[SwellJoe]

I'm not opposed to nuclear, but that's not an option on the table, either. In Texas, fossil fuel is God, and nothing that would impede it will be tolerated, even when there are more cost effective and less environmentally destructive methods. Oil and gas holds so much sway over our politics that it's nearly impossible to make progress. Allowing the oil industry to externalize costs is so deeply ingrained in our politics it's hard to see a way out of it.

[tbirrell]

> more cost effective and less environmentally destructive methods

There are few options that are both these things. Which is not an argument to not fund R&D to reach that point, simply that as of right now, precious few things have both these properties. And once you add in the requirement to be able to sustain the power grid, I'm not sure you have any options.

That said, arguing that Big Oil has a strangle hold on politics, while not wrong, is misleading. This simple fact of the matter is that it is the least of many evils right now. Its like salt. Very useful for meat preservation, and the best they had for millennia, though not up to par with modern preservatives. Some day we will have something that is a legitimate contender, and at that point we can go after Big Oil for its influence. But until we have a legitimate contender, taking out Big Oil will only cause problems.

[SwellJoe]

Your comment is misleading. Solar and wind are literally cheaper than fossil fuels today (https://insideclimatenews.org/news/25032019/coal-energy-cost...). Even if we want to punt on going wholly green and keep night-time/cloudy-day coal and natural gas infrastructure running rather than deal with storage (though wind still blows at night), the times when Texas most needs power are the times when the sun is most able to provide it.

The only reason coal/natural gas aren't prohibitively expensive is that the infrastructure already exists. If the deck hadn't been stacked against solar and wind all this time, and if externalized costs started being reflected back on fossil fuel extraction decades ago instead of incentivizing more extraction, we wouldn't be in this mess. We would already have a healthy balance of solar and wind power generation, and the cost of converting some coal-fired plants to natural gas a few years ago (which was cause and effect of more fracking in west Texas, Oklahoma, and elsewhere) could have been redirected toward clean solutions. If our governments at all levels weren't owned by fossil fuels, we would have built our last fossil fuel power plant a decade or two ago. Germany made the decision a couple of decades ago, and they've got more Seattle weather than Texas weather...where were we? We were subsidizing cleanup for BP and Exxon spills and pretending like there were no other options.