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Thread: Texas's 'Nightmare' Energy Situation Is a Warning to the Rest of America

  1. #11
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    I live in Texas and haven't had power for days, but if you think the federal government can fix our problems,I say what I've said for years: Secede.
    The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God stands forever. Isaiah 40:8

  2. #12
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    Just saw on the news the 2 top people in charge of the power don't even live there. One in Michigan, one in California. Seems many people dropped the ball but then again how many prepare for a 100 year event ? The only good thing I can say about here in Illinois, they have been updating our electric substations. Worst winter we've had in years, my power blinked once.

  3. #13
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    Proper weatherization makes a difference. North Dakota has both oil and wind and still manages to maintain production. Proper insulation makes a big difference in your house too. You can get by with a smaller backup system than you would otherwise need.

  4. #14
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    Can You Believe This Is Happening in America?


    We used to dream big. Now we’re increasingly thinking short term.

    By Thomas L. Friedman
    NYT Opinion Columnist


    • Feb. 23, 2021

    In the last six months I’ve heard one phrase more often than I had in my previous 66 years: “Can you believe this is happening in America?”

    As in: “I spent the whole day hunting online for a drugstore to get a Covid vaccination. Can you believe this is happening in America?”

    “Fellow Americans ransacked our Capitol and tried to overturn an election. Can you believe this is happening in America?”

    “People in Texas are burning their furniture for heat, boiling water to drink and melting snow to flush their toilets. Can you believe this is happening in America?”

    But, hey, all the news is not bad. We just sent a high-tech buggy named Perseverance loaded with cameras and scientific gear 292 million miles into space and landed it on the exact dot we were aiming for on Mars! Only in America!

    What’s going on? Well, in the case of Texas and Mars, the basic answers are simple. Texas is the poster child for what happens when you turn everything into politics — including science, Mother Nature and energy — and try to maximize short-term profits over long-term resilience in an era of extreme weather. The Mars landing is the poster child for letting science guide us and inspire audacious goals and the long-term investments to achieve them.

    The Mars mind-set used to be more our norm. The Texas mind-set has replaced it in way too many cases. Going forward, if we want more Mars landings and fewer Texas collapses — what’s happening to people there is truly heartbreaking — we need to take a cold, hard look at what produced each.

    The essence of Texas thinking was expressed by Gov. Greg Abbott in the first big interview he gave to explain why the state’s electricity grid failed during a record freeze. He told Fox News’s Sean Hannity: “This shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America. … Our wind and our solar got shut down, and they were collectively more than 10 percent of our power grid, and that thrust Texas into a situation where it was lacking power on a statewide basis. … It just shows that fossil fuel is necessary.”

    The combined dishonesty and boneheadedness of those few sentences was breathtaking. The truth? Texas radically deregulated its energy market in ways that encouraged every producer to generate the most energy at the least cost with the least resilience — and to ignore the long-term trend toward more extreme weather.

    “After a heavy snowstorm in February 2011 caused statewide rolling blackouts and left millions of Texans in the dark,” The Times reportedSunday, “federal authorities warned the state that its power infrastructure had inadequate ‘winterization’ protection. But 10 years later, pipelines remained inadequately insulated” and the heaters and de-icing equipment “that might have kept instruments from freezing were never installed” — because they would have added costs.

    As a result, it wasn’t just Texas wind turbines that froze — but also gas plants, oil rigs and coal piles, and even one of Texas’ nuclear reactors had to shut down because the frigid temperatures caused a disruption in a water pump to the reactor.

    That was a result of Abbott’s Green Old Deal — prioritize the short-term profits of the oil, gas and coal industries, which provide him political campaign contributions; deny climate change; and dare Mother Nature to prove you wrong, which she did. And now Texas needs federal emergency funds. That is what we capitalists call “privatizing the gains and socializing the losses.” I don’t know what they call it in Texas.

    But to disguise all that, Abbott trashed his state’s trendsetting wind and solar power — power it pulls from the sky free, with zero emissions, making rural Texans prosperous — in order to protect the burning of fossil fuels that enrich his donor base.

    Abbott’s move was the latest iteration of a really unhealthy trend in America: We turn everything into politics — masks, vaccines, the weather, your racial identity and even energy electrons. Donald Trump last year referred to oil, gas and coal as “our kind of energy.” When energy electrons become politics, the end is near. You can’t think straight about anything.
    “For a healthy politics to flourish it needs reference points outside itself — reference points of truth and a conception of the common good,” explained the Hebrew University religious philosopher Moshe Halbertal. “When everything becomes political, that is the end of politics.”

