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'It was obviously a mistake': Ted Cruz on decision to fly to Mexico as Texas freezes – video
Ted Cruz has provoked an outcry after the Republican senator from Texas left the state for a trip to the sunny Mexican tourist resort of Cancún, as millions of his constituents endured deadly power outages and freezing temperatures.
Cruz was spotted waiting for, then later boarding, a flight to Cancún on Wednesday night.
A day later, after the images went viral, he returned to Texas
Ted Cruz flies to Cancún as millions of Texans freeze in the dark
Ted Cruz can’t escape Mexico vacation memes More - in US Politics
Republican leaders in Texas face growing backlash as power crisis deepens
As Texas struggled on Thursday with a disastrous lack of power, food and water following the deadly storm that brought Arctic temperatures to the southern US, the state’s Republican leadership stood battered by a growing outcry over mismanagement of the power grid and a painfully slow emergency response.Residents huddled at elementary schools in makeshift “warming centers”, moved in with any relatives and friends who have heat – despite the coronavirus risks – or simply held out inside their homes in deteriorating conditions.Some do not have enough water to drink, let alone wash. Others are dealing with flooding from burst pipes, unreliable gas and electricity service and “boil water” notices spreading to additional major cities. And with at least two dozen confirmed deaths in the state since the weekend storm, the National Weather Service announced on Wednesday that a new storm front would likely bring another round of frigid temperatures to Texas and “significant ice accumulations”.The immediate risks for the most vulnerable residents remained exposure, malnourishment and the threat of fires or carbon monoxide poisoning as residents sat inside cars, brought grills indoors, and used fireplaces for the first time in years in an attempt to stay warm.But the state’s Republican governor, nationally elected officials and Republican-led state legislature were dealing separately with a growing backlash at the inability to restore power for days as residents stood in long lines for paltry supplies of groceries and queued for miles for gasoline.A focus of particular wrath on Thursday was Senator Ted Cruz, who was spotted leaving frigid Houston Wednesday on a flight bound for Cancun, Mexico, the popular beach destination south of the border.Cruz “is vacationing in Cancun right now when people are literally freezing to death in the state that he was elected to represent and serve”, the former Texas congressman Beto O’Rourke, who made a strong run against Cruz for his Senate seat in 2018 and then ran for president in the 2020 election, said on MSNBC.O’Rourke blamed decades of Republican leadership in the state for failing to embrace alternative energy and maintain durable energy infrastructure. “There has been complete Republican control of the state of Texas for 20 years,” O’Rourke said.Cruz finally confirmed he had taken the trip and on Thursday afternoon was returning to Houston.In an effort to stay ahead of constituents’ wrath about the power crisis and lack of preparedness or information, the governor, Greg Abbott, announced a full-scale investigation into the state’s standalone energy utility – whose leadership Abbott himself appointed. He also tried to shift the blame for the power grid failure to a supposed failure of windmills, which account for about 7% of power generation in Texas.“This shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America,” Abbott said on Fox News.That was a gross mischaracterization of the power crisis, which Abbott elsewhere admitted was brought on mainly by frozen natural gas pipelines that had knocked power plants offline.“Every source of power Texas has has been compromised,” Abbott said at a news conference on Wednesday.On Thursday at a White House briefing, the press secretary, Jen Psaki, said that weather effects on solar and wind energy in Texas were “the least significant factors” in the disaster.And homeland security adviser Liz Sherwood-Randall said the dire storms “demonstrate to us that climate change is real and it’s happening now and we’re not adequately prepared for it”.Both the state plants and the pipelines are run by the state utility, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (Ercot), which was set up independent of other states’ grids so that Texas, whose economy is built on the fossil fuels industry, would not be as subject to federal energy regulations.Even with the grid in tatters, the arrangement was worth it, declared former Texas governor Rick Perry, a Republican who served as energy secretary under Donald Trump.“Texans would be without electricity for longer than three days to keep the federal government out of their business,” Perry wrote in a blogpost.Residents might disagree. More than 130 of the state’s 254 counties were experiencing water outages or potential contamination, and more than 250,000 residents had not had water service for three days, according to state data.Store shelves were cleared of food, lines formed at public spigots in parks, firewood was hard to come by and out-of-state plumbers were invited to come work on an epidemic of burst pipes. Hospitals reported oxygen shortages and nursing homes and dialysis centers struggled to stay online.The Texas national guard was deployed across the state to check on residents and move them to shelters. The Federal Emergency Management Agency had sent blankets, provisions, generators and fuel “to ensure the continued availability of backup power,” the White House said. Joe Biden declared a state of emergency in Texas last Sunday.