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      Republican leaders in Texas face growing backlash as power crisis deepens

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      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'

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      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