A different Texas power failure
How long will we continue to accept such abysmal leadership from those in Austin?
Texans can be thankful that the heartless mayor of Colorado City proved to be the outrageous exception rather than the rule during the deadly Lone Star deep freeze. While he was ranting in an unhinged Facebook screed that neither elected officials nor neighbors owed anybody anything during the most dangerous and debilitating snow and ice storm in decades, the (now former) mayor’s West Texas neighbors were helping each other.
So were his fellow Texans in Houston and other big cities, along with small-town and rural residents across the state. Shoveling sidewalks along their icy streets, delivering food and water to those without, checking on elderly shut-ins shivering under blankets, they exemplified their conviction that we are indeed our neighbor’s keeper.
Local government also responded to electricity grid failures that left 4 million Texans at the mercy of singledigit temperatures and without water for nearly a week. The city of Houston under Mayor Sylvester Turner’s leadership and Harris County under Judge Lina Hidalgo’s, were responsive, forthcoming and focused. Recognizing the seriousness of what was happening, they and their counterparts tried to respond to a crisis that not only left Texans uncomfortable and upset but also fearful of the potential danger that resulted in dozens of deaths, the exact number of which is still being tallied.
Texans, children and adults, froze to death from here to Abilene. Many others died or were sickened from carbon monoxide poisoning as they resorted to desperate, dangerous measures to keep warm: bringing in outdoor grills, sitting in a running car inside a closed garage.
These losses of life must be reminders that the system broke down — not just the power grid, not just the nonprofit grid manager ERCOT, but Texas’ system of governance itself.
While local officials had our back, our state government let us freeze.
The primary reason we were ill-prepared is because we relied on state officials, including Gov. Greg Abbott, who prioritize amassing power and profit instead of providing public service. Their weak and irresponsible leadership set the stage for this fiasco.
State officials were warned more than a decade ago that the grid was vulnerable, that it needed upgrading, weatherizing — yet, lawmakers refused to require companies to do it. They knowingly chose deregulation over reliability, failing to build in extra energy capacity in case of emergency. On the contrary, they created a perverse incentive for energy producers during a crisis: the more desperate the demand, the more decadent the profits.
And it wasn’t enough to coddle industry in the warm embrace of Texas-style voluntary compliance over the past two decades.
We’ve learned in recent days that back in November, the agency cut ties with its independent reliability monitor. And Houston Chronicle reporters Eric Dexheimer and Jay Root reported Friday that Abbott’s appointees at the Texas Utility Commission gutted enforcement of Texas grid rules over the past year, leading to a 40 percent drop in enforcement cases by the end of 2020.
In a hearing last week, Abbott’s handpicked PUC chair, DeAnn Walker wilted under lawmakers’ angry questioning. As they pushed her to promise a thorough investigation, she balked.
“I don’t know that we have the staff,” she said, failing to acknowledge her role in eviscerating the Oversight & Enforcement Division, which could have done that investigation.
Even lawmakers not directly involved in utility oversight have failed Texans by promulgating hot-button social issues designed to keep them in office rather than telling constituents hard truths about making the needed investments to avoid a life-threatening disaster. In essence, they didn’t acknowledge effective governance as a job requirement — perhaps not even as a realistic possibility.
Unfortunately, we citizens don’t always take our responsibilities seriously either. We allow a governor to go on Fox News and blame the mythical Green New Deal Monster for the state’s power failure and let him escape blame himself. We are likely to re-elect a U.S. senator who mariachis off to Mexico during the miserable depths of the crisis instead of holding him to account.
Decades ago, two huge snowstorms dumped 35 inches of snow on Chicago, and the city’s response was disastrous. For weeks, people couldn’t get to work, stinking trash piled up, mass transit failed. When the sun came out on Election Day, Chicagoans remembered their snow boots and booted out their mayor. We Texans rarely take governance that seriously, let alone our power over it as voters. Despite our vaunted reputation for rugged independence, we vote lemming-like, whether blithely casting ballots as yellow-dog Democrats decades ago or as their GOP equivalent these days (whatever the color of the canine).
The yellow-dog nickname, of course, originated with the old saying that Democrats in years past would vote for a yellow dog before casting a ballot for a Republican. Such Pavlovian devotion, then and now, lets our elected officials off the hook. They don’t have to be serious about providing responsible, responsive governance if we’re not. They can wear their anti-government cynicism like a badge, trusting either that we’re gullible enough to accept willful neglect as conservative piety — or that we’re simply too disengaged to care.
Last week, Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick were showing brow-furrowed seriousness as they vied for Oscar mentions with their portrayals as the dutiful government stewards who despite their seven years each in Texas’ highest-ranking offices, were caught woefully unaware by the catastrophic vulnerabilities of Texas’ power grid. The two, who regularly play the patron saints of polarization on cable TV, gallantly vowed solutions, launched investigations, threatened subpoenas. Abbott called for real reform — including weatherization requirements for power generators — and trolled ERCOT’s out-of-state board members until a few submitted resignations.
Patrick committed his own precious time to deliver Texans from electrical evil: “I’m just going to put this on my shoulders and take responsibility for this fix,” he said.
We’ll see. Perhaps this time, the threat of ballot box consequences is real enough to push our statewide elected loafers into service — real service in the interests of the people of Texas. If so, the people have to keep that threat alive with our vigilance, our calls, our letters, our prying public eyes into government’s closeted affairs.
We can’t allow the warmth of a springtime sun to melt away our memories of Texans freezing to death, literally.
Chicago got serious. So can we.