It's amazing to watch the national brouhaha over this situation while also being an affected resident of Texas. It's amazing how people have adopted passionate stances despite not living here or knowing anything about power grids. Heck, even friends of mine who are affected take whatever stance they already agree with. Deregulation is good! It's the GOP's fault! It's the windmills. No, its not the windmills!
I'm starting to internalize the idea that the news and the popular talk on social media is heavily distorted and based on what we are already biased to believe.
I have been amazed, and also disappointed, by the amount of people that want this to be the fault of “stupid conservative Texas” and absolutely refuse to even entertain the idea that anything other than “Texas is dumb” could have been a contributor. Even in this thread, the number of comments that adamantly insist “this is only a Texas problem”, despite facts to the contrary, is astounding.
That goes the other way around, too (lots of conservatives immediately blaming windmills etc).
It reminds me a lot of the Reddit posts whenever a bombing happens. You’ll see people from both sides rabidly hoping that it was a Muslim suicide bomber or a far-right extremist, because if that’s the case they can use the event to push their political agenda. It’s sickening, IMO.
There surely is room here for criticizing Texas GOP policies, but they aren’t the only problem here, and if we actually want to fix things we need to stop playing these ridiculous partisan games and be honest with ourselves with the full picture of issues.
Just a reminder the your junior Senator (among many others[1]) mocked California and our electric grid when we were hit by record wild fires last year. He also voted against federal aid for Hurricane Sandy because it only impacted blue states.
And maybe you should look up the timeline on when your state representatives ran to fox news and tried to blame the green new deal and windmills for the outage. I am sure the national discourse would be a bit more sane if it wasn't kicked off by Texas politicians spreading 100% FUD.
You are asking everyone else to be reasonable while your own politicians viciously attack the other side and straight up lie to the American people.
Lol, this could not be a more perfect example of exactly what I’m talking about. Nowhere in my comment did I say that Texas politicians are not to blame (in fact, I said the opposite) and yet here you come riding in to “remind me” of some actions that Texas politicians did that have absolutely no relevance to the issue at hand.
> You are asking everyone else to be reasonable while your own politicians viciously attack the other side and straight up lie to the American people.
I don’t personally control Cruz or Abbott’s actions. If I did, they wouldn’t be in office. But what I can control is how I react to situations, just like you can control how you react to situations. I choose to be reasonable and expect others around me to be reasonable, because that’s how things progress. It seems you choose to double down on unproductive finger pointing and playing “gotcha”, though.
That’s fine if you don’t like Cruz. I don’t like him either. But Cruz being a dumbass and taunting California has absolutely nothing to do with the issues that affected Texas this week, and you bringing it up is completely unneeded and unhelpful. Please go have your outrage session somewhere else.
I never liked the meme, but this guy has to be a NPC. Seriously. I couldn't agree more with you assessment about the current news/discussion life-cycle.
Personally I think that the way news are produced and consumed fuels a vicious cycle that is more about tribes than information.
> and if we actually want to fix things we need to stop playing these ridiculous partisan games and be honest with ourselves with the full picture of issues.
One side takes these issues very seriously. We have been fighting tooth and nail to address climate change, improve the nations infrastructure and provide adequate safety nets for when things go bad. The other side spends their time screaming about socialism and stolen elections.
The point I am trying to make is that this is not a "both sides" problem. One side is taking these issues very seriously the other refuses to even engage in a conversation about them. Obamacare is a perfect example of how this played out. The legislation literally originated as a Republican proposal, but Republicans refused to cooperate and instead trotted out the "death panels" talking point. And here we are 12 years later, and they still don't have a replacement plan.
If you are actually interested in hearing about the solutions that are on the table you can get a rough idea by visiting Biden's energy plan[1]. These are very real proposals, with broad democratic support. But to get any of this stuff passed, it will likely require input and support from Republicans. And unfortunately, I have little to no faith that they will come to the table on this. I hope I am wrong.
Winterizing natural gas power plants isn't mentioned once in Joe Biden's clean energy platform. He also didn't mention anything about weatherizing natural gas generators in any of the debates.
Death panels and the ACA have nothing to do winterizing with natural gas generators.
