February 15, 2021: Texas Power Grid Collapses - Red State Politicians Blame Democrats!

 

2/15/21: A powerful winter storm slams Texas and large swaths of the Great Plains. Temperatures plunge. Numbskulls insist that a few record-cold days prove climate change is fake. 

Someone should point them to the list of the ten hottest years recorded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for help.

 

One of the numbest skulls belongs to first-term Republican congresswoman, Rep. Lauren Boebert. With winter weather slamming the Plains, she figures out what has happened, tweeting: 

Rolling blackouts from ND to TX have turned into lengthy power outages in freezing conditions.

 

Biden needs to lift his oil & gas ban as we need reliable energy sources.

 

The Green New Deal was just proven unsustainable as renewables are clearly unreliable.

 

This is particularly dumb, even for Boebert, who habitually sounds dumb, because: 

A.    Zero elements of the Green New Deal have been enacted.

B.     She might just as well have blamed the outages on Obama’s Affordable Care Act.

C.    Heavy snow and ice storms like the one that just hit tend to knock out power lines.

D.   Downed lines are the problem. The current outages have little to do with how much power is available.

E.     The U.S. achieved “energy independence,” broadly defined, a few years ago. So we don’t lack energy.

F.     We became a net exporter of natural gas in 2017.

G.    President Trump (speaking of numbskulls) bragged in  2019 about his success in this regard, saying, “We are independent and we do not need Middle East oil.”

 

In scrolling through Twitter, however, I discover that Texas Sen. John Cornyn sounds equally numb in the cranium. 

His tweet on the storm reads: “Rolling blackouts in Texas and spiking gas and power prices amid a cold snap show the folly of eliminating natural gas – and coal.” 

In the real world, where this blogger tries to live, it is factually correct to say that no one has eliminated natural gas production at all; plus, coal production has fallen because prices for natural gas and even wind and solar have dropped below the cost of mining coal. So the blackouts in Texas have nothing to do with what President Biden or the Democrats might eventually do. (See: 2/24/21.) 

 

POSTSCRIPT: You may recall President Trump’s promise to end the “War on Coal” and save tens of thousands of coal mining jobs. 

During his four years in office, the number of jobs in the mines continued to decline. Coal production was lower in 2019 than in any year since 1978. This decline was not the fault of Mr. Trump. Then again, neither was the decline under his predecessor, although Trump said it was.