    Making everything politics, added Halbertal, “totally distorts your ability to read reality.” And to do that with Mother Nature is particularly reckless, because she is the one major force in our lives “that is totally independent of our will.” And if you think you can spin her, Halbertal said, “the slap in the face that she will give you will be heard all across the world.”


    You don’t have to listen too carefully to hear it. Although it is still too early to say for sure, the Texas freeze fits a recent pattern of increasingly destructive “global weirding.” I much prefer that term over “climate change” or “global warming.” Because what happens as average global temperatures rise, ice melts, jet streams shift and the climate changes is that the weather gets weird. The hots get hotter, the colds get colder, the wets get wetter, the dries get drier and the most violent storms get more frequent. Those once-in-100-years floods, droughts, heat waves or deep freezes start to happen every few years. That’s how we will experience climate change.

    According to a recent report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration: “The U.S. has sustained 285 weather and climate disasters since 1980 where overall damages/costs reached or exceeded $1 billion (including C.P.I. adjustment to 2020). The total cost of these 285 events exceeds $1.875 trillion. … The years with 10 or more separate billion-dollar disaster events include 1998, 2008, 2011-2012, and 2015-2020.” This year, after this Texas disaster alone, could set a record — and we’re only in February.

    If global weirding is our new normal, we need a whole new level of buffers, redundancies and supply inventories to create resilience for our power grids — and many more distributed forms of energy, like solar, that can enable households to survive when the grid goes down. Looking to maximize profits around fossil fuels in an age of global weirding is just begging to get hammered.

    As Hal Harvey, C.E.O. of Energy Innovation, remarked to me: “Cavemen understood that you have to store things up to be secure. Birds know that. Squirrels know that. So, what are we doing? And what was Texas doing?”

    Every leader needs to be asking those questions. Leadership always matters. But today, it matters more than ever at every level. Because in a slower age, if your city, state or country had a bad leader and got off track, the pain of getting back on track was tolerable. Now, when climate change, globalization and technology are all accelerating at once, small errors in navigation can have huge consequences. They can leave your community or country so far off track that the pain of getting back on track can be excruciating.

    Just look at Texas and you’ll know what I mean. And just look up at Mars, and think of the mind-set that got us there, and you’ll know what needs to change.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/23/opinion/us-politics-texas-mars.html?action=click&algo=bandit-all-surfaces&block=more_in_recirc&fellback=false&imp_i d=432376165&impression_id=5a6fb951-7781-11eb-bca5-afdfa522e533&index=2&pgtype=Article&region=footer& req_id=615997152&surface=more-in-opinion&variant=1_bandit-all-surfaces

  5. #15
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    I read somewhere today that part of the Texas problem was they believed the global warming hype they have been fed and figured there was no need to winterize their energy grid..Bet they don't listen to that crap again.

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    Texas Is a Rich State in a Rich Country, and Look What Happened

    We don’t realize how fragile the basic infrastructure of our civilization is.

    By Ezra Klein
    NYT Opinion Columnist


    • Feb. 25, 2021


    A few months back, because I really know how to live, I spent a night reading “The Green Swan: Central banking and financial stability in the age of climate change.” The report, released in January 2020 by the Bank for International Settlements, argued that central banks, concerned as they are with the stability of prices and financial systems, were negligent if they ignored climate change. The economies we know are inseparable from the long climatic peace in which they were built. But that peace is ending. There are no stable prices in a burning world.

    This is one of those papers where the measured language preferred by technocrats strains against the horrors they are trying to describe. What emerges is almost an apocalyptic form of poetry. One line, in particular, has rung in my head for months. “Climate-related risks will remain largely unhedgeable as long as systemwide action is not undertaken.” If you know anything about financial regulators, you know the word “unhedgeable” is an alarm bell shrieking into the night. Financial systems are built to hedge risk. When a global risk is unhedgeable, the danger it poses is existential.
    The point of the report is simply this: The world’s economic systems teeter atop “backward-looking risk assessment models that merely extrapolate historical trends.” But the future will not be like the past. Our models are degrading by the day, and we don’t understand — we don’t want to understand — how much in society could topple when they fail, and how much suffering that could bring. One place to start is by recognizing how fragile the basic infrastructure of civilization is even now, in this climate, in rich countries.

