The great Texas climate catastrophe is heading your way
The Green New Deal has come, believe it or not, to the state of Texas. How's it working out so far?
Well, the good news is all that alternative energy seems to have had a remarkable effect on the climate. Sunday night, parts of Texas got the temperatures that we typically see in Alaska. In fact, they were the same as they were in Alaska. So global warming is no longer a pressing concern in Houston.
The bad news is, they don't have electricity. The windmills froze, so the power grid failed. Millions of Texans woke up Monday morning having to boil their water because with no electricity, it couldn't be purified.
The ironically named Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which oversees the grid, had no solution to any of this. They simply told people to stop using so much power to keep warm. So in Houston, hundreds of shivering Texans headed to the convention center like refugees to keep from freezing to death. Some Texans almost certainly did freeze to death. Later this week, we'll likely learn just how many more were killed as they tried to keep warm with jury-rigged heaters and barbecues and car exhaust.
That happens every time when the power goes out; even advanced societies become primitive and dangerous, and people die. We've seen it happen repeatedly in California for years now, rolling blackouts in a purportedly First World state that is slipping steadily into chaos.
But who saw that coming in Texas? If there's one thing you would think Texas would be able to do, it's keep the lights on. Most electricity comes from natural gas and Texas produces more of that than any place on the continent. There are huge natural gas deposits all over the state. Running out of energy in Texas is like starving to death at the grocery store: You can only do it on purpose, and Texas did.
Rather than celebrate and benefit from their state's vast natural resources, politicians took the fashionable route and became recklessly reliant on so-called alternative energy, meaning windmills. Fifteen years ago, there were virtually no wind farms in Texas. Last year, roughly a quarter of all electricity generated in the state came from wind. Local politicians were pleased by this. They bragged about it like there was something virtuous about destroying the landscape and degrading the power grid. Just last week, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott proudly accepted something called the Wind Leadership Award, given with gratitude by Tri Global Energy, a company getting rich from green energy.
So it was all working great until the day it got cold outside. The windmills failed like the silly fashion accessories they are, and people in Texas died. This is not to beat up on the state of Texas -- it's a great state, actually -- but to give you some sense of what's about to happen to you.
Here's President Biden last month:
BIDEN, JAN. 27: In my view, we’ve already waited too long to deal with this climate crisis ... That’s why I’m signing today an executive order to supercharge our administration['s] ambitious plan to confront the existential threat of climate change. And it is an existential threat.
"Climate crisis", "existential threat", "ambitious plan". You hear those phrases a lot and you'll notice that they are all suspiciously non-precise. So what do they mean for you? Will they mean higher energy prices? For starters, gas prices are already up, in case you haven't noticed. Electricity will follow. Higher costs hurt the weakest, inflation always does, but it's worse than that. Green energy inevitably means blackouts. Someday that may change as technology progresses, but as of right now and given the current state of technology, green energy means a less reliable power grid. It means failures like the ones we're seeing now in Texas. That's not a talking point, that is true. It's science. So of course, they're denying it.
Here's our new climate czar taking a quick break from spewing carbon in his private jet to lecture the rest of us about a topic he personally knows nothing about: Private sector jobs and how more windmills are going to generate tons of them:
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