar air is pushed south, often down into the lower 48.
Texas, a wholly owned subsidiary of the oil and gas industry, decided long ago that they didn't want to be part of the national power grid. So they have their own grid, which is almost completely unregulated.
To keep prices low the power companies don't have any reserve capacity. They spend nothing on contingencies for extremely hot or extremely cold weather. So when it got down to 20, 10, 5 and 0 degrees last weekend all the natural gas pipelines froze. Power plants that use gas turbines went offline. Cooling water pipes froze, and coal and nuclear plants went offline. Ice formed on blades, so wind turbines went offline.
Now, we have gas turbines in Minnesota, where it was -20 below for days on end at the same Texas was 20 and 30 degrees warmer. They didn't freeze. We have nuclear power plants, and coal-fired power plants, and wind turbines, and they all kept working just fine.
While Texas was suffering from blizzard-like conditions last Sunday Minnesota had very cold but clear weather. During the worst two days in Texas the solar panels on our house generated 145 kilowatt hours of electricity. Some of which we could have sent to Texas if they hadn't cut themselves off from the rest of the country, preventing people from freezing to death or dying of carbon monoxide poisoned trying to keep warm by running their cars.
See, that's the thing about renewable energy. It's not always windy or sunny everywhere. But it's always windy or sunny somewhere. And if you have an interconnected grid you can trade that power back and forth.
When Texas lost power its governor went on Fox News and blamed the outage on wind turbines, which generate maybe 10% of Texas' power. He didn't mention that the nuclear, coal and natural gas plants that generate the vast majority of power in Texas were also offline, because utilities skipped weatherizing their infrastructure, even though Texas went through a similar disaster in 2011.
When Texas lost power Ted Cruz went to Cancun, because he wanted to be a "good dad." Because, you know, there's nothing a senator can do to help.
When Texas lost power New York representative and Republican bogeywoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went to Houston, helped out at a food bank and organized an online relief drive that had already raised $4 million by Saturday. But she doesn't have kids who need to go to lie on the beach in Cancun in the middle of a pandemic, so she has all the free time in the world.
Yeah, AOC is just pulling a stunt, showing how Democrats actually care about people and then do something to help. But, geeze, Ted! I mean, Rafael. You could have pulled the same stunt. But you didn't! You went to Cancun, something an actual human being would know makes you look like a total douche bag.
When Texas lost power Joe Biden declared a major disaster, freeing up emergency funds. There was no sniping about Texas voting for the "former guy," or an attempt to extort some concession from its governor, or a rush visit to Houston to throw paper towels at people seeking warmth in a shelter.
Republicans constantly tell us that government is the problem, not the solution. Well, it's very clear that Republican governments are the problem. Republican governments are just shills for giant companies and billionaires, doing whatever the people with all the money want them to do. Or worse, they use the levers of government to line their own pockets. Like that former guy who charged the Secret Service millions of dollars to stay at his own hotels and resorts...
And somehow Republicans maintain power by selling the lie that they're the defenders of freedom. What was the freedom Texas Republicans sold to its citizens? The freedom to get ripped off by big companies:
SAN ANTONIO — As millions of Texans shivered in dark, cold homes over the past week while a winter storm devastated the state’s power grid and froze natural gas production, those who could still summon lights with the flick of a switch felt lucky.
Now, many of them are paying a severe price for it.
“My savings is gone,” said Scott Willoughby, a 63-year-old Army veteran who lives on Social Security payments in a Dallas suburb. He said he had nearly emptied his savings account so that he would be able to pay the $16,752 electric bill charged to his credit card — 70 times what he usually pays for all of his utilities combined. “There’s nothing I can do about it, but it’s broken me.”