    Which brings me to Texas. Two facts from that crisis have gotten less attention than they deserve. First, the cold in Texas was not a generational climatic disaster. The problem, as Roger Pielke Jr., an environmental analyst at the University of Colorado at Boulder, wrote in his newsletter, is that the Electric Reliability Council of Texas’ worst-case scenario planning used a 2011 cold snap that was a one-in-10-year weather event. It wasn’t even the worst cold Texas experienced in living memory: in 1989 temperatures and electricity generation (as a percentage of peak demand) dropped even further than they did in 2011. Texas hadn’t just failed to prepare for the far future. It failed to prepare for the recent past.

    Second, it could have been so much worse. Bill Magness, the president and chief executive of ERCOT, said Texas was “seconds and minutes” from complete energy system collapse — the kind where the system needs to be rebuilt, not just rebooted. “If we had allowed a catastrophic blackout to happen, we wouldn’t be talking today about hopefully getting most customers their power back,” Mr. Magness said. “We’d be talking about how many months it might be before you get your power back.”

    This was not the worst weather imaginable and this was not the worst outcome imaginable. Climate change promises far more violent events to come. But this is what it looks like when we face a rare-but-predictable stretch of extreme weather, in a rich state in a rich country. The result was nearly 80 deaths — and counting — including an 11-year-old boy found frozen in his bed. I can barely stand to write those words.
    Texas will not prove unique, or even all that bad, in terms of how fragile the assumptions beneath its critical infrastructure really were. Most of its mistakes are familiar to anyone who has ever covered the politics of infrastructure and disaster preparation. Shalini Vajjhala, who worked on climate resilience in the Obama administration and is now the chief executive of re:focus partners, a firm that helps cities prepare for climate change, put it sharply to me. “When I am successful, that means something hasn’t happened. That’s good policy, but it’s lousy politics. The first year, you’re applauded. The second year, your budget is cut. The third year, your staff goes away.”

    It is not just our energy infrastructure that is unprepared for climate change. It is our political infrastructure. It is our social infrastructure. It is our psyches. There’s long been a hope that repeated climate crises will force Republicans to enlist in the fight to stop, or slow, climate change. How can you ignore the crisis when it is your constituents who are frozen, your home that is underwater? But what we saw in Texas is the darker timeline — a doom loop of climate polarization, where climate crises lead, paradoxically, to a politics that’s more desperate for fossil fuels, more dismissive of international or even interstate cooperation.

    The state’s Republican leaders immediately blamed renewable energies as the lights flickered off across their communities. “This shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America,” Gov. Greg Abbott told Sean Hannity, going on to say that “it just shows that fossil fuel is necessary.” Abbott was lying — the Green New Deal hasn’t passed, and the largest drop in electricity generation came from frozen natural gas and coal lines, not frozen wind turbines — but fact-checking his statement is like trying to knock the moon from the sky with a Wiffle bat. Climate politics long ago became culture war, and Abbott’s comments were simply stating which side he’s on. Honestly, I preferred Senator Ted Cruz’s impulse to quietly jet off to Cancún.