There is a bunch of strong evidence that climate change is man made and real. There is much less evidence that climate change is causing more extreme cold events, or specifically had any influence on this polar vortex.
And wind did slightly worse than coal and natural gas generators when it comes to stability over the last week, so it's definitely not a savior.
There are a million opportunities to argue about the ACA or climate change. But this issue is about winterization/maybe connecting Texas to the national power grid. Can we just argue about that here?
Btw I voted for Biden, but the Democratic platform has very little focus on weatherizing natural gas plants.
It is a high level policy agenda, not a 10k page regulatory document. There are literally dozens of references to making infrastructure robust to the impacts of climate change, for example:
"Americans deserve infrastructure they can trust: infrastructure that is resilient to floods, fires, and other climate threats"
If we are going to criticize Democrats for not explicitly discussing an extremely niche grid infrastructure issue in their platform, maybe we should also criticize the fact the republicans didn't even bother to publish one this past election cycle[1]
> But this issue is about winterization/maybe connecting Texas to the national power grid. Can we just argue about that here?
What is there to argue? Texas failed to adequately winterize. They should make sure to fix that. End of argument.
Our Junior senator that peaced out to Cancun with his family this week(during a pandemic)? Yeah, he is always in our thoughts.
It was pretty gross reading about these guys going on national conservative networks playing national GOP politics spreading FUD about renewables... From under a bunch of blankets on my phone because it was 41f in my house.
If you think my reply was attack, then you are probably blinded by your own biases.
I left a substantive and truthful reply. Here is another synopsis in case it helps: Certain Texas politicians are notorious for poisoning the well when it comes to public discourse. And in this very specific example, they literally went to fox news and other outlets and blamed the issues on GND and windmills. At that point the Texas power outages were barely blip on the national radar, but their lies on national media kicked off a firestorm of headlines to counter their lies.
They literally started this. But folks keep blaming the media, and keep blaming the libs. Wake up. If you disagree with anything I said, a substantive reply is welcome. But if you are just going to cry about being attacked, go somewhere else.
What is it you think "they" started? You're really all over the place with these replies. I don't think anyone here would disagree that it's absurd for Texas politicians to blame issues on GND, but had they not done that, it's not as if Texans would be any better off. I can tell you're not a fan of Cruz, but I think the point myself and the GP are trying to make is that there are lots of situations in American politics which boil down well to Red vs. Blue. Personally I don't think this is one of them.
They walked away from the negotiating table around 12 years ago and are nearly entirely focused on playing up the culture war games rather than actually doing any sort of governing.
And yet there is a fun little internet subculture that insists both sides are at fault, the media is at fault, tribalism, etc...
> there are lots of situations in American politics which boil down well to Red vs. Blue. Personally I don't think this is one of them.
I disagree. Blue side has been warning about extreme weather events due to climate change, about how unprepared our infrastructure is. Red side has been oil money == good, deregulation == profits. I don't think there has ever been a disaster that has so vividly highlighted the contrasting platforms and priorities of the two parties.
> I have been amazed, and also disappointed, by the amount of people that want this to be the fault of “stupid conservative Texas” and absolutely refuse to even entertain the idea that anything other than “Texas is dumb” could have been a contributor.
In my opinion this is the result of a mentality that sees the government as the obvious solution to problems, so when you see problems existing in a place where people seem to have a different philosophy of government, its clearly the fault of those morons who don’t realize that all problems can be solved by sufficient application of government force.
> if we actually want to fix things we need to stop playing these ridiculous partisan games and be honest with ourselves with the full picture of issues.
Some people actually do want to fix things on some level, but they are quite confident in their understanding of the problem and they believe that the indicated solution is clear, and anyone who doesn’t agree with them is either stupid, or evil, or both. So they’re unwilling to abandon what they see as a perfectly correct solution because a bunch of evil morons want to argue about “unintended consequences” or “agent-principal problems.”
Other people are more interested in signaling their ideological alignment with the above, and the object level issue provides them with opportunities to signal.
Ensuring the electric grid doesn't collapse when it gets below 20 degrees is in fact exactly the sort of thing that can be fixed with enough application of force.
