This post was written by a member of WOW Dems’ Legislative Action Committee.
Last week saw record-smashing cold across the United States, but Texas dominated headlines as residents lost power, then water (in some cases, like Harris County, for a frustratingly long time after the freezing temperatures subsided).
The blackouts started early in the morning on Monday, Feb. 15, and for many neighborhoods, this turned into four continuous days (or longer) of no power during some of the coldest days ever recorded in the area. By Feb. 18, 580 cases of carbon monoxide poisoning, including two deaths, from Harris County alone were reported, as people brought barbecue pits and generators inside their houses to stay warm. An 11-year-old boy in Conroe (a city north of Houston) allegedly died from hypothermia due to the loss of electricity and heat in their home (his family has filed a lawsuit over his death).
The full extent of the harm – loss of life, damage to property, personal injury – is yet to be tallied, but it is safe to say the effects have been calamitous statewide.
I spent much of Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday huddled in bed with my husband and our pets like the grandparents in “Willy Wonka,” watching our food supply dwindle and checking in with family scattered across the state when I could actually charge my phone. I don’t think I’m alone in feeling the singularity of this experience: the impotence and creeping exhaustion of those first ugly days and the tragic irony of watching this play out in a state that has stubbornly isolated itself from the rest of the country.
The infuriating but characteristically slow and calculated response from Gov. Greg Abbott, who would have stopped at blaming wind energy if the weather disaster had not gotten so much attention in the media. Other Republican responses were not so deliberate; Colorado City Mayor Tim Boyd resigned over a Facebook post claiming the government’s not responsible for helping us in times like this, and we can “sink or swim” at our own discretion. It may have been comically tone-deaf, but the philosophy behind his post is consistent with Texas Republicans’ long history of political obstructionism, and it has informed the series of GOP decisions that led up to this point.
In 2011, in the wake of another series of blackouts resulting from an unusually cold winter storm, federal regulators recommended that power companies winterize their equipment. Their report cited another storm in 1989, in which cold weather similarly disabled equipment, forcing ERCOT to implement rolling outages. Because of the expense associated with properly winterizing equipment, power companies chose, over the next decade, to ignore these recommendations because they were not regulatory requirements. Now, in response to last week’s blackouts, Abbott’s called for a law requiring power plants to winterize. He has criticized ERCOT, describing its response as “completely unacceptable.” And with the legislature in session while the events of last are fresh on everyone’s mind, it is possible that something will be done to improve reliability.
But it’s worthwhile to consider, more broadly, how deregulation and privatization encourages companies to maximize profits by streamlining in potentially devastating ways. The free market will not protect us from unlikely but intolerable events like what happened last week – it’s just not profitable. In the decade after the 2011 blackouts, our Republican-led legislature killed at least six distinct bills aimed at improving energy reliability and ensuring adequate reserve power in the case of blackouts like we experienced last week, including a 2015 bill filed by current Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson that would have required power companies to use the 2011 federal report in strategic planning. This should come as no surprise – Texas Republicans rake in tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands, of dollars from energy interests each election season (just check OpenSecrets.org to see for yourself).
As weather events grow increasingly severe due to climate change, we need politicians who are willing to proactively hold accountable the corporations who provide these public services. We need to call on our representatives in the state legislature to stand up to the behemoth energy sector when it endangers public interest. And if they can’t, or won’t, we will make sure they get the message on election day.
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