The Lessons of the Texas Power Disaster

The Lessons of the Texas Power Disaster

The entire nation’s energy delivery system needs an overhaul.

There is a great deal of nonsense being written and spoken about this week’s power failures in Texas, which left a number of people dead and millions without power or potable water, sometimes for days.

Among the more prominent nonsense peddlers was the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, who blamed the mess on wind power and other renewable fuels, while warning that proposals like the Green New Deal — which would zero out fossil fuels — would more or less be the end of civilization as we know it. There was also Rick Perry, the state’s former governor, who seemed to suggest that using more renewables would lead to socialism, and Representative Dan Crenshaw, who blamed the whole thing on that liberal bastion otherwise known as California. “Bottom line,” Mr. Crenshaw wrote on Twitter, “Texas’s biggest mistake was learning too many renewable energy lessons from California.”

These statements were catnip to progressives, who mainly blamed the state’s libertarian energy system, which, they claimed, sought to keep prices low at the expense of safety.

None of the poppycock from Texas politicians is of any help to the scores of Texans who spent long hours and days freezing in their homes. It has also obscured the real reasons for the disaster and diverted attention from an important lesson: that the nation’s energy delivery system, not just in Texas but everywhere, needs a radical overhaul if it is to withstand future shocks and play the role that President Biden has assigned it in the battle against climate change.