> Ensuring the electric grid doesn't collapse when it gets below 20 degrees is in fact exactly the sort of thing that can be fixed with enough application of force.
This seems like the sort of belief system that inspired the story of King Canute and the tide. [0]
> Spend the money, or we'll take it from you. Done.
I understand that a lot of people only care about justifying the expropriation of wealth. But it seems you’ve forgotten to include the part where the expropriation is actually justified on the basis of promises to do something good with that money.
Can you point me to a specific current federal regulation that would’ve prevented this issue? TFA posits that there aren’t. So, you’ll take money to enforce a non-existent regulation?
The trivial proof of the GP's statement is that there are regions of the world and the US that regularly drop below 20F and have a functioning electrical grid (say, for instance, Alaska).
That's not proof at all. Building grid infrastructure that can function below 20F in regions that reach that temperature regularly is easier in important ways - in particular, if a new piece of infrastructure gets built that can't cope, the problem will happen early on and either get fixed or worked around, whereas somewhere like Texas can build up decades of new infrastructure that can't cope with the cold before anything happens to demonstrate that.
Huh? The various law making entities in the US are not always making maximal use of their power, it doesn't make any sense to wave your hands in the air and say that they can only do the things they've already made laws for.
Was King Canute making maximal use of his power when he ordered back the waves, or could he have deployed his army to the beach to reinforce his edicts?
Require that the power companies in Texas winterize their equipment. Done.
The electric company in El Paso, which is not part of ERCOT, did spend heavily to winterize their equipment after the 2011 cold snap. El Paso did not suffer outages this year like the rest of Texas.
Producing heat in the winter is a solved problem. If power companies are not applying the known solutions to a recurring problem, then apply state force to require them to do so. Done.
>In my opinion this is the result of a mentality that sees the government as the obvious solution to problems, so when you see problems existing in a place where people seem to have a different philosophy of government, its clearly the fault of those morons who don’t realize that all problems can be solved by sufficient application of government force.
It has nothing to do with the government and everything to do with beliefs. Your post is doing exactly that. Pointing out simple facts like that all grids have been under invested in for 50 years, that we need to spend trillions to bring them up to todays standards and that we need to diversity power sources is met with derision and downvotes.
> It has nothing to do with the government and everything to do with beliefs.
Government is not separable from the beliefs of the people who inhabit it and participate in its processes.
> Pointing out simple facts like that all grids have been under invested in for 50 years
Surely you can see that this is a belief and not a “fact”
> that we need to spend trillions to bring them up to todays standards and that we need to diversity power sources is met with derision and downvotes.
Well if people disagree then I feel it would be better for them to discuss. But it seems like there’s this perception that there is no room for reasonable disagreement and that’s what I was pushing back on.
We can agree that the grid needs more investment and still have differences of opinion on how to generate that investment.
>Surely you can see that this is a belief and not a “fact”
The belief is that every American should have uninterrupted access to electricity. The fact is that we are woefully under investing to keep that state of affairs. You can have your own beliefs, you can't have your own facts.
For some reason people who want to spend less money on infrastructure don't mention that they wouldn't mind if 50% of people don't have access to roads, hospitals, or electricity.
> The belief is that every American should have uninterrupted access to electricity. The fact is that we are woefully under investing to keep that state of affairs. You can have your own beliefs, you can't have your own facts.
The belief that the best way to get every American to have uninterrupted access to electricity is through public investment in infrastructure is belied by your admission that hasn’t happened. Which is a fact.
> For some reason people who want to spend less money on infrastructure don't mention that they wouldn't mind if 50% of people don't have access to roads, hospitals, or electricity.
For some reason the people who want to spend more money on publicly funded projects insist on casting aspersions rather than introspecting on why they’re always dependent on expropriation for basic things.
>The belief that the best way to get every American to have uninterrupted access to electricity is through public investment in infrastructure is belied by your admission that hasn’t happened. Which is a fact.
We have though. From 1930 to 1980 the US had a world class system that was better than any in the world.
> Texans preferring to go cold and starve than suffer the burden of regulation or government. This was not the philosophy of Texas governance succeeding as planned, it was clearly a monumental failure.
