[ Texas brought this crisis on themselves by insisting on
operating their own power grid that doesn’t connect with others; by
failing to do anything to make the grid more resilient; by creating a
political system that is controlled by power and money.]
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IS TEXAS’ DISASTER A HARBINGER OF AMERICA’S FUTURE?  
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Jeff Goodell
February 17, 2021
RollingStone
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_ Texas brought this crisis on themselves by insisting on operating
their own power grid that doesn’t connect with others; by failing to
do anything to make the grid more resilient; by creating a political
system that is controlled by power and money. _

People carry groceries from a local gas station on February 15, 2021
in Austin, Texas. Winter storm Uri has brought historic cold weather
to Texas, causing traffic delays and power outages, and storms have
swept across 26 states with a mix of freezing, temperatures and
precipitation. Montinique Monroe // RollingStone

 

A few days before Texas [[link removed]] went
dark, Elon Musk appeared on the _Joe Rogan Experience_ to tout the
wonders of the Lone Star State. Both Rogan and Musk have recently
moved to Austin, part of a wave of privileged migrants who have come
to Texas for lax regulation, low taxes, and great tacos. On the
podcast, Musk said Austin
[[link removed]] “is
going to be the biggest boomtown that America has seen in 50 years, at
least.”

Anyway, that’s what social media posts I’ve seen report Musk said.
I had planned to listen to the podcast the other day, but then it
started snowing here in Austin, and a car spun out in front of me on
an icy highway, nearly sending me into a concrete abutment. Ever
since, life has gotten, shall we say, complicated. The power went out
at our house Monday at 2 a.m., and since then, my fiancée and I and
have been trying to keep ourselves warm and sane and our water pipes
flowing during 10-degree nights. We finally fled to a friend’s house
which, miraculously, still had power.

The blackout, which has lasted 56 hours so far, has left nearly three
million people without electricity (as of this morning). As I write
this, a big part of Texas is cold and dark. Businesses are shut down.
Streets are empty, other than a few guys sliding around in 4x4s and
fire trucks rushing to rescue people who turn their ovens on to keep
warm and poison themselves with carbon monoxide. Modern life is a
delicate thread made up of flowing electrons, and it is unraveling
here among the BBQ pits and hipster bars. Yesterday, the line at our
neighborhood grocery store was three blocks long. People walking
around with handguns on their hip adds to a sense of lawlessness
(Texas is an open-carry state). Homeless people wander the streets,
blankets wrapped around their heads.

In parts of Houston and Austin, city officials have issued a boil
water notice to residents due to possible contamination from broken
pipes and offline water treatment plants. In Galveston, officials
called for a refrigerator truck to care for the bodies of 20 people
[[link removed]] who
have died from the cold. Last night on MSNBC
[[link removed]],
former El Paso city councilman Beto O’Rourke was in high form,
saying “we are nearing a failed state in Texas” and all but
demanding that Gov. Greg Abbott step down for gross incompetence. (El
Paso, by the way, is the only major city in Texas undarkened by this
power outage, because it is the only city wise enough to have power
connections beyond the Texas grid).

Austin may indeed be a harbinger of America’s future — although
perhaps not in the ways that Musk intended. Thanks largely to 200
years of hell-bent consumption of fossil fuels, our world is changing
fast. Despite decades of scientific research, we have only a shadowy
understanding of what’s coming our way, or how to prepare for it.

And now it is black. As I write these words, at 6 a.m. on Wednesday
morning, the power just went out. We had a warm dinner last night and
felt lucky. I got up early to write a dispatch. I sat in a chair in
the living room and wanted to figure out a way to describe the eerie
experience here and the scary way that Texas Republicans are twisting
it all to their advantage. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see
the neighbor with the porch light on, and I thought how weird and
wasteful that was, when the rest of the city is dark. Then, at exactly
6:04 a.m., the lights surged on and off three times, then there was a
weird orange flash. I presume a transformer nearby blew. Now I can
feel the cold seeping in. I am typing on battery time.

T

This is fucked up. Last night, Austin Energy General Manager Jackie
Sargent said that if they couldn’t get the grid under control
it could go down for a month.
[[link removed]] That means no
water, no electricity. It’s a short, dark journey from there to food
riots, gangs, social breakdown. Is that where this is headed? Or is
this just a “rolling blackout” that will bring power back on in 45
minutes. I have no idea. I am stuck in a slow-motion catastrophe.

What’s happening in Texas right now may or may not be linked to the
climate crisis. The Arctic is warming three times as fast at the rest
of the world, and it’s changing the dynamics of atmospheric
circulation. Some studies that say the warming Arctic might be causing
a “wavy” jet stream that is pushing Arctic air further south, into
places like Texas. But given the chaotic complexity of weather
systems, it’s hard to attribute this to climate change
[[link removed]] with any certainty.
As climate scientist Tim Woollings put it
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“It’s really not obvious what is going on.”