    The most common mistake in politics is to believe there is some level of suffering that will force responsible governance. There isn’t. We saw this during the coronavirus crisis, when some Republicans blanched before the lockdowns and masking, and repositioned themselves as the tough, sacrificial defenders of normalcy. “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?” Asked Texas’ lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick. “And if that’s the exchange, I’m all in.”
    Similarly, once climate change can no longer be ignored, Republicans may tighten their embrace of fossil fuels rather than admitting decades of policy error. I have covered climate policy for years, so I was appalled to hear Republicans call to burn more coal as their energy system failed. But if I were cold and scared and looking for a familiar answer from people I already trusted, I can imagine it making sense to me. Unchecked climate change promises a future of scarcity and emergency, and that can create demand for politicians and solutions who falsely promise a return to simpler, better times.
    “When people are presented with a crisis like in Texas, they often grasp for stability,” Julian Brave NoiseCat, vice president of policy and strategy at Data for Progress, told me. “This is something the right is good at — they offer the security of tradition, of the familiar.” The irony is that on this issue, it is progressives who are the true conservatives. We are the ones who want to conserve the climate that the entirety of human civilization has known, who believe that the planetary conditions that fostered all of our institutions and social structures are worth preserving. “If you want to stand athwart the history of emissions and yell ‘stop,’” NoiseCat says, “you need to do really transformational things.”
    Transformation at that scale requires cooperation — between individuals, and cities, and industries, and regions, and countries. But there is reason to believe a warming world will be a less cooperative world. Here, something former Gov. Rick Perry of Texas said is instructive. “Texans would be without electricity for longer than three days to keep the federal government out of their business.” Perry, I should note, most recently served as head of the federal Department of Energy — the same agency whose name he had forgotten when he tried to mark it for elimination in a 2011 Republican presidential debate. You can’t make this stuff up.
    The mind aches for the comforts of snark here, but I think Perry’s words carry deeper, broader truth. Texas kept its grid disconnectedfrom the regional grids so it didn’t have to follow federal regulations. In a world of aggressive climate action, it’s easy to imagine more states, and countries, receding from compacts and multilateral institutions because they don’t like the new rules, or the loss of sovereignty. Indeed, America just experienced this dance as President Donald Trump withdrew us from the climate accords, before President Biden signed us back up. A global crisis that demands cooperation and even sacrifice will be fertile soil for nationalists and demagogues.
    In Omar El Akkad’s novel “American War,” it’s a bill banning fossil fuels that leads to a second civil war. That may be fiction, but there’s a growing array of studies showing that hotter weather leads to more violence, both between individuals and between countries. “We estimated that 11 percent of civil conflicts in Africa since the 1980s can be attributed to warming that has occurred,” Solomon Hsiang, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley who has been a leader in this work, told me. “Or, in a different study, looking at El Niño, we found that the timing of about 20-25 percent of civil conflict since 1950 can be connected to El Niños.” I sometimes wonder whether climate change will kill more people through war than weather.
    This isn’t a case where the mechanism is mysterious. I am tetchier on hot days. So are most people. There’s a famous 1986 study called “Ambient Temperature and Horn Honking: A Field Study of the Heat/Aggression Relationship.” In it, Douglas Kenrick and Steven MacFarlane simply let a car idle at green lights in Phoenix during the spring and summer, and measured how long it took the driver behind to honk. The hotter the day, the faster the honks came. The most aggressive honkers were the drivers with the windows rolled down, as they were most exposed to the heat. It’s an amusing study, but subsequent research was bloodier: hotter days bring more assaults, gang violence and murders.

    Cooperation is humanity’s superpower, and the way we have enlarged our circle — from kin, to tribes, to religions, to countries, to the world — is miraculous. But the conditions under which that cooperation has taken hold are delicate, and like everything else, part of the biophysical system in which we live. We are changing that system in ways we do not understand and with consequences we cannot predict.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/25/o...te-change.html







    Last edited by Green Man; 02-27-2021 at 11:06 AM.

  7. #17
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    I consider myself very fortunate, compared to most of my fellow Texans. My electricity and natural gas stayed on the whole time. So I had heat and could cook.

    I did not have water for 6 days. I had drinking water stored, and shoveled snow into buckets and pulled icicles off my house to thaw for flushing. And since I could not leave faucets dripping, my pipes froze.

    The internet and phone were down for 5 days and the TV cable for 13 days. Before you make fun of me for including the TV, let me say this: I was in an information black hole. For days, I had no way to communicate with anyone and had no idea what was going in my area, or in the world.

    I knew the storm was coming and prepared the best I could. I was not prepared for the information black hole. That was difficult – wondering what was going on in the world, and no way to find out.

  8. #18
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    Quote Originally Posted by Green Man View Post

    We don’t realize how fragile the basic infrastructure of our civilization is.

    By Ezra Klein

    Only the ignorant do not realize this.

    For Klein to claim this is the result of Climate Change is adding to the ignorance. I might posit that this event is a wake-up call from a loving Creator who knows that if we continue to ignore His instructions we will all perish.

    Appreciate your resourcefulness, Cassie, and your sense of gratitude. Thanks

  9. #19
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    The power grid and it's susceptibility to damage has been a topic here for 12 years many books have been published on the topic. But this is the first time that an attack against the US by it's "Government" is not only likely but a near certainty. The CIA and USAF have EMP cannons that can target specific areas such as a town or zip code, this is not speculation but fact.
    They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
    “As a general rule, the earlier you recognize someone is trying to kill you, the better off you’ll be.”

    "You think a wall as solid as the earth separates civilisation from barbarism. I tell you the division is a sheet of glass."



  10. #20
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    Quote Originally Posted by Lenno View Post
    The power grid and it's susceptibility to damage has been a topic here for 12 years many books have been published on the topic. But this is the first time that an attack against the US by it's "Government" is not only likely but a near certainty. The CIA and USAF have EMP cannons that can target specific areas such as a town or zip code, this is not speculation but fact.
    Lenno, are you saying the government attacked Texas?

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