“We have state leadership – Governor Abbott, Lieutenant Governor [Dan] Patrick – that want to point fingers at everything except the problem,” the San Antonio Democratic politician Julián Castro told MSNBC.Ercot’s chief executive, Bill Magness, asked residents for patience. “I am sure when we review this, we’re going to find things we wish we’d done better,” he said in a televised address.In Houston the emergency recalled the devastation from Hurricane Harvey in 2017 and the flooding that ensued.But then as now, no elected Republican could be heard to warn that the state must take action to address the climate change emergency. Instead they sent the opposite message.“Bottom line: thank God for baseload energy made up of fossil fuels,” Representative Dan Crenshaw, a Texas Republican with a growing national profile, tweeted on Wednesday. More
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Rick Perry says Texans will endure blackouts 'to keep the government out of their business'
Rick Perry, the former Texas governor who became Donald Trump’s energy secretary, has said that Texans would willingly endure longer periods of sub-freezing temperatures if it stymied Democrats’ energy policy and efforts to combat climate change.“Texans would be without electricity for longer than three days to keep the federal government out of their business,” Perry was quoted saying in blog post published Wednesday on the website of Republican congressman Kevin McCarthy.The blog post had asserted that those “watching on the left may see the situation in Texas as an opportunity to expand their top-down, radical proposals. Two phrases come to mind: don’t mess with Texas, and don’t let a crisis go to waste”.Perry’s comments come as millions of Texas are struggling with a brutal winter storm, which created a surge in demand for electricity to warm up homes unaccustomed to such extreme lows, buckling the state’s power grid and causing widespread blackouts. Frigid temperatures and snow have covered most of the central US this week, resulting in at least two dozen deaths, but Texas in particular has reeled because most of its power is on a state-run grid that has repeatedly been described as mismanaged.Residents of the Lone Star state are lining up for grocery stores that are running out of food. Pipes have burst because of the cold, leaving residents without water to drink or prepare food. Many are scrambling to find shelter in buildings with electricity. Multiple municipalities have instituted “boil water” orders, as power outages have impacted water treatment facilities.Meanwhile, many Texans slammed authorities for their handling of the crisis. The severe winter storm has, among some Republicans, been used to open up a new culture war around the expansion of renewable energy, which is a stated priority of the Biden administration in order to address the climate crisis.Perry was among the many Republicans who falsely claimed that frozen wind turbines spurred the mass electricity shutdowns. In reality, the utility system’s failure to prepare for perils presented by cold temperatures – such as frozen natural gas pipes – had a significantly larger role in this crisis.Renewable energy sources such as wind did see failures; these lapses contributed to 13% of Texas’ power outages, while generating approximately 25% of the state’s winter energy. But sources such as coal, gas, and nuclear power ceded nearly twice as many gigawatts of power due to the low temperatures.Nonetheless Greg Abbott, Texas’ governor, voiced anti-wind sentiments similar to Perry’s.“This shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America,” the Republican governor told Fox News host Sean Hannity on Tuesday. “Our wind and our solar got shut down, and they were collectively more than 10% of our power grid, and that thrust Texas into a situation where it was lacking power on a statewide basis … It just shows that fossil fuel is necessary.”Abbott’s attack contradicts the operators of the Texas grid, which is overwhelmingly run on gas and oil, who have confirmed the plunging temperatures caused gas plants to seize up at the same time as a huge spike in demand for heating. Nevertheless, images of ice-covered wind turbines, taken in Sweden in 2014, were shared widely among conservatives on social media as proof of the frailty of clean energy.Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic congresswoman behind the Green New Deal platform, said that Abbott was “blaming policies he hasn’t even implemented for his own failures” while the renewable energy industry also hit back.“It is disgraceful to see the longtime antagonists of clean power engaging in a politically opportunistic charade misleading Americans,” said Heather Zichal, chief executive of the American Clean Power lobby group.Oliver Milman contributed to this report. More
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Why is Texas suffering power blackouts during the winter freeze?
