Bill for climate change is past due
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, has hunkered down over the years with cough drops to fight what many consider the “head cold” of climate change. Turns out the urgency and severity are more like being trapped in an ice-cold meat locker. Cough drops just won’t do — period.
Meteorologists warned late last year that a weakening of the polar vortex was coming and a major southward discharge of cold air was expected in the second half of January. According to reports, the cause is warmer waters surrounding the Arctic changing the behavior of a so-called “girdle” that has kept a mass of swirling air in its place. The warm bursts cause this enclosing band to stretch south. Hello, climate change!
It also happened 10 years ago — but when we saw it again last week, did our Texas politicians react any differently? Texas Railroad Commissioner Jim Wright immediately criticized renewable energy sources taking priority over natural gas. But a senior director at ERCOT pinned the failures on frozen equipment at gas, coal and nuclear plants. Land Commissioner George P. Bush said that “relying solely on renewable energy would be catastrophic.”
Of course, I see no experts suggesting “solely” using any single source of power — but hyperbole like this is political reality and a proven tool of political spin.
Even Gov. Greg Abbott has shifted blame according to his audience: He pinned the blame on various energy sources at a recent news briefing but told Fox News host Sean Hannity that renewable energy was the culprit and warned against the Green New Deal.
Caught in this spin, Abbott has started a study commission that once again “kicks the can down the road.” So, no — officials did not react differently this year!
Boy, this debate sure sounds familiar. Remember in 2019 during California’s wildfires, it was PG&E, climatologists and the governor versus President Donald Trump, who tweeted the disaster would only need raking. Remember the 2019 Black Summer bushfires in Australia, which affected 80 percent of the country. Was it started by campfires? How about the growing intensity of fires in the Amazon, which led to international concern about the world’s largest terrestrial carbon dioxide sink? Really? Was it due to crop clearing?
Simple common sense here: If you drop a match into a pile of green sprouts, it will not keep burning long. Drop it into brown, dry, dead sprouts and you’ll get a different result, right? People are always dropping matches, but the point is not how it starts, or who dropped the match, but how the fire spreads — and how intense that energy becomes.
It’s no question that in the short term, climate change will find its way into your utility bills, whether by heatwaves or cold snaps. Being stuck in a meat locker, as we were in San Antonio last week, is a bit more serious, as is climate change.