This must have left at least a few of his supporters conflicted that sweltering Saturday, including an aged white couple, one with a cane – Republicans, judging from past yard signs – sitting on a neighbor’s sun-shaded porch three doors down, waiting for the power to return. They got locked out of their own home when the electric garage door gave up the ghost. An African-American Democrat and retired federal employee, also without air conditioning, told me that she didn’t care if Texas leadership was Republican or Democrat. Main question for her: Are Texas leaders taking care of day-to-day basics?
From what some of us could see and feel for about an hour and a half that Saturday in Woodway, the answer was far from certain.
Meanwhile, Republican legislators were down at the State Capitol at Abbott’s command, not taking care of basics such as keeping our homes cooled but ignoring hundreds of Texans who came from across the state, overwhelmingly to protest legislation making it harder to vote. Other legislators have been tackling such “crises” as snuffing access to school sports teams for transgendered students and snuffing the teaching of institutional racism in American history. Senate Bill 3, for instance, would strip out a provision from another bill passed in May to at least teach that white supremacy is "morally wrong."
All this comes from a party that once claimed to believe in smaller government and less regulation, a party long ago founded on racial equality that righted – guess what? – more than two centuries of American institutional racism.
The mania to confirm our former president’s widely disproven claims of election fraud is clearly driving the “Election Integrity Protection Act” and symbolizes the recklessness of a state taking its eye off the ball during the high-stakes game of managing a bustling economy and strong residential growth and instead pursuing trumped-up crises. For instance, the election bill seems more intent on punishing the moms and pops who work polling places as well as county election officials who, dutifully working with the Texas secretary of state (a figure appointed by Abbott), by all accounts did their jobs well in 2020.
“In spite of all the circumstances, Texas had an election that was smooth and secure,” Keith Ingram, director of elections for the Republican-run Texas Secretary of State’s Office, reported to the Texas House Elections Committee way back on March 4. “Texans can be justifiably proud of the hard work and creativity shown by local county election officials.” Ingram went on to praise his own local elections administrator in Williamson County who, in an effort to make voting safe in the middle of a pandemic, reorganized polling places to keep citizens from bunching up and spreading COVID-19.
And Republican leaders’ thanks for a job well done by those who braved the coronavirus and worked in the trenches of democracy? Unleash newly empowered partisan poll watchers into the sanctity of the polling place (though, thankfully, without the video-making liberties state legislation this spring would have permitted) and threatening penalties for embattled polling-place workers and election officials who run afoul of increasingly complicated state laws. Oh, and Texas Secretary of State Ruth Hughs has resigned amid a lack of legislative support, possibly for doing her job too damn well.
Irony in all this: With the exception of the 2020 election, Texas remains one of the worst states for voter turnout.
Away from the distracting culture wars and efforts to complicate voting, some of us are now easing into a torrid summer that across the American West finds reservoir levels at near-record lows, mountain snowpack nearly gone and the risk of wildfires high. I won’t bring up climate change for fear of spurring apoplectic fits among any epiphany-averse readership, but all of our population growth and all of our business growth for which our state’s political leaders have long clamored is now here and daily testing our independently run power grid in ways unimagined.
And we're arguably not taking care to ensure it and we thrive in increasingly extreme weather events such as last February’s week-long freeze that plunged millions of Texans into darkness and bitter cold.
Titled “Never Again: How to Prevent Another Major Texas Electricity Failure,” the report suggests that, amidst Texas’ ongoing building boom (even with home prices now testing consumer limits), the state must pursue other ways to get ahead of the next extreme weather event: “Between leaky buildings, lack of electricity and poor public communications, over 100 Texans died of hypothermia or carbon monoxide poisoning during the February blackout. Texas must fix this by improving the energy efficiency of our buildings. Over half of Texas homes were built before the state adopted building energy codes with insulation requirements in 2001.”
No less than Republican state Sen. Bob Hall, among the most conservative members of the Legislature, was quoted in June as concluding that the grid's operating problems have not been fixed: "If I were a business right now, as desirable as Texas is, if I'm dependent on a steady supply of electricity, I'd be very concerned about coming here right now." Indeed, when Texas heat that month surprised many of us by reaching the triple digits of late summer, the oft-vilified Electric Reliability Council of Texas – reeling from unanticipated demand and scores of outages – pressed customers hard to up their thermostats to 82 degrees while sleeping. All of which understandably sparked cynicism in Texans of all political stripes after last winter’s massive power failure and Abbott’s springtime claims all was now well.
In the wake of June outages and ERCOT calls for conservation amid extreme temperatures and numerous plant maintenance emergencies in what one official called “an aging fleet” of energy infrastructure, ERCOT last week announced further steps to ensure power reliability, including purchasing more reserve power during uncertain weather and requiring power generators to provide more operational updates. And if ERCOT interim president Brad Jones’ 60 cited objectives (a third reportedly already met) seem a bit overwhelming, they at least convey the complexity involved in managing an efficient, cost-effective state power grid up to both daily demands and extreme weather events.
