Texas Governor Greg Abbott has tried to blame solar and wind power generation for the power outages. Perhaps the solar farms were snow covered for a while before it slid off or the solar unit melted it off. Abbott said the windmills froze and wouldn’t rotate. Could it be because they don’t use the same oils and designs used in northern climes?

            He was angry at the company managing the state-owned electric grid for its failures. The grid can’t produce power. It just moves it around Texas. Most of Texas generation is from fossil fuels. Northern state’s fossil plants insulate their piping so they don’t freeze. Texas doesn’t. Their gas fired plants apparently draw from gas and oil production wells and not from man-made underground storage and above ground tanks as we have. When the oil and salt water in the lines at the wells froze, they lost their supplies. The coal fired plants shut down because their feeding equipment couldn’t handle coal that had froze solid. Their one nuke plant had one unit down for some undisclosed reason. Probably for refueling as winter usually has a less need for power.

            A decade ago a smaller cold snap had created a small disruption. Outside consultants were brought in for advice. Their report advised insulating the plants as well as updating and expanding the grid. It also suggested connecting it to surrounding grids as a back-up. All of this would cause the state to spend its own money, increase customer bills, and cause the power and production companies to spend money on those improvements. The report was mostly ignored.

            Texas is controlled by Big Oil and other powerful companies which don’t want state interference causing them to spend more and create regulations in a state that is abhorrent to regulations.

            Finally we again have a President and an administration that is going to try to save humanity. Biden said “If it isn’t too late to save us from the worst effect of climate change…”. His question is critical to life on Earth/

            The projections worrying him are for the conditions in 2100 without considering what conditions will be in 2150 or 2200 is like the analogy of someone falling off a building and saying “so far, so good” with each floor. The question for us is how high the building is. Is it one floor and we can limp away, or two floors and we can crawl away with a few broken bones, or maybe three floors with too many broken bones to move, or four floors with a cracked skull and internal injuries? Projections for 2100 are for four floors of damage. Beyond 2100 is like falling off the fifth floor to splat on the pavement.

            Biden is right in the question. We are already experiencing long term droughts broken by a heavy rain or two before resuming, greater numbers of storms and hurricanes, warmer winters, and flora and fauna moving farther north. Glaciers around the world are melting. The seas are rising and flooding of cities is already happening. His question is this. Is it like a two or three story building, or are we just passing the top floor of a skyscraper saying “so far, so good.”