As many have heard, Texas has been hit with the worst snowstorm in a decade. To those who think this is unprecedented, a similar snowstorm hit the state in 2010. Spikes in energy demand amid the unusually low temperatures led to rolling blackouts affecting more than 4 million Texans coping with freezing weather. All schools and most businesses have shut down and will likely remain so until the temperature moves above freezing this weekend.
Fresh from accusing Sen. Ted Cruz of attempted murder, the famously tone-deaf socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez blithely tweeted that accepting her Green New Deal would have spared Texans of their current difficulties. Somehow her $93 trillion plan, she says, which many Democrats endorsed but didn’t dare vote for, would have supplied “next-gen public infrastructure investments” that could have somehow neutralized the effects of a freak snowstorm in Texas.
To her credit, at least Ocasio-Cortez focused on the infrastructure aspect of her brainchild and didn’t pretend it would reverse the effects of climate change and thus somehow lessen the impact of the weather—it wouldn’t. But, sure enough, news outlets like CBS and CNBC reported that climate change is to blame for Texans currently freezing without power.
How exactly do slightly rising temperatures caused by human activity lead to a snowstorm and power failures in Texas? MSNBC writer Hayes Brown explains it thus: “[I]magine a swirling mass of frigid air over the Arctic being held in place by an invisible force field. Sometimes the air manages to slip a bit under the shield and drift down North America. That, in simplified terms, is what happened here: A pocket of the polar vortex, which the air of the jet stream normally holds in place, got loose and decided to visit the U.S.”
It might be too much to ask Brown to explain exactly how this phenomenon is caused by human activity. Most scientists can’t really answer this question either. But, rest assured, the assumption that human-caused climate change is to blame always lingers in the background. Even if they steer clear of most unprovable claims, leftist writers inevitably come off like Dennis Quaid’s character in “The Day After Tomorrow” when explaining how global warming has led to a superstorm ushering in a new Ice Age.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPXJKLi3x-s
In reality, citing climate change for Texas’s current weather or casting the Green New Deal as a realistic response to such weather is completely unscientific and unhelpful. As anyone who has lived in Texas can attest, crazy weather and extreme temperature changes happen all the time, and it’s difficult to conclusively tie these changes to human activity.
As Tucker Carlson rightly argues, Texans are suffering all the more because of adopting so-called green energy. A writer at the Austin American-Statesman reports that wind turbines, which produce up to a fifth of the state’s energy, have “been offline because of frozen wind turbines in West Texas, according to Texas grid operators.”
While many have been quick to reply that other energy producers have also been hampered by the weather, common sense would conclude that a particularly gas-rich state like Texas would have been in a much better condition if it didn’t bother with inefficient, unreliable wind turbines.
Adding to leftist incoherence about the climate, Texans must also cope with the unneighborly attitude that has come to predominate in today’s world as a result of nearly a year of COVID-19 hysteria. While most people with power have checked on friends and family and have even opened up their houses to those in need, I noticed many could not resist the urge to go on social media to virtue signal their energy conservation and blame those who dared to crank up their heat above 65 degrees. Perhaps bored with calling out those posing in pictures without masks, these same types are now leaving snarky comments to people in dire need of assistance.
Thus, while millions of Texans freeze without power and some even die because of malfunctioning fireplaces, so many on the left see this as both opportunity to push unscientific claims about the climate and energy production and browbeat their neighbors for not agreeing with their politics.
A better way forward would be the exact opposite of this. In the long-term, Texans and Americans in general should reject the boondoggles of renewable energy and use more reliable, cheaper sources. In the short-term, they should reject superstition and bitterness, which has only worsened an already terrible situation.
In the face of the crisis, all people have is one another. Unfortunately, too many people have forgotten this lesson. It is time to recover this lost sense of community and start warming people’s hearts as well their homes. Otherwise, the next disaster that comes will prove far more deadly and long-lasting.