Authoritarian government also has failures that result in millions of deaths; I’m unsure how you can be so confident that no one in Texas (of all places) would rather freeze to death than willingly accept the risk of being frozen to death by a tyrannical government that promises things then breaks promises.
To be clear this isn’t about the object-level issue of preferring starvation under one ideology to starvation under another. This is about the inability of other people to comprehend that anyone could possibly feel differently than they do about who starves you to death.
> None of us are trying to die for the glory of a sociopathic libertarian ideal.
None of us are trying to die for the glory of a psychotic marxist ideal but we still pay taxes.
> that no one in Texas (of all places) would rather freeze to death than willingly accept the risk of being frozen to death by a tyrannical government that promises things then breaks promises
These are the exact same pathology. You're drawing a distinction based on whether one is "government", but they're the same type of lethargic entrenched entity, regardless of how they were chartered.
The actual problem is the lack of accountability. The free market philosophy points us to exit as an ideal of accountability. Sometimes exit works very well - switching electric providers during quiescent times to get pricing that better matches your usage. And sometimes relying on exit fails terribly, like this rare event where it is easier to balk at obligations rather than have prepared enough to fulfill them. If we care about exit in general, then it behooves us to recognize when it fails.
> These are the exact same pathology. You're drawing a distinction based on whether one is "government", but they're the same type of lethargic entrenched entity, regardless of how they were chartered.
One type of lethargic entrenched entity survives on the basis of consensual interactions, the other survives on the basis of economic values extracted by threats of violence. The pathology is in forcing the people who want to benefit from consensual interactions to support a system of coercion.
> The actual problem is the lack of accountability. The free market philosophy points us to exit as an ideal of accountability. Sometimes exit works very well - switching electric providers during quiescent times to get pricing that better matches your usage. And sometimes relying on exit fails terribly, like this rare event where it is easier to balk at obligations rather than have prepared enough to fulfill them. If we care about exit in general, then it behooves us to recognize when it fails.
> One type of lethargic entrenched entity survives on the basis of consensual interactions
So goes your theory, but not in actual practice. For the qualities under discussion, generation companies have seemingly acted in lockstep, therefore it makes sense to view them as a singular entity. And it's not productive to call signing up for electric service consensual in any meaningful way. The ability to technically opt out isn't worth much when it would significantly impact your life, as evidenced by the vanishingly small amount of people who do so.
You can also come at the reduction from the other direction and define how interacting with the "government" is technically consensual as well. eg don't pay taxes, do the work required to not have your income flows surveilled, etc. Or in this case, don't sign up for the (de jure) government power grid, and go your own way. Which is equivalent to what you would have had to do in the first scenario anyway - both scenarios end up with people who devoted their lives to being independent from the electrical grid being fine, and those who didn't freezing.
The point is that all frameworks ultimately have their limits - they are only good when their reasoning power holds. True understanding requires being able to switch between them as appropriate, rather than shoehorning everything into one and insisting that it must fit.
> For the qualities under discussion, generation companies have seemingly acted in lockstep, therefore it makes sense to view them as a singular entity. And it's not productive to call signing up for electric service consensual in any meaningful way. The ability to technically opt out isn't worth much when it would significantly impact your life, as evidenced by the vanishingly small amount of people who do so.
This is true.
> You can also come at the reduction from the other direction and define how interacting with the "government" is technically consensual as well. eg don't pay taxes, do the work required to not have your income flows surveilled, etc. Or in this case, don't sign up for the (de jure) government power grid, and go your own way.
This is willfully ignorant of how governments don’t let people do any of this. Being subjected to violence if you decline to participate is the opposite of consent.
> The point is that all frameworks ultimately have their limits - they are only good when their reasoning power holds. True understanding requires being able to switch between them as appropriate, rather than shoehorning everything into one and insisting that it must fit.
I agree with this and I was unclear. I mention consenting interactions because many of the people who oppose increases in the scope of state-sponsored activities prefer to source their necessities from markets. I’m aware that the tentacles of the government are long and broad and no part of the economy (least of all power generation) is free from this interference. There was probably a better way to express this in this thread.