Millions of people in Texas have spent days in below-freezing temperatures without power in what officials have called a “total failure” of the state’s electricity infrastructure. How did oil- and gas-rich Texas – the biggest producer of energy in the US – get here?While there are many factors that led to the power outages in Texas, the state’s power grid has come under intense scrutiny in light of the storm. Here’s what we know so far about Texas’s power grid and the role it played in the state’s winter disaster.Who controls Texas’s power grid?The “Lone Star” statelikes to go it alone when it comes to delivering power to its residents. Texas is unique among the 48 contiguous US states in that it relies on its own power grid. The other 47 states are all part of the two power grids that service the eastern and western halves of the country.The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, known as Ercot, manages the state’s power grid. Ercot is technically a non-profit corporation, and while it functions independently from the state’s government, the corporation is overseen by a state agency called the Public Utility Commission of Texas. Members of the commission are appointed by the state’s governor.Texas is the only state in the country, besides Alaska and Hawaii, that is not part of either the Eastern Interconnection or Western Interconnection, the two main power grids in the US. This means that Texas is not regulated by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (Ferc), the agency that oversees interstate electric transmission. Instead, Texas is basically “an electrical island in the United States”, as described by Bill Magness, CEO of Ercot. While this means that Texas has more control over electricity in the state, it also means there are fewer power plants the state can rely on for power.Parts of Texas are not serviced by Ercot. El Paso at the western tip of the state gets power from the Western Interconnection, which is why the city has been saved from the most brutal effects of the power outages.Why are so many people without power?Ercot turned off power for millions of customers after several power plants shut down due to the below-freezing temperatures the state is experiencing. Officials at Ercot said the equipment at the plants could not handle the extreme, low temperatures. The choice was either shutting down power for customers or risking a collapse of the grid altogether.Why is Texas on its own power grid?For as long as electricity has existed in Texas, the state, which prides itself on its independence has relied on itself for power. Officials in the state have long had a stubborn will to stay out of the hands of federal regulators.While Magness, Ercot’s CEO, said that the shutdown was due primarily to “reasons that have to do with the weather”, critics have said Texas’s energy market incentivizes cheap prices at the cost of delaying maintenance and improving power plants. In 2011, the state experienced similar blackouts, though for a shorter period of time compared with what has been seen this week.Following those blackouts, the Ferc gave a series of recommendations to Ercot to prevent future blackouts, including increasing reserve levels and weatherizing facilities to protect them from cold weather.Ed Hirs, an energy fellow at the University of Houston, told the Washington Post that Ercot “limped along on underinvestment and neglect until it finally broke under predictable circumstances”.Did renewable energy play a role in the grid’s malfunction?While Republicans have been blaming frozen wind turbines for the state’s blackouts, officials and experts say that malfunctions in natural gas operations played the largest role in the power crisis.Ercot said all of its sources of power, including those from renewable sources, were affected by the freezing temperatures. The state largely relies on natural gas for its power supply, though some comes from wind turbines and less from coal and nuclear sources.Natural gas can handle the state’s high temperatures in the summer, but extreme cold weather makes it difficult for the gas to flow to power plants and heat homes. Michael Webber, an energy resources professor at the University of Texas Austin, told the Texas Tribune that “gas is failing in the most spectacular fashion right now”.With the climate crisis likely to trigger more freak weather events like the one Texas is suffering it is noteworthy that there are places that experience frigidly cold weather that rely heavily on wind turbines and manage to have electricity in the winter. In Iowa, a state which sees freezing temperatures more often than Texas, nearly 40% of electricity is generated by wind turbines.What are officials doing to prevent future blackouts?With millions still without power as of late Wednesday, officials in Texas remain focused on getting power back to residents and remedying the damage from the storm. Politicians from both major parties have criticized Ercot for its handling of the storm, but officials have steered clear of providing examples of specific fixes. Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, has called for an investigation into Ercot, declaring it an emergency item for the state’s legislative session.But some Texas leaders have made it clear that they believe Texas should remain independent from the national power grids. Rick Perry, a former governor of the state who also served as Donald Trump’s energy secretary until 2019, said: “Texans would be without electricity for longer than three days to keep the federal government out of their business.” More
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Kamala Harris promises federal relief for Texas victims of winter storms
