Sign of the times, I suppose.
Below is an exchange started when 34 year old Lauren Boebert, the darling of some of the Trump wing of the GOP, posted on power outages in Texas. Boebert has made a name for herself by being one of the crop of hard right elected Congressmen that came in last election. She's definitely in the hard, hard right wing of the GOP. She's noted for carrying a gun in D.C., to the extent that she's not noted for the Mae Winchester effect, that being that any woman carrying a gun on the Internet who is not unattractive and under 40 is going to be regarded as a major babe by some.
This has nothing to do with guns.
It has something to do with electricity.
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I don't know why Texas is having power interruption. I do know that when I was young, we had power interruptions here every time we had a really bad storm, and we're in a region which expected really bad storms. We still get really bad storms, although not as often as we once did, but we don't get power outages much anymore. Indeed, they're really rare.
A factor in that has been, I'm pretty sure, a dedicated effort to put the overhead lines underground. Indeed, we're more likely to get a power outage now due to a construction accident than a storm, although we still get some storm induced ones.
I don't know the state of delivery lines in Texas. Maybe they're overhead, maybe they aren't, maybe they're both. But Texas has embraced the high growth model of American economics, and that has its problems. Stretching infrastructure is one of them.
A friend of mine who lives in Texas (and I have quite a few friends in Texas) takes the view here, but in a much more developed fashion. He asserts that green energy requirements have made for a shift to unreliable forms of generation and that's stressed the system. Is that right? I don't know. It might be, and if it is, it would be because cold naps, like heat waves, create a high demand for energy. Lots of windmills have been off line due to the storm. Solar has probably been impacted. Lots of houses in Texas, for example, have their heat on night and day right now, when normally they would not. That could be it.
On the other hand, the point by one Stoddard isn't without merit. Rethinking power delivery may make sense, in both an urban and a rural sense. He may be confused, I'd note, by the degree to which the power demand in Texas is rural. Texas is heavily urban.
Beyond that, here's something else. Like electric cars, this day is coming. There's a certain hold back the tide aspect to a lot of these discussions, but no matter what a person thinks about them, we've crossed a tipping point in this discussion and the evolution away from carbon based power generation is going to keep on keeping on.
And, on the last point, we're at the classic American finger pointing early administration point. Nobody can blame any new President for anything, as they haven't had the time to really have an impact on anything, yet.
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Footnotes
*Mae Winchester is presenter on the C&Rsenal Vlog. While not unattractive, she's not a raving beauty either, but any woman appearing with a gun is guaranteed to receive piles of male Internet fans.
