Republican Fail: Snow Could Turn Texas Blue

Texas Republicans totally own the energy blackouts. They will pay at the polls in coming elections and this failure to provide safety to citizens could be the tipping point that flips the state blue.

Millions of people have no or very limited power in Texas because of snow and cold weather. The state's energy infrastructure is failing its residents. The blame lays fully on the Republican leadership.

Huffpost reports,

"...while the output from all sources of electricity plunged in Texas, frozen instruments at coal, nuclear and natural gas power plants, coupled with a limited supply of natural gas, were the main cause of the rolling blackouts, Dan Woodfin, a senior director for the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, told Bloomberg News on Tuesday. (ERCOT is the state's main grid operator.)

Energy analysts and electricity experts said a complete failure to plan for extreme weather scenarios caused the kind of cascading disaster that risks becoming more common as climate chaos increases pressure on human systems.

Ironically, wind energy represented one bright spot for grid operators as the resource, which tends to ebb in the winter months, actually surpassed daily production forecasts over the past weekend."

Governor Gregg Abbot blames Alexandria Ocassio Cortez and her green new deal, even though that is not yet an actual thing. Trump cult members will probably buy it. But I believe that there's a good chance that enough Texans whose brains have not melted will realize that they have suffered or even lost loved ones because of Republican de-regulation and austerity policies. In other words, Republicans who control the legislatures and the governorship failed to do their primary job of making citizens safe.

This is consistent with the way Republicans have handled the Covid-19 pandemic, making policies that lead to the deaths of a lot more people than it could have been if policies had been aimed at saving lives.

The Dallas News reported,

"The Texas Democratic Party criticized Gov. Greg Abbott in a press release for not being open to renewable energy.

"Abbott played politics with alternative sources of energy and now, thermal sources have been knocked offline," Texas Democratic Party Chair Gilberto Hinojosa said. "If Abbott cared more about doing his job than trying to scare oil and gas workers into voting for him, Texas should have been able to avoid this crisis."

This Republican caused blackout should be labeled as such, and we should be doing it with every incident of incompetence and suffering caused by rabid de-regulation and caring more about corporations than citizens.