But here are two things we do know: first, our world is poorly
equipped for the changes that come with a rapidly warming climate.
What’s going on here in Texas right now is Exhibit A. The gas plants
and pipelines that power the grid were not built to withstand cold,
because it doesn’t get cold here very often, and nobody imagined it
would ever be any different. But climate change fucks with things in
dangerous and unpredictable ways: when it gets hot, planes sometimes
have to stop flying because the heat changes the density of the air,
and planes need longer runways to take off. Train tracks buckle.
Bridges crack. Server farms overheat. When it rains two or three times
harder than it has ever rained before, drainage systems are
overwhelmed and rivers jump their banks. When bigger, more intense
hurricanes hit, sea walls are overwhelmed.

As Jesse Jenkins, a systems engineer at Princeton University told
the _New York Times_
[[link removed]]:
“We’re now in a world where, especially with climate change, the
past is no longer a good guide to the future. We have to get much
better at preparing for the unexpected.”

The second thing we know is that, whatever happens, no matter how much
human suffering and misery it causes, Republicans are going to exploit
the event as evidence that we need to keep burning fossil fuels. That
is just a rule. Here in Texas, it started with the false notion that
the power outage had been caused by freezing wind turbines. In fact,
the outage was caused by thermal plants — mostly natural gas and
coal — and pipelines that froze up in the cold. More than half of
the Texas grid’s winter generating capacity, largely powered by
natural gas, was offline due to the storm. “Gas is failing in the
most spectacular fashion right now,” Michael Webber, an energy
resources professor at the University of Texas at Austin, told
the _Texas Tribune
[[link removed]]._

But the Texas fossil-fuel mafia was not about to let facts get in the
way of trashing clean energy. On Monday morning, just after the power
went out, the first thing I saw on my Twitter feed was a picture of a
helicopter
[[link removed]] de-icing
a wind turbine blade. The picture — which later went viral — had
been tweeted out by a gas and oil industry consultant, with the
obvious implication that without fossil-fuel-fired helicopters, wind
turbines couldn’t function in the extreme cold. In fact, wind
turbines do fine in the winter – Iowa has lots of them, as does
Canada and Denmark. Many research outposts in Antarctica, which has
the harshest cold-weather climate on Earth, are 100 percent powered by
renewables.

Then Rupert Murdoch’s propaganda machine cranked up. On
Monday, _The Wall Street Journal_ ran an editorial (“The Deep
Green Freeze
[[link removed]]”)
blaming frozen wind turbines for the Texas blackout: “Herein is the
paradox of the left’s climate agenda: The less we use fossil fuels,
the more we need them.” That night, Fox’s Tucker Carlson
[[link removed]] aired
his version of the “freezing wind turbines” fairy tale, calling
wind turbines “silly fashion accessories” and all but blaming them
for the suffering of hundreds of thousands of people in Texas. Carlson
is not stupid. He knew it was a lie. But he said it anyway, because
that’s what the anti-science Trumpers in his audience want to hear.
Last night, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who is also not stupid, went
on _Hannity_
[[link removed]] to
twist the lie into a political talking point
[[link removed]].
“This shows that the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the
United States of America,” Abbott said.

The levels of cynicism and opportunism here are staggering, especially
in the midst of a state-wide emergency that is causing untold
suffering and death. If I had power, I’d write about how Texas
brought this crisis on themselves by insisting on operating their own
power grid that doesn’t connect with others; by failing to do
anything to make the grid more resilient despite knowing for years
[[link removed]] that
it was in trouble; and by creating a political system that is
controlled by the power and money of an obsolete and dying energy
source that worked fine in the Nineteenth century, but is now an
engine of destruction and chaos.

But it is now 7 a.m., the house is growing cold, and my battery is
running low. Another dark day begins in the biggest boomtown America
will see for the next 50 years.
 

_[In 1989, JEFF GOODELL [[link removed]] began
covering crime and politics in New York City for7 Days, a weekly
magazine that won a National Magazine Award for General Excellence in
1990. Since 1996 he has been a staff writer at Rolling Stone and a
frequent contributor to the New York Times Magazine._

_Goodell’s latest book is The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking
Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World (Little, Brown, 2017).
His reporting took him to 12 countries and many coastal cities in the
U.S., as well as to Greenland and to Alaska with President Barack
Obama. The Water Will Come was picked as a New York Times Critics’
Top Book of 2017, as well as one of Washington Post’s 50 Notable
Works of Nonfiction in 2017._

_Goodell was a fellow at New America in 2016 and 2017 and is currently
a Senior Fellow at Atlantic Council. As a commentator on energy and
environmental issues, he has appeared on NPR, MSNBC, CNN, CNBC, ABC,
NBC, Fox and The Oprah Winfrey Show. He was awarded a 2020 Guggenheim
Fellowship in General Nonfiction.]_

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