Texas and Climate Change

Extreme Weather

I have lived in Texas for nearly the last 30 years. About this time a year ago, give or take a couple of months, the residents of Texas experienced the worst weather event in Texas history.

Our Governor at the time was Governor Greg Abbot. Governor Abbot was a climate change skeptic ahead of the freeze that was responsible for human death and still is a climate change skeptic.

We still have the same Governor!

Below is a Facebook post I created at the time.

For the last week, Texas has been experiencing extreme weather. The state of Texas is colder than the state of Alaska. Because of the abnormally cold temperatures, the Texas power grid became overloaded.

To save the power grid ERCOT (The electric reliability council of Texas) which operates the electric grid of Texas, decided to take an emergency method and implement rolling blackouts in the state of Texas. They stated that the blackouts were to be between 10 minutes and an hour.

Yesterday the temperature outside was 3 degrees Fahrenheit (-16.11 °C), during this time we were without power for 9 hours. Every time the electric companies were called, the call was placed on hold for a while and then dropped. My neighbors told me they had similar results. For the majority of the last several days, the temperature outside has been in the single digits. Never has my power been on for more than 3 hours. The longest I had to wait for my power to be restored was 9 hours, followed by 5 hours. They are improving, the last power outage I experienced, just minutes ago, only lasted 2 hours. It is currently 18 degrees Fahrenheit (-7.78 °C). The last time it got this cold was in 1899. I don’t expect this rolling blackout to end until Saturday, when the temperature is supposedly to get above freezing.

There are only three electric grids in the nation, East coast, West coast, and Texas. There are plenty of mad people all pointing the blame. It turns out that Texas leads the country in electricity produced by wind. I was surprised to learn about this since Texas is a conservative Republican state.

The climate change skeptics say the failure was partly due to failed wind turbines icing up. There is at least one nuclear power plant that seems to have failed also. The natural gas-powered electric plants had problems getting propane due to the poor road conditions.

Climate scientists overwhelmingly believe climate change is real. Why do the people who have the power to change the thing disagree with the majority of climate scientists?

I would like to tag the following writers.

Graham Cooke; Antonis Iliakis; Solomon Zulu; Lisa Gerard Braun; PJ Jackelman; Colleen Millsteed; David Perlmutter; Stephen Dalton; Jason Morton