The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie — deliberate, contrived, and dishonest — but the myth — persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic.
— John Kennedy, 1917-1963, American President [1961-1963]
The eighties and nineties were kind of a blur to me. My life was consumed with raising kids and working. There was not a lot of time devoted to television. That may explain why I now find myself terribly amused by some of the shows that I didn’t watch then. My latest favorite is “Third Rock from the Sun”. The pretext for this series involves four aliens from outer space who are on a mission to learn about earth and its inhabitants. The main character, Dick Solomon, is played by John Lithgow, an amazing actor. I think the show is hilarious and sometimes insightful. Today’s rerun episode theme was truth. Dick and his cohorts are incapable of lying. They struggle to understand why humans create so many problems for themselves by not telling the truth and by not being able to discern fact from falsehood.
My thoughts immediately drifted to the high level of untruths that permeate our discussions these days. Or at least much of what is being bantered about seems like untruths to ME at least. There is now talk about “alternative facts”. Isn’t this an oxymoron? If something is a fact, the opposite of that is NOT a fact, umm isn’t it? This is such a target-rich environment, which lie to focus on? Well of course there is the “Big Lie” about the election results. That has created so much discord and destruction. And then there is the whole QAnon fiasco. But I think I will skip these for now in favor of the lies being told this week about the Texas power outage.
Do you ever get a little tired about hearing about Texas? Don’t mess with Texas!! Austin is the fastest growing, successful high-tech community in America. Everyone is leaving California and moving to Texas. Texas is bigger and better than X number of other states combined. The Dallas Cowboys – America’s Team! Texas is so big you can’t drive across it in one day. Blah, blah, blah, blah! Two years ago, I was walking through the MINNESOTA state fair and saw this exhibit extolling all of the virtues of Texas. Give me a break!! Now let me begin with sympathy to all who have experienced loss in the tragedy of the winter storm. I would never wish this disaster on anyone, especially fellow Americans. But I must confess to some guilty schadenfreude for the public officials there – Texas is not so bulletproof either. I know it is always wrong to gloat when others have problems, but it was so hard for me to resist:
• Last fall Texas Senator Ted Cruz hooted when California governor Gavin Newsome had to ask its residents to turn down their air conditioners because of the energy issues created by wildfires. In an August 19, 2020 Tweet he said “California is now unable to perform even basic functions of civilization, like having reliable electricity. Biden/Harris/AOC want to make CA’s failed energy policy the standard nationwide. Hope you don’t like air conditioning!”
• Texas OPTED OUT of regional energy planning/sharing consortia, instead relying on their OWN planning. (Don’t mess with Texas.) There were a few exceptions on the fringes of the state who had participated in joint energy grid planning and these areas went through the recent weather event relatively unscathed. There are three grids in the Lower 48 states: The Eastern Interconnection, the Western Interconnection — and Texas. The Texas grid is called ERCOT, and it is run by an agency of the same name — the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. ERCOT commissioners are now taking flak from Texas politicians who are pointing the fingers at others and fleeing this debacle with reckless abandon!! Why did Texas want to go it alone? Because then they were not under the jurisdiction of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). Don’t mess with Texas!
• FERC visited Texas on at least three occasions in the last thirty years after similar weather problems (in an advisory role) and recommended more weatherization of the state’s energy facilities. These recommendations were summarily ignored, because, because umm I guess Texas knows best. And amazingly former Governor Perry said last week that the disaster was worth it, to keep FERC out of the lives of Texans. “Texans would be without electricity for longer than three days to keep the federal government out of their business.” I’m not so sure that those Texans who have lost loved ones or even the ones getting $8,000 monthly electric bills would really say that.
• Texas Representative Kyle Biedermann has prepared a bill that would begin the process of secession for Texas. Texas GOP Chairman Allen West has publicly endorsed this legislation to allow for a referendum. They even have a cute name for it – Texit.
So, in the face of all this mismanagement by MANY in the state, the present Governor of Texas knows where the blame lies – it is the failing WIND ENERGY facilities in the state. According to Newsweek, Texas Governor Greg Abbott has blamed the disaster on green energy and criticized the proposed Green New Deal. “This shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America,” Abbott said, claiming that wind and solar energy make up “collectively more than 10 percent of our power grid.” “It just shows that fossil fuel is necessary for the state of Texas as well as other states to make sure we’ll be able to heat our homes in the wintertime and cool our homes in the summertime.” I don’t think anyone is saying that we will never need natural gas again.
And then there is this: The aforementioned Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which oversees most of the state’s electrical grid, has placed the blame for the outages on Texas’ reliance on natural gas. Dan Woodfin, a senior director at ERCOT, told The Texas Tribune that more than half of their winter generating capacity is offline and that much of this is powered by natural gas. “It appears that a lot of the generation that has gone offline today has been primarily due to issues on the natural gas system,” Woodfin said. It is estimated that 80 percent of the Texas electricity grid’s capacity may be generated by natural gas, coal, and nuclear power. Just 7 percent of its winter capacity was due to come from wind. Or as Michael Webber, an energy resources professor at the University of Texas at Austin, told The Texas Tribune: “Texas is a gas state. Gas is failing in the most spectacular fashion right now.” Let’s call a spade a spade – this debacle lies clearly at the feet of those officials who allowed energy generators in Texas to sidestep widely recommended winterization work, commonplace in areas all over the US, in the interest of HIGHER UTILITY PROFITS.
Despite the secessionist leanings by some in the state, when Governor Abbott requested assistance from Washington, President Biden responded that the US Government will do all that it can to alleviate this exceedingly difficult situation – and I might add, AS IT SHOULD. The US government is funded by taxpayers from ALL the fifty states, including those who are not considering secession. FEMA will spring into action bringing generators and other things to help, just as they did for Houston and other devasted areas of Texas in 2017 in Hurricane Harvey and in many other flood events. But again, the chippy side of me remembers that Houston is well known for its lax to non-existent land use controls. Amazingly even today, the nation’s fourth largest city has no zoning ordinance, instead relying on a convoluted system involving some general overall development standards and the legal ability of the city to enforce private deed restrictions. This lack of urban planning has created difficulties when it comes to efficiently providing public services most notably drainage and flood control. So, don’t tell Houston how to run their city, and don’t tell Texas how to run their power grid – Don’t mess with Texas you Yankee jerks. Just send on down the money when we get into trouble. Oops, I slipped again.
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Thanks for your insights, Craig, and for the shout out to John Lithgow and the Third Rock writers and actors. There is the adage, usually applied to property developers asking for public financing assistance, about socializing the costs and risks and privatizing the profits. It applies to the Texas energy failure as well. We ought to appreciate the people who manage the power grids because of everything they do to monitor storms, temperatures, power supplies and demands to insure that power is where it needs to be when it needs to be there. They always say you are doing your best job managing a utility if nobody has to think about it. If the water comes out of the tap and toilet flushes, the customer is happy. The power grid is similar, but I would argue more complex based on its sheer size and because its shifts in demand are 24/7. All of that said, I agree Texas should have listened to the recommendations that they winterize their production and distribution facilities before something like this happened. They also would have had more options for power sourcing if they were interconnected with the rest of the nation and likely had excess power supply in areas not affected by their weather event, including places where wind turbines were still spinning.