[txlpo78]

I have been amazed, and also disappointed, by the amount of people that want this to be the fault of “stupid conservative Texas” and absolutely refuse to even entertain the idea that anything other than “Texas is dumb” could have been a contributor. Even in this thread, the number of comments that adamantly insist “this is only a Texas problem”, despite facts to the contrary, is astounding.

That goes the other way around, too (lots of conservatives immediately blaming windmills etc).

It reminds me a lot of the Reddit posts whenever a bombing happens. You’ll see people from both sides rabidly hoping that it was a Muslim suicide bomber or a far-right extremist, because if that’s the case they can use the event to push their political agenda. It’s sickening, IMO.

There surely is room here for criticizing Texas GOP policies, but they aren’t the only problem here, and if we actually want to fix things we need to stop playing these ridiculous partisan games and be honest with ourselves with the full picture of issues.

[qqqwerty]

Just a reminder the your junior Senator (among many others[1]) mocked California and our electric grid when we were hit by record wild fires last year. He also voted against federal aid for Hurricane Sandy because it only impacted blue states.

And maybe you should look up the timeline on when your state representatives ran to fox news and tried to blame the green new deal and windmills for the outage. I am sure the national discourse would be a bit more sane if it wasn't kicked off by Texas politicians spreading 100% FUD.

You are asking everyone else to be reasonable while your own politicians viciously attack the other side and straight up lie to the American people.

[1] https://twitter.com/BFriedmanDC/status/1361693012225650688

[txlpo78]

Lol, this could not be a more perfect example of exactly what I’m talking about. Nowhere in my comment did I say that Texas politicians are not to blame (in fact, I said the opposite) and yet here you come riding in to “remind me” of some actions that Texas politicians did that have absolutely no relevance to the issue at hand.

> You are asking everyone else to be reasonable while your own politicians viciously attack the other side and straight up lie to the American people.

I don’t personally control Cruz or Abbott’s actions. If I did, they wouldn’t be in office. But what I can control is how I react to situations, just like you can control how you react to situations. I choose to be reasonable and expect others around me to be reasonable, because that’s how things progress. It seems you choose to double down on unproductive finger pointing and playing “gotcha”, though.

That’s fine if you don’t like Cruz. I don’t like him either. But Cruz being a dumbass and taunting California has absolutely nothing to do with the issues that affected Texas this week, and you bringing it up is completely unneeded and unhelpful. Please go have your outrage session somewhere else.

[dna_polymerase]

I never liked the meme, but this guy has to be a NPC. Seriously. I couldn't agree more with you assessment about the current news/discussion life-cycle. Personally I think that the way news are produced and consumed fuels a vicious cycle that is more about tribes than information.

[qqqwerty]

Ad hominems are not welcome here. See my reply to a sibling comment[1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26195450

[qqqwerty]

From your original post:

> and if we actually want to fix things we need to stop playing these ridiculous partisan games and be honest with ourselves with the full picture of issues.

One side takes these issues very seriously. We have been fighting tooth and nail to address climate change, improve the nations infrastructure and provide adequate safety nets for when things go bad. The other side spends their time screaming about socialism and stolen elections.

The point I am trying to make is that this is not a "both sides" problem. One side is taking these issues very seriously the other refuses to even engage in a conversation about them. Obamacare is a perfect example of how this played out. The legislation literally originated as a Republican proposal, but Republicans refused to cooperate and instead trotted out the "death panels" talking point. And here we are 12 years later, and they still don't have a replacement plan.

If you are actually interested in hearing about the solutions that are on the table you can get a rough idea by visiting Biden's energy plan[1]. These are very real proposals, with broad democratic support. But to get any of this stuff passed, it will likely require input and support from Republicans. And unfortunately, I have little to no faith that they will come to the table on this. I hope I am wrong.

[1] https://joebiden.com/clean-energy/

[JamesBarney]

Winterizing natural gas power plants isn't mentioned once in Joe Biden's clean energy platform. He also didn't mention anything about weatherizing natural gas generators in any of the debates.

Death panels and the ACA have nothing to do winterizing with natural gas generators.

There is a bunch of strong evidence that climate change is man made and real. There is much less evidence that climate change is causing more extreme cold events, or specifically had any influence on this polar vortex.

And wind did slightly worse than coal and natural gas generators when it comes to stability over the last week, so it's definitely not a savior.

There are a million opportunities to argue about the ACA or climate change. But this issue is about winterization/maybe connecting Texas to the national power grid. Can we just argue about that here?

