Texas Governor Blames Wind Turbines for Rolling Blackouts as Deep Freeze Leaves Citizens in the Cold and Dark

There is nothing like a politician invested in a big lie. They carry it with them to the grave. By now those of us living outside the United States and looking askance at the current state of the country post-Trump, are witnessing more of the bull roar that seems to have infected Republican leadership at the federal and state level.

In the February 17th issue of The Texas Tribune, reports that Governor Greg Abbott while being interviewed on Fox News referred to the as of yet to be legislated Green New Deal, and frozen wind turbines as the cause of widespread power outages. Nothing could have been further from the truth than the governor’s blame game. The real culprit in the face of a descending polar vortex was the state’s unpreparedness for just such an event. Texas did not foresee how cold temperatures could impact its thermal energy distribution capacity. Some 32 Gigawatts of electricity sourced from natural gas and coal had gone offline compared to 16 Gigawatts of wind power affected by the cold.

The reality that Governor Abbott is not willing to face is climate change. Texas and much of the United States is experiencing what has been predicted by climate scientists in their modeling. The polar regions of the planet are warming faster than has been seen in recorded history because of increased concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Sea ice minimums in the Arctic have become the new norm. The Arctic Ocean is getting warmer. The air above it is as well. The effect on prevailing winds, and in particular the Jet Streams that encircle the globe in the Northern and Southern Hemisphere, has been profound.

Back in 2014, I posted on this site a piece on weather and climate change.

What is the Weather and What is Climate Change?

In it, I referred to a Scientific American article that described how the Jet Stream was getting weird. In other words, this powerful upper atmospheric phenomenon was no longer acting in a way that we recognize as normal. Instead of sweeping across the continent from west to east in the mid-latitudes, it was meandering and dipping as low as the southern parts of the United States in unprecedented fashion. At the time I wrote that posting, attributing this change in the Jet Stream’s behaviour to vanishing polar sea ice was considered controversial. Now what was observed in 2014 has become more the norm than weird with a number of incidents in the past seven years duplicating what we are seeing this week.

Whether you believe this is evidence of climate change or not, the trend suggests a future in which polar vortices will descend on the southern half of the United States in increasing frequency, and usually about this time of year when the atmosphere in the Northern Hemisphere begins to absorb more heat from the Sun than during the period around the Winter Solstice. Knowing this should be motivation for governments and utilities to harden the infrastructure to ensure rolling blackouts like the ones going on in Texas this week, don’t repeat.

Natural disasters like this current one have been hitting that state for the past few years. Hurricane Harvey is just one example of a storm displaying aberrant behaviour that could very well be explained in global warming climate models. And so too are polar vortices like the current one that has plunged temperatures to record lows.

In the northern states and Canada, cold weather infrastructure is designed to function when temperatures reach well below 0 Celsius (32 Fahrenheit). But places like Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida don’t have the same robust systems that can take a lick and keep on ticking.

Beto O’Rouke, the Democratic candidate for the senate who lost to Ted Cruz in the last election, stated in The Texas Tribune article, that the lack of preventive action is making the state more vulnerable. “Energy experts….were warning of this for years. Abbott chose to ignore the facts, the science, and the tough decisions and now Texans will once again pay the price.”

Abbott, like his Canadian counterpart in Alberta, Jason Kenney, is committed to fighting against any laws or actions that threaten the fossil fuel economy upon which the state is built. In 2019, according to The Dallas Morning News, Texas scientists offered to educate Abbott on climate change after he told reporters that him not being a scientist made it impossible for him to know whether greenhouse gas emissions from the fossil fuel industry were contributing to increased natural disasters in his state.