Freezing weather in Texas and a breakdown of the electricity grid in the state, has given Democrats an opening, while Republican leaders are trying to point the blame elsewhere, writes John Matisonn.
The massive breakdown of the Texas electricity grid this week signalled the coming battle over US President Joe Biden’s plan to switch the US from oil, gas, and coal to green energy. It’s already clear that fake facts and a post-truth debate will play a large part.
Unusually freezing weather in Texas disrupted more than 800 public water systems serving 162 of the state’s 254 counties, affecting 13.1 million people, and 47 people have died from the cold.
Wellheads in the Permian Basin froze solid. Pipelines leaked water, which turned metal and gas into useless, immovable ice. Climatologists think this is because the polar vortex of frigid air is wobbling and dipping south, freezing parts of the mid-western US.
Electricity supply collapsed because Texas chose to ignore warnings after the last two freezes, in 1989 and 2011, to spend money on maintenance, “winterising”, and extra natural gas storage capacity for the next cold spell.
Separated electricity
Independent-minded Texas has chosen to be the only state in the US to separate its electricity supply from all other states, to keep it free of government regulation, cheap, and profitable. That meant it could legally ignore Washington’s warnings that operators were not prepared for freezing weather.
When the weather got colder than it’s ever been natural gas pipelines and equipment froze. All the top politicians in Texas are Republicans, and Democrats have seen an opening. Republican leaders have every incentive to point the blame elsewhere.
In 1989, a federal study spelt out how to avoid such a disaster in the future by "winterising" equipment the way companies in colder states do. In 2011, after Arctic weather caused a series of rolling blackouts, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) produced another report that gave the same warning.
“The single largest problem during the cold weather event was the freezing of instrumentation and equipment,” it said.
Both were largely ignored.
“We must address why, after 10 years have passed, are we in a worse position today than in 2011,” said the state comptroller, Glenn Hegar, a Republican, who as a state legislator sponsored a Bill a decade ago to prod the electric companies into preparing for winter.
Rick Perry, the former Texas Governor and President Donald Trump’s Secretary of Energy, said going it alone was worth it.
“Texans would [rather] be without electricity for longer than three days to keep the federal government out of their business,” Perry said this week.
When this latest electricity crash happened, 12% of the electricity failures were wind. The rest was in traditional sources, particularly natural gas. But Fox News’ Tucker Carlson knew the real culprit.
“Unbeknown to most people the green new deal came to Texas. The state became totally reliant on windmills,” Carlson told his large, national TV audience.
Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott took up the mantra. “This is where we’re heading with the green new deal.”
Neither chose to explain how this happened in a state governed by conservative Republicans.
“Green energy failure”, read the banner on the bottom of the screen of Fox News’ stories about power outages.
“Every time we have challenges with the grid, whether it’s in California this past summer or Texas right now, people try to weaponise this for their pet project, which is fossil fuels,” said Leah Stokes, an assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who studies energy policy.
“Our infrastructure cannot handle extreme weather events, which these fossil fuels are ironically causing.”
Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize winning economist and columnist for the New York Times, asked, “... why do they think they can get away with such an obvious lie? The answer, surely, is that those peddling the lie know that they’re operating in a post-truth political landscape. When two-thirds of Republicans believe that (leftwing) Antifa was involved in the assault on the Capitol, selling the base a bogus narrative about the Texas electricity disaster is practically child’s play”.
The Texas economy is built on oil and gas, and natural gas is their biggest single source of energy. Allowing competition led to 23% wind turbines during Republican governance, because wind was competitively priced.
Soaring natural gas prices
But there is a storage problem in Texas when it comes to natural gas. Numerous experts said the electricity companies don’t buy reserves of natural gas to keep in storage, because that would cost money and the state did not make it a requirement. Since the crisis, natural gas prices have soared.
Texas electricity was unregulated until the formation of the Energy Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) in the 1970s. But several experts described ERCOT as, “... anything but reliable… its board is really just an industry club. Several of its members don’t even live in Texas”.
While Republicans control the state legislature, the governor’s mansion, and both senate seats, the last four years have seen Democrats make inroads into their support.
Divisions in the Republican Party could offer Democrats their best opportunity in decades. Former President Donald Trump and the most powerful Republican in office in the country, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, are now in open conflict over the direction of the party.
Personal attack
After Trump won acquittal in the Senate on Saturday on the charge of inciting insurrection, McConnell made a searing speech blaming Trump for the violent attack on the Capitol, even though McConnell voted for Trump’s acquittal. Trump responded with a personal attack, signalling more to come.
Neither will back down. McConnell believes the Republican Party can never win unless it abandons Trump, who gained support among the working class, but has lost suburbanites throughout the country. Trump will not back down as long as he has support, which appears to remain formidable although reduced since the violence at the Capitol.
A potential front-runner for the Republican nomination for President in four years’ time, former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, became the latest politician to face Trump’s wrath this week. After mild criticism of his actions, Haley asked for a meeting. Trump refused. His office made sure that was leaked to the press.
New polls since Trump’s acquittal show him the frontrunner for the nomination in 2024. There is no doubt he read them.
In the middle is Fox TV News, grappling with the problem: on which side is its bread buttered?
- John Matisonn is the author of 'Cyril's choices: Lessons from 25 years of freedom in South Africa'.
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