Digging Deep: Neither California’s Nor Texas’ Power Grids Could Survive Climate Apocalypse

The climate cultists just can’t help themselves, and now that they’ve posted their screeds Blaming you eating a burger for causing greenhouse gasses induced extreme winter weather (sigh), they have to get creative to protect the cult beliefs

Texas and California built different power grids, but neither stood up to climate change

Texas and California may be worlds apart in their politics and climate policies, but they have something in common: Extreme weather crashed their power grids and left people stranded in the dark.

The two sprawling, politically potent states have devoted massive sums to their power networks over the past two decades — California to produce huge amounts of wind and solar energy, Texas to create an efficient, go-it-alone electricity market built on gas, coal, nuclear and wind. But neither could keep the lights on in the face of the type of brutal weather that scientists call a taste of a changing climate. (snip)

The catastrophe this week in Texas left more than 4 million people in the dark and the cold, and even more without clean water, when a rare blast of Arctic air drove temperatures down, freezing both natural gas plants and wind turbines.

Texas “planned more for heatwaves than for ice storms,” said Dan Reicher, who worked in the Clinton administration’s Energy Department on renewable energy and is now at Stanford University. And the onus now is on figuring out how to prevent a repeat — a tricky situation given the independence of Texas’ grid and sharp opposition from Republicans there to linking up to other states and giving federal regulators oversight of its power system.

See, a warming world causes cold and snow and ice. And, yeah, Texas planned more for warmth than a rare cold weather system. California planned for a doomy warmth, and their system still failed hard, to the point that they had to ration electricity, that they had planned brownouts and blackouts, unlike Texas, which just saw its grid go down. It’s kinda like so many states from NC down: we have some plans for winter weather, but, that only goes so far. Northern states don’t really plan heavy for hurricanes, while, we in NC do. And they still do damage.

If we’re supposed to plan for a doomy warming world, why would we plan for crazy cold weather? Oh, right, it’s a cult.

That presents both an opportunity and a challenge for President Joe Biden, potentially aiding his efforts to draw support from lawmakers and states for his multitrillion-dollar proposals to harden the nation’s energy infrastructure to withstand climate change. But he’s already facing entrenched resistance to his pledges to shift the nation to renewable energy by 2035 — including from fossil fuel advocates who have sought to scapegoat wind and solar for the energy woes in both states.

If Joe was smart, he’d push more nuclear, Gen 5 and Gen 6. But, his base of lunatics, which has increased in numbers tremendously from the Clinton years, won’t allow nuclear, even though some climahysterics, like Michael Mann, are in favor of nuclear. If it’s mostly solar and wind states which get lots of winter weather will see the grid go down from production first, rather than mostly downed lines, blown transformers, and blown substations.

Meanwhile, they’re also dragging in SJW garbage, rich vs poor

Texas freeze shows a chilling truth – how the rich use climate change to divide us

…

Like the poor across America and much of the world, poor Texans are getting hammered by climate change. Many inhabit substandard homes, lacking proper insulation. The very poor occupy trailers or tents, or camp out in their cars. Lower-income communities are located close to refineries and other industrial sites that release added pollutants when they shut or restart.

In Texas, for-profit energy companies have no incentive to prepare for extreme weather or maintain spare capacity. Even if they’re able to handle surges in demand, prices go through the roof and poorer households are hit hard. If they can’t pay, they’re cut off. (snip)

Climate change, Covid-19 and jobs are together splitting Americans by class more profoundly than Americans are split by politics. The white working class is taking as much of a beating as most Black and Latino people.