Blaming climate change for the cold snap, or renewables for the blackouts, lets energy planners off the hook. In mid-February, an unexpected and severe cold snap hit most of the USA. It was caused by Arctic air pushed down from the north by a rare but not unprecedented weather system. Even as far south as Texas, temperatures fell to record lows, causing grid failures. Millions were left without power for days, forcing families from their cold homes into their cars. Read more at Spiked…
Comment made on spiked about this article
This article shows the problem with Spiked. It can never resist having a go at ‘woke’ people ( in this case Alexandra Ocasio) above all else and this distorts any truthful analysis of the problem here. Whether you accept that climate change is ‘causing’ the severe weather conditions here, what we are seeing are more severe weather events in southern states of the US whether it be freezing condition, severe floods or hurricane winds. What the article doesn’t mention is that in 2011 in Texas ( long before AOC was around) almost exactly the same thing happened- extremely cold weather led to power outages. There were hardly any wind turbines to blame then. The usual reports were issued and said that the energy infrastructure should be winterised. This would have cost a lot of money to the energy companies and their GOP supplicants so nothing was done. So when the same ‘unprecedented freezing conditions’ happened a decade later, the same outages happened only this time they were worse and the people responsible were caught out trying to blame frozen wind turbines. Yes it was a ‘policy failure’ but it’s Greg Abbott and his GOP numpties ( whom you don’t call out personally) rather than AOC (whom you do) who are ‘bonkers’. It’s not just planning failures that are to blame it’s our neo-liberal politicians who are quite happy to see all this stuff handed over to ‘the market’ and then can’t believe it when ‘the market’ delivers power outages and huge bills of tens of thousands of dollars to ordinary people who have just kept their heating on because it was freezing. I think that the changing climate is behind a lot of this but it enrages me when you see politicians like the Greek prime minister shrug his shoulders and say ‘it’s climate change’ when wildfires raged in Greece this summer. Stop cutting back your emergency services and start building resilience then.
If you think that the article omitted to criticise both sides of the putative debate — AOC vs GOPs, it would seem — you clearly have not read it. It clearly states the need to scrutinise both.
I thought that article was very measured , the crucial point was this
‘Gas production, distribution and generating infrastructure can be made to work in colder weather. Solar panels and wind turbines cannot’
The Dems are happy to burden the future generations with huge debt with no evidence that it is the right way to proceed.
The climate alarmist are hyper vigilant and yell and throw their arms about at every event that their photos can make look bad.
Look at the German floods the height of the water was not as bad as previous years the people died as the water rushed off non absorbent ground like tarmac , previously with extreme rainfall the ground soaked it up resulting in a slow rise of water and a slow recede. The death toll then was no measure of the climate getting worse.