Kamala Harris has sent a message to residents of Texas and other states hit by power outages and prolonged winter conditions that help is on the way.“I just want to mention all of those folks in Texas and the mid-Atlantic,” the vice-president said in a live interview on Wednesday morning on NBC’s Today show, her first national network interview since taking office.“I know they can’t see us right now, because they’re without electricity, but the president and I are thinking of them, and really hope we can do everything that is possible through the signing of the emergency orders to get federal relief to support them.”Biden signed a declaration of emergency for Texas on Sunday, opening the way for state officials to move more quickly to tap a larger share of federal aid.Harris also echoed a promise made by Joe Biden on Tuesday night that the United States would have enough doses on hand to vaccinate “all Americans” by July. “We have a vaccine now, and that is great, but we need to get it in the arms of all Americans,” Harris told the Today show host Savannah Guthrie.“And as the president said last night, we expect that that will be done in terms of having the available supply by the end of July, and so we are very excited about that.”Harris touted the speed with which the federal government is sending vaccine doses to states, a rate the White House pegs at 13.5m doses a week or a 57% increase since the inauguration.“As quickly as we’re producing it, we’re getting it out,” she said.Challenged on a guideline issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention saying teachers could return to work without being vaccinated, Harris said the White House felt strongly that teachers should be bumped up in line for vaccine doses.“Teachers should be a priority,” she said. “We think they should be a priority, and the states are making decisions individually.”Teachers’ unions have expressed concern that Biden’s plan to reopen most elementary schools in the next three months could expose teachers to health risks.While the federal government issues recommendations about who should receive vaccine doses in what order, each state maintains its own priority list.Harris said that a $1.9tn Covid relief and economic stimulus package the Biden administration is trying to guide through Congress would help make schools safer by providing funds to improve ventilation, erect social distancing barriers and other measures.“Our goal is that as many K-8 schools as possible will reopen within the first 100 days,” Harris said. “Our goal is that it will be five days a week. And so we have to work to achieve that goal.”To respond to complaints from states that there remained a lack of coordination on federally supplied aid, Harris said the Biden administration had begun to put national protocols in place to support states “that need that kind of coordination and support”.As part of its vaccine initiative, federal agencies have doubled direct shipments of vaccine doses to pharmacies, Harris said, and expanded a program to ship doses to community health centers serving vulnerable populations.“We just want to say to everybody, just please get vaccinated,” Harris said. “And in the interim, wear a mask, social distance and make sure you wash your hands and do that frequently.”Harris deflected a question about whether Donald Trump should face criminal charges after being acquitted in his Senate impeachment trial earlier this month.“You know, right now Savannah I’m focused on what we need to do to get relief to American families,” Harris said. “And that is my highest priority, it is our administration’s highest priority, it’s our job, it’s a job we were elected to do, and that’s our focus.“I haven’t reviewed the case through the lens of being a prosecutor, I’m reviewing the case of Covid in America through the lens of being vice-president of America.” More
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Texas Republicans endorse legislation to allow vote on secession from US
The Texas Republican party has endorsed legislation that would allow state residents to vote whether to secede from the United States.In a talkshow interview, the party chair, Allen West, argued that: “Texans have a right to voice their opinions on [this] critical issue.“I don’t understand why anyone would feel that they need to prevent people from having a voice in something that is part of the Texas constitution,” the former Florida congressman said of the Texas Referendum Independence Act. “You cannot prevent the people from having a voice.”West is the latest Republican to come out in support of declaring Texas an independent nation. Last month, thestate representative Kyle Biedermann confirmed that he will introduce the bill for a referendum as early as this week.“Texit,” named after the British referendum to leave the European Union, refers to the process of Texas exiting the United States to become an independent, self-governing nation.The endorsement drew intense backlash from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. Many took aim directly at Allen as party chair, continuing a slew of criticism that has been levied at him since first he took on the role in July.Back then, Allen was immediately criticized for changing the political organization’s slogan to “We are the Storm,” in what the New York Times called an “unusually visible example of the Republican party’s dalliance with QAnon”, the conspiracy theory.This week’s endorsement also is not the first time the former Florida congressman has promoted secession.Earlier he insisted that “law-abiding states should bond together and form a Union of states that will abide by the constitution”, following a US supreme court ruling to dismiss a lawsuit seeking to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election.When corporate donors to the Texas Republican party were asked for responses, many companies stated that they had not made any recent political donations – some paused all corporate giving after the 6 January deadly insurrection at the US Capitol, the political news site Popular Information reported.The ride-hailing company Lyft, which donated $5,000 to the Texas GOP in 2016, told the outlet that it had “no plans to donate to the party in the future”, adding that the company was “troubled by chairman West’s statements”. More