Btw I voted for Biden, but the Democratic platform has very little focus on weatherizing natural gas plants.

[qqqwerty]

It is a high level policy agenda, not a 10k page regulatory document. There are literally dozens of references to making infrastructure robust to the impacts of climate change, for example:

"Americans deserve infrastructure they can trust: infrastructure that is resilient to floods, fires, and other climate threats"

If we are going to criticize Democrats for not explicitly discussing an extremely niche grid infrastructure issue in their platform, maybe we should also criticize the fact the republicans didn't even bother to publish one this past election cycle[1]

> But this issue is about winterization/maybe connecting Texas to the national power grid. Can we just argue about that here?

What is there to argue? Texas failed to adequately winterize. They should make sure to fix that. End of argument.

[1] https://www.vox.com/2020/8/24/21399396/republican-convention...

[Rapzid]

Our Junior senator that peaced out to Cancun with his family this week(during a pandemic)? Yeah, he is always in our thoughts.

It was pretty gross reading about these guys going on national conservative networks playing national GOP politics spreading FUD about renewables... From under a bunch of blankets on my phone because it was 41f in my house.

[honkdaddy]

This kind of attack is pretty much exactly what the GP was referring to.

[qqqwerty]

If you think my reply was attack, then you are probably blinded by your own biases.

I left a substantive and truthful reply. Here is another synopsis in case it helps: Certain Texas politicians are notorious for poisoning the well when it comes to public discourse. And in this very specific example, they literally went to fox news and other outlets and blamed the issues on GND and windmills. At that point the Texas power outages were barely blip on the national radar, but their lies on national media kicked off a firestorm of headlines to counter their lies.

They literally started this. But folks keep blaming the media, and keep blaming the libs. Wake up. If you disagree with anything I said, a substantive reply is welcome. But if you are just going to cry about being attacked, go somewhere else.

[honkdaddy]

>They literally started this.

What is it you think "they" started? You're really all over the place with these replies. I don't think anyone here would disagree that it's absurd for Texas politicians to blame issues on GND, but had they not done that, it's not as if Texans would be any better off. I can tell you're not a fan of Cruz, but I think the point myself and the GP are trying to make is that there are lots of situations in American politics which boil down well to Red vs. Blue. Personally I don't think this is one of them.

[qqqwerty]

> What is it you think "they" started?

They walked away from the negotiating table around 12 years ago and are nearly entirely focused on playing up the culture war games rather than actually doing any sort of governing.

And yet there is a fun little internet subculture that insists both sides are at fault, the media is at fault, tribalism, etc...

> there are lots of situations in American politics which boil down well to Red vs. Blue. Personally I don't think this is one of them.

I disagree. Blue side has been warning about extreme weather events due to climate change, about how unprepared our infrastructure is. Red side has been oil money == good, deregulation == profits. I don't think there has ever been a disaster that has so vividly highlighted the contrasting platforms and priorities of the two parties.

[dna_polymerase]

You did it again.

[qqqwerty]

It is pretty obvious from your comment history that you are just here to troll people:

"What fucked up ideology do you have"

"Method 10: Write an absolute piece of shit article on revue."

"I've read many stupid posts about de-googling ... But this one really amazes me"

"There are absolutely no words to describe the stupidity exhibited here."

That is just from the first few pages. This isn't reddit, I suggest you take that discourse over there.

[dna_polymerase]

Ouch, talking about ad hominem attacks...

Also, how did you go trough my comments and ignored everything else that did not support your hypothesis? You really are a NPC.

[chordalkeyboard]

> I have been amazed, and also disappointed, by the amount of people that want this to be the fault of “stupid conservative Texas” and absolutely refuse to even entertain the idea that anything other than “Texas is dumb” could have been a contributor.

In my opinion this is the result of a mentality that sees the government as the obvious solution to problems, so when you see problems existing in a place where people seem to have a different philosophy of government, its clearly the fault of those morons who don’t realize that all problems can be solved by sufficient application of government force.

> if we actually want to fix things we need to stop playing these ridiculous partisan games and be honest with ourselves with the full picture of issues.

Some people actually do want to fix things on some level, but they are quite confident in their understanding of the problem and they believe that the indicated solution is clear, and anyone who doesn’t agree with them is either stupid, or evil, or both. So they’re unwilling to abandon what they see as a perfectly correct solution because a bunch of evil morons want to argue about “unintended consequences” or “agent-principal problems.”

Other people are more interested in signaling their ideological alignment with the above, and the object level issue provides them with opportunities to signal.