> This is willfully ignorant of how governments don’t let people do any of this
I haven't heard of municipal light companies making it illegal to generate your own electricity or not connect your house to the grid, apart from general fit-for-occupancy laws. Similarly, the IRS doesn't have a cause of action if you deliberately earn less to pay less taxes (there is no "capitation" tax). So we can call those things consensual in a similar manner as signing up with a privately owned electric monopoly - all have narrow paths whereby you can technically go your own way.
In general for any given decree, one can always choose to to ignore it and bear specific consequences. This applies to de jure governments and de facto government alike. It takes a functioning market with many different options to diminish those consequences to the point where they can be accepted as some natural order rather than centralized diktats.
> I haven't heard of municipal light companies making it illegal to generate your own electricity or not connect your house to the grid, apart from general fit-for-occupancy laws.
It sounds like you haven’t done much research on this but anyone who has tried to opt out quickly discovers that these things exist. For example, in many municipalities it is illegal to occupy a dwelling that is not served with electricity from the grid. Having discovered this myself because the power company refused to sell me power, because they couldn’t confirm my identity, because they only way they were willing to confirm my identity was through a credit bureau asking me about my credit history, of which for some reason they had no records, (respectfully) I’m unwilling to do the unpaid labor of searching the internet to prove something I know very well from personal experience. Suffice it to say I rented a house and was unable to legally occupy it for a week because I had to get someone else to call the power company and turn on the lights. There are laws that prevent people from opting out.
> In general for any given decree, one can always choose to to ignore it and bear specific consequences. This applies to de jure governments and de facto government alike. It takes a functioning market with many different options to diminish those consequences to the point where they can be accepted as some natural order rather than centralized diktats.
Well, considering the Texan senator who is currently planning his return from Cancun was involved in spreading lies that ultimately led to an attempted insurrection against the US government... I think people are a little sick of Texas politics right now, and Texas losing power on large scale for a major weather event for the 2nd time in four years is a nice reminder of the local attitudes about climate change and the failures of Texan libertarianism.
It's amazing to watch the national brouhaha over this situation while also being an affected resident of Texas. It's amazing how people have adopted passionate stances despite not living here or knowing anything about power grids.
It's as if ... being affected by this terrible doesn't make someone an expert on situation since whatever is happening with the grid is quite far from those affected.
But it's not like there being differing opinions means that truth and falsehood cease to exist. Someone is lying, specifically Fox News and the governor of Texas are about alternative energy. Some policies really were problematic. etc.
And I'm sorry the diverse people of Texas have to suffer this. If one policy makers were the one who had to freeze in the dark but that's life.
In each media interview he gives a different shade of the story as he tries to walk it back. He's got to be lying in at least all but one scenario he explains it as.
I've wondered about how much of outsiders' responses have been driven by their own prejudice against Texas and our current political representatives.
Which really isn't fair since Texas has a massive number of democratic voters. We have multiple large metropolitan areas but we also have massive rural regions that tend to outweigh when it comes time to vote.
I would say the majority of those outside responses are from people who see Texas as some kind of backwards red state that was overdue for some comeuppance.
If you look at the red vs blue divide nationally, this is quite literally the perfect storm for blue team to yell at red team "I told ya so". Intense weather due to climate change which red team denies, loving the idea of an independent grid that cuts you off from other states, being against federal regulations but asking for federal aid, and having one of your senators fly to Cancun in the middle of it. I could go on, but all of this happened right after talk of succession was trending on social media.
I also believe a lot of online activists are hoping to capture the energy and anger over this event to "turn Texas blue" as they have been wanting to do.
> I would say the majority of those outside responses are from people who see Texas as some kind of backwards red state that was overdue for some comeuppance.
Consider that Texans have a well-earned reputation for talking about secession from the union, Don't Mess with Texas, etc. In some ways the dynamic between Texas and not-Texas reminds me of the dynamic between USA and not-USA.
> turn Texas blue
People have to realize that there is not really red states and blue states. It's urban-vs-rural, and whether a state turns red or blue has everything to do with the growth of metropolitan areas, not some shift in political values.
Don't Mess with Texas was simply a highly effective ad campaign from the '80s aimed at reducing littering on Texas roadways by the Texas Department of Transportation.
