We must wake from our dreams of secession
Early Wednesday morning, hours after our house went dark, the faucets went empty and my hands went mauve, a scene from Monty Python’s movie “The Life of Brian” flashed through my mind. At a meeting of the “People’s Front of Judea,” the motley group of revolutionaries seeking to secede from Rome, the leader bellows “What have the Romans ever done for us?” After a pause, his fellow secessionists offer a few possibilities: “Aqueducts.” “Roads.” And, of course, “wine.” As the answers continue to cascade, the leader finally blurts “Oh, shut up!”
Since last Sunday’s ice storm, Houstonians are doing anything but shutting up. Overnight, the city vaunted as the world’s energy capital had instead been vaulted into the role of its entropy capital. Nearly 1.5 million Houston households — households, mind you, not individuals — were without power and often without water for four days. If the energy suppliers overseen by Electric Reliability Council of Texas could tap into the ire of private citizens and public officials now struggling to meet this unprecedented crisis, they could power the entire Gulf Coast.
But our anger, while understandable, is also partly misdirected. In fact, it leads us back to that scene in “Life of Brian.” First, it seems ERCOT was doing more or less what it was designed to do: pick the winners in a statewide energy market with little regulatory oversight. The bottom line was, quite literally, the bottom line for the participating energy suppliers. Their logic was clear: the minimization of long-term investment in their operations to guarantee a maximum of corporate return in the short term. The entire scheme, one portfolio manager told the Washington Post, amounted to “a Wild West market design.”
In the mid-1970s, Texas decided to secede — or, more accurately, maintain its independence — from the national power grid. As Richard Cudahy explains in his article “The Second Battle of the Alamo: The Midnight Connection” — the moniker given to the series of court cases that allowed Texas utility companies to renegotiate their independence — freedom from national oversight was the “cherished goal” of Texas utility companies. In effect, our energy providers, which assigned ERCOT the responsibility for running their rodeo, affirmed the desire, not unlike the People’s Front of Judea, to free itself from the regulatory constraints imposed by our modern-day Rome — aka, Washington, D.C.
But like the story of the Alamo, the story of energy independence is rife with myths. Over the past few days, Texans have become all too familiar with an acronym ERCOT, an organization most of us had never even knew existed. We have also become all too familiar with what took place on the watch of ERCOT: fossil fuel operators and wind energy operators who, spurred by the cherished goal of maximum profit, allowed Texans to perish. They failed to invest in hardening their natural gas plants and winterize their air turbines for severe freezes. They neglected to plan for adequate energy reserves in case of a crisis, as they are wont to do, erupted unexpectedly. They created the structural inability to turn to suppliers outside the state for essential megawatts.
But the dream of secession is not limited to these particular entities or state political leaders who have allowed them to go about their business undisturbed. Secession has seduced the rest of us, too — a kind of cognitive secession that allows us to ignore known unknowns. While politicians are now calling for the heads of those “responsible” for this mess, the fact is that all Texans — including ostensibly environmentally enlightened folks like myself — are also responsible. We have all been willing victims of what the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, in his book “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” called WYSIATI — what you see is all there is.
Since the early 2000s, what Texans have seen is a smorgasbord of consumer energy plans. While it is debatable if this dazzling choice of plans translates into real energy savings, it at least offers us the illusion of lower prices and priceless freedom. In this example of “fast thinking,” we embraced the illusion because we believed it would help with our own bottom lines. And, of course, it abetted the grander illusion that Texas is best off riding alone toward the sunset when it comes to the national energy grid and, yes, federal regulations.
If we had thought more slowly, we might have seen what was hiding behind the illusion: the terrible risks inherent in such profit-driven calculations oiled by the lack of regulatory oversight. As that claque of Judean secessionists might remind us, our Rome gave us roads, if not wine, and continues to give us tens of billions in federal aid every year. But this spirit of secessionism — which also led to our rejection of Washington’s offer of Medicaid expansion — carries terrible human costs. Rather than offering “Oh, shut up!” to those claiming Texans are willing to bear outages for their freedom, we might instead suggest they think more slowly before speaking.