Texas governor lets biggest donors off hook
President extends hand to nation’s world allies
AUSTIN, Texas – As frozen Texas reels under one of the worst electricity outages in U.S. history, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has blamed grid operators and iced-over wind turbines but gone easier on another culprit: an oil and gas industry that is the state’s dominant business and his biggest contributor.
And as the toll deepened Friday from a week of historic winter storms, which have killed more than 20 people in Texas, the dog-piling on a power grid that is proudly isolated from the rest of the country ignores warnings known by the state’s GOP leaders for years.
“It’s almost like a murder suspect blaming their right hand for committing the crime,” said Democratic state Rep. James Talarico. His home near Austin home lost power for 40 hours and had no working faucets Thursday, when roughly 1 in 4 people in Texas were told to boil water.
Like most of the state’s 30 million residents, Talarico’s power is controlled by grid managers at the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which Abbott laid into Thursday after more than 4 million people had endured outages in subfreezing temperatures.
But that is not where the responsibility ends, as power plants that feed the grid were knocked offline by the extreme cold, and natural gas producers didn’t protect wellheads from freezing.
“ERCOT is a convenient whipping boy,” Talarico said.
The crisis has put a fossil fuel industry that lavishes the Texas Capitol with money in the crosshairs in ways that Abbott has not had to navigate when steering America’s second-largest state through other disasters, including hurricanes and the coronavirus pandemic. For the first time Thursday, Abbott called on Texas to mandate that power plants be winterized.
Oil and gas built and enriched Texas, and with that its politicians, including those who became president. But none has reaped campaign contributions on the scale of Abbott, who in six years in office has gathered more than $150 million from donors, more than any governor in U.S. history.
Texas’ energy interests are the largest backers of his rise, and he has not ruled out a White House run in 2024. More than $26 million of his contributions have come from the oil and gas industry, more than any other economic sector, according to an analysis by the National Institute on Money in Politics.
As Texas’ grid first began buckling early Monday, Abbott drew backlash after going on Fox News and laying fault on solar and wind producers, at a time when natural gas, coal and nuclear energy systems were responsible for nearly twice as many outages.
Pressed on those comments later, Abbott took a softer tone and acknowledged every source of power had been compromised. But he accused ERCOT of misleading the public with messages that the grid was ready for the storm.
“It’s especially unacceptable when you realize what ERCOT told the state of Texas,” Abbott said.
ERCOT is overseen by the Texas Public Utility Commission, whose three members were appointed by Abbott. Although ERCOT manages most of Texas’ power grid, the commission and the Texas Legislature make key policy decisions that have factored into the ongoing crisis.
WASHINGTON – In his first big appearance on the global stage, President Joe Biden called on fellow world leaders to together demonstrate that “democracies can still deliver” as he underscored his administration’s determination to quickly turn the page on former President Donald Trump’s “America First” approach.
Biden, in a virtual address Friday to the annual Munich Security Conference, said it’s a crucial time for the world’s democracies to “prove that our model isn’t a relic of our history.”
“We are in the midst of a fundamental debate about the future direction of our world,” Biden said in the address just after taking part in his first meeting as president with fellow Group of Seven world leaders. That debate is “between those who argue that – given all of the challenges we face, from the fourth industrial revolution to a global pandemic – autocracy is the best way forward and those who understand that democracy is essential to meeting those challenges.”
Biden said that the U.S. is ready to rejoin talks about reentering the 2015 multilateral Iran nuclear deal abandoned by the Trump administration.
The Biden administration announced Thursday its desire to reengage Iran, and it took action at the United Nations aimed at restoring policy to what it was before Trump withdrew from the deal in 2017.
Biden also spoke about the economic and national security challenges posed by Russia and China, as well as the twodecade war in Afghanistan, where he faces a May 1 deadline to remove the remaining 2,500 U.S. troops under a Trump administration negotiated peace agreement with the Taliban.
As Biden underlined challenges facing the U.S. and its allies, he tried to make clear that he’s determined to repair a U.S.-Europe relationship that was strained under Trump, who repeatedly
questioned the value of historic alliances.
‘I know the past few years have strained and tested the transatlantic relationship,” Biden said. “The United States is determined to reengage with Europe, to consult with you, to earn back our position of trust and leadership.”
Biden’s message was girded by an underlying argument that democracies, not autocracies, are models of governance that can best meet the challenges of the moment, according to a senior administration official who previewed the president’s speech for reporters.
At the G-7, administration officials said, Biden focused on what lies ahead for the international community as it tries to extinguish the public health and economic crises created by the coronavirus pandemic. He said the U.S. will soon begin releasing $4 billion for an international effort to bolster the purchase and distribution of coronavirus vaccine to poor nations, a program that Trump refused to support.
Biden’s turn on the world stage came as the U.S. on Friday officially rejoined the Paris climate agreement, the largest international effort to curb global warming. Trump announced in June 2017 that
he was pulling the U.S. out of the landmark accord, arguing that it would undermine the American economy.
Biden announced the U.S. intention of rejoining the accord on the first day of his presidency, but he had to wait 30 days for the move to go into effect. He has said that he will consider climate change in every major domestic and foreign policy decision his administration faces.
“This is a global existential crisis,” Biden said.
His first foray into an international summit will be perceived by some as an attempted course correction from Trump’s agenda. The new president, however, has made clear that his domestic and foreign policy agenda won’t be merely an erasure of the Trump years.
“I’m tired of talking about Donald Trump,” Biden said this week at a CNN town hall in Milwaukee.
Biden on the campaign trail vowed to reassert U.S. leadership in the international community, a role that Trump often shied away from while complaining that the U.S. was too frequently taken advantage of by freeloading allies.
Biden encouraged G-7 partners to make good on their pledges to COVAX, an initiative by the World Health Organization to improve access to vaccines, even as he reopens the U.S. spigot.
Trump had withdrawn the U.S. from WHO and refused to join more than 190 countries in the COVAX program. Trump accused WHO of covering up China’s missteps in handling the virus at the start of the public health crisis that unraveled a strong U.S. economy.
It remains to be seen how G-7 allies will take Biden’s calls for greater international cooperation on vaccine distribution given that the U.S. refused to take part in the initiative under Trump and that there are growing calls for the Democrat’s administration to distribute some U.S.-manufactured vaccine supplies overseas.
French President Emmanuel Macron has called on the U.S. and European nations to allocate up to 5% of current vaccine supplies to developing countries – the kind of vaccine diplomacy that China and Russia have begun deploying.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres this week criticized the “wildly uneven and unfair” distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, noting 10 countries have administered 75% of all vaccinations.
Biden, who announced last week that the U.S. will have enough supply of the vaccine by the end of July to inoculate 300 million people, remains focused for now on making sure every American is vaccinated, administration officials said.
Allies also were listening closely to hear what Biden had to say about a looming crisis with Iran.
Iran informed the International Atomic Energy Agency this week that it will suspend voluntary implementation next week of a provision in the 2015 deal that allowed U.N. nuclear monitors to conduct inspections of undeclared sites in Iran at short notice unless the U.S. rolled back sanctions by Feb. 23.
“We must now make sure that a problem doesn’t arise of who takes the first step,” German chancellor Angela Merkel said. “If everyone is convinced that we should give this agreement a chance again, then ways should be found to get this agreement moving again.”