[xxpor]

Ensuring the electric grid doesn't collapse when it gets below 20 degrees is in fact exactly the sort of thing that can be fixed with enough application of force.

Spend the money, or we'll take it from you. Done.

[chordalkeyboard]

> Ensuring the electric grid doesn't collapse when it gets below 20 degrees is in fact exactly the sort of thing that can be fixed with enough application of force.

This seems like the sort of belief system that inspired the story of King Canute and the tide. [0]

> Spend the money, or we'll take it from you. Done.

I understand that a lot of people only care about justifying the expropriation of wealth. But it seems you’ve forgotten to include the part where the expropriation is actually justified on the basis of promises to do something good with that money.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Canute_and_the_tide

[leesalminen]

Can you point me to a specific current federal regulation that would’ve prevented this issue? TFA posits that there aren’t. So, you’ll take money to enforce a non-existent regulation?

[davidgay]

The trivial proof of the GP's statement is that there are regions of the world and the US that regularly drop below 20F and have a functioning electrical grid (say, for instance, Alaska).

[makomk]

That's not proof at all. Building grid infrastructure that can function below 20F in regions that reach that temperature regularly is easier in important ways - in particular, if a new piece of infrastructure gets built that can't cope, the problem will happen early on and either get fixed or worked around, whereas somewhere like Texas can build up decades of new infrastructure that can't cope with the cold before anything happens to demonstrate that.

[chordalkeyboard]

Thats probably a result of superior management of infrastructure rather than “application of enough force.”

[maxerickson]

It is clearly stated as a hypothetical application of political will, not a reference to a particular regulation.

[chordalkeyboard]

Then this is the indicated response: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Canute_and_the_tide

[maxerickson]

Huh? The various law making entities in the US are not always making maximal use of their power, it doesn't make any sense to wave your hands in the air and say that they can only do the things they've already made laws for.

[konjin]

>In my opinion this is the result of a mentality that sees the government as the obvious solution to problems, so when you see problems existing in a place where people seem to have a different philosophy of government, its clearly the fault of those morons who don’t realize that all problems can be solved by sufficient application of government force.

It has nothing to do with the government and everything to do with beliefs. Your post is doing exactly that. Pointing out simple facts like that all grids have been under invested in for 50 years, that we need to spend trillions to bring them up to todays standards and that we need to diversity power sources is met with derision and downvotes.

[chordalkeyboard]

> It has nothing to do with the government and everything to do with beliefs.

Government is not separable from the beliefs of the people who inhabit it and participate in its processes.

> Pointing out simple facts like that all grids have been under invested in for 50 years

Surely you can see that this is a belief and not a “fact”

> that we need to spend trillions to bring them up to todays standards and that we need to diversity power sources is met with derision and downvotes.

Well if people disagree then I feel it would be better for them to discuss. But it seems like there’s this perception that there is no room for reasonable disagreement and that’s what I was pushing back on.

We can agree that the grid needs more investment and still have differences of opinion on how to generate that investment.

[konjin]

>Surely you can see that this is a belief and not a “fact”

The belief is that every American should have uninterrupted access to electricity. The fact is that we are woefully under investing to keep that state of affairs. You can have your own beliefs, you can't have your own facts.

For some reason people who want to spend less money on infrastructure don't mention that they wouldn't mind if 50% of people don't have access to roads, hospitals, or electricity.

[chordalkeyboard]

> The belief is that every American should have uninterrupted access to electricity. The fact is that we are woefully under investing to keep that state of affairs. You can have your own beliefs, you can't have your own facts.

The belief that the best way to get every American to have uninterrupted access to electricity is through public investment in infrastructure is belied by your admission that hasn’t happened. Which is a fact.

> For some reason people who want to spend less money on infrastructure don't mention that they wouldn't mind if 50% of people don't have access to roads, hospitals, or electricity.

For some reason the people who want to spend more money on publicly funded projects insist on casting aspersions rather than introspecting on why they’re always dependent on expropriation for basic things.

[konjin]

>The belief that the best way to get every American to have uninterrupted access to electricity is through public investment in infrastructure is belied by your admission that hasn’t happened. Which is a fact.

We have though. From 1930 to 1980 the US had a world class system that was better than any in the world.

[Pxtl]

Well, considering the Texan senator who is currently planning his return from Cancun was involved in spreading lies that ultimately led to an attempted insurrection against the US government... I think people are a little sick of Texas politics right now, and Texas losing power on large scale for a major weather event for the 2nd time in four years is a nice reminder of the local attitudes about climate change and the failures of Texan libertarianism.