You're not wrong, but red team is not exactly wasting the opportunity to score political points either: Rick Perry and others saying "See? Wind power + green new deal bad".
That's true, I am just more exposed to the Twitter and Reddit coverage, which is decidedly blue team. There is absolutely a bunch of red team folks trying to use this to their advantage. However I will say that I don't think red team is going to be as successful as blue team in this event.
I laugh at both color-teams, and heartily encourage Texas and any other states who so choose to secede, but it's still difficult for me to imagine that a giant continent-wide blizzard is a sign of global warming. How much deeper would the snow have to be, and how much further below zero would the temperature have to be, before we could call it "weather" rather than "proof of global warming"? In general I think "intense weather" is supposed to signify hurricanes.
You should familiarize yourself with the polar vortex, the impact that ongoing climate change has on its now semi-regular collapse, and how this leads to massive cold fronts pushing south in the central region of the US. What is changing due to atmospheric warming is the frequency and magnitude of these events. Maybe do a bit of basic research next time before revealing your ignorance.
In the Midwest we call it a “cold winter”, they’ve been happening with regularity for a few hundred years. On the upside, the coyote hunting gets great once the temps get around -15 or so, just don’t forget your pack boots and down long johns.
> but it's still difficult for me to imagine that a giant continent-wide blizzard is a sign of global warming.
Of course no individual event is "proof of global warming", but this is entirely consistent with it.
This points out the huge failure in communication about climate change, but this is in fact exactly the sort of thing you would expect (and why "global warming" is such an easy term to misunderstand).
Short story is there is more energy in the atmosphere (i.e. heat) and it has to go somewhere. One of the places it goes is into higher variability in weather patterns, more energetic storms, changes is stable weather patterns. So that absolutely includes lower winter lows, as well as higher summer highs. Most of the modelling shows events like this winter storm growing in both intensity and frequency.
So far from the contradiction you (seem to?) see, it's pretty much what is expected.
The isn't the first time it has snowed in Texas. When it happened 150 years ago it wasn't "due to climate change" (literal quote from parent). This time it is. Warming enthusiasts undermine their argument by trying to have it both ways. They should ignore weather, and emphasize average temperatures.
Nobody is trying to have it both ways (what is a "warming enthusiast, anyway?) People someone articulate it poorly, but unless they are really confused they aren't saying that literally this data point is "due to climate change", but that seeing more unusual weather patterns is likely due to climate change. The first is a category error, the second is a decent interpretation of available data.
I woke up to a snow on Feb 15 is "just" weather. If I live in Austin, it was pretty weird. If I live in Anchorage, pretty normal. The difference between those two statements is not about weather, but about climate.
One lesson of climate change is that our past experiences of weather in a place are often going to become poorer and poorer predictors of next months weather. The fact that change involves a global warming phenomena tells us that both the weather and the changes in it are likely to get more intense.
> I've wondered about how much of outsiders' responses have been driven by their own prejudice against Texas and our current political representatives.
Californian with family in the Midwest - lots of folks are too dense to realize there are people on the other side of natural disasters when these horrible situations are happening. That prejudice happens to some degree, I've lived it =/
Regardless of politics, best of luck to you and your own.
As in, Texas has a fair blend of both parties but get perceived as being "red". With the current political atmosphere, people tend to want to make issues political. What this article is trying to point out is that this was an engineering problem, not a policy problem.
> It's amazing how people have adopted passionate stances despite not living here or knowing anything about power grids.
The people who started publicly adopting passionate (and quite obviously false) stances despite not knowing (or worse, knowing but adopting the false stances anyway) about electrical grids live in and have responsibility for Texas, the crisis, and the response to it. And that's what turned it into a tribal, partisan political issue.
You Texans don't like that, you should consider it next time you find yourselves in front of a ballot. Or sooner; effective political engagement requires more than voting.
It is like that because of social media and news outlets that basically produce "confirmation bias" news that has no other intention but to reinforce one's own existing beliefs. Both sides do it so it is not a partisan issue. This is what I think is actually behind the reason that the USA is so divided now and each side of the debate is so entranced in the typical political discourse.
I'm starting to internalize the idea that the news and the popular talk on social media is heavily distorted and based on what we are already biased to believe.