A just-issued report by the Austin-based University of Texas Energy Institute on the February freeze acknowledges this complexity: “The failure of the electricity and natural gas systems serving Texas before and during Winter Storm Uri in February 2021 had no single cause. While the 2021 storm did not set records for the lowest recorded temperatures in many parts of the state, it caused generation outages and a loss of electricity service to Texas customers several times more severe than winter events leading to electric service disruptions in December 1989 and February 2011.”
This in-depth, heavily footnoted report stresses that, despite political enemies of renewable power using the freeze crisis to gleefully pummel sources other than fossil fuel, power plants within each category of technologies – natural gas-fired power plants, coal-fired power plants, nuclear reactors, wind generation and solar generation facilities – failed to operate at expected electricity generation output levels. It also notes that power demand forecasts were too low and that failures specifically within the natural gas system – including the freezing of gas production, storage and distribution facilities – exacerbated overall electricity problems. It also highlights absolutely bewildering marketplace dynamics that yield what newly appointed Peter Lake, chairman of the Public Utility Commission of Texas, last week described as a “crisis-based business model” that yields only real financial rewards “the closer you get to a crisis, which is obviously not good for our consumers.”
All of this is lost in the din of culture wars. Republicans’ bullying of Democrats, led by a governor striving to project toughness for political purposes, has backfired, obscuring far more urgent matters. Right or wrong (and I personally think wrong), House Democrats have again broken quorum, this time fleeing the state, leaving Republicans with the prospect of another failed election bill and another dashed legislative session. Abbott says Democrats should be blamed if they don’t return to address business such as property tax relief, but to a degree he bears significant blame for needlessly aggravating bad feelings to the point of yet another crisis. He clearly learned nothing from the springtime exodus of Democrats, including one rule in politics which sorts out political charlatans dedicated to their own ends from genuine leaders intent more often than not on producing definitive solutions addressing complicated societal and economic problems: Every stupid action begs an equally stupid reaction.
One thing’s sure: The 2021 legislative sessions stand in stark contrast to the 2019 session, during which all put aside petty politics and got down to the nuts and bolts of running the state of Texas, including bipartisan efforts to overhaul school finance. But the complexities of refiguring school finance and mounting fixes in energy generation don’t fire up the rank-and-file party activists that office-holders encounter at local party luncheons and state conventions. What sends activists’ blood pumping is a latter-day quasi-religious crusade against an unholy enemy, compromises be damned.
And pumped-up activists are what Abbott will need against a political flame-thrower such as Allen West, a rousing Christian nationalist and political challenger who last year seemed to take delight in bedeviling the governor over the latter’s pandemic measures. West not only blames Abbott and House Speaker Dade Phelan for actions he sees as precipitating two Democratic walkouts (including Phelan’s giving Democrats leadership positions) but also suggests Abbott has failed to protect the electric grid. To quote West’s pointed tweet Monday: “Have you forgotten those who died during the winter storm? I have not.”
Before Democrats fled Texas, testimony in the House Committee on Constitutional Rights and Remedies involving former Harris County prosecutor and Democratic Rep. Ann Johnson and Jonathan White, chief of election integrity in the Texas Attorney General’s Office, suggested that since 2005 there have been 534 successful prosecutions targeting 155 individuals for election fraud. Johnson calculated that of the more than 80 million ballots cast in Texas during that period, the number of prosecutions of specific offenses is .000622 percent – and, she charged for good effect, “you have a .002 percent chance of being struck by lightning.”
Meanwhile, June has broken heat records kept since 1895, yielding the hottest June in the United States. Nearly half of the country is experiencing some form of drought, though most of Texas has thus far been spared. A March 2020 report by the state climatologist at Texas A&M University forecasts warmer temperatures over longer periods of time in Texas. Interestingly, it also notes that trends in extreme cold are “much larger than trends in extreme heat.” No wonder we saw dour and discouraged looks on the faces of state senators, Republican and Democrat, interviewing ERCOT and PUCT officials last week.
Aware of the embarrassment summer can bring with a still hobbled, creaky power grid and criticism he failed to include further power grid reliability on the agenda of the 30-day special session now underway (apparently rendered moot by Democrats’ fleeing town), Abbott sought cover by dispatching a highly publicized, astonishingly short-sighted July 6 letter to the Public Utility Commission directing it and ERCOT to take “immediate actions to increase power generation capacity and ensure reliability of the Texas power grid” while penalizing renewable energy as part of the vibrant mix the power grid must draw upon. Sadly, Abbott appears to be mostly taking his strategies from Texas Republicans’ playbook of 2011, after another winter freeze crippled the state power grid. Legislators patched it up – insufficiently, we now know – while Republican legislators pursued red-meat issues such as voter ID to satisfy rank-and-file bloodlust. Abbott’s strategy now: Hope that Texas skirts the record drought baking the American West (so far so good) and that whatever rubber bands and bubblegum presently bind the power grid will hold long enough for Abbott to vanquish his three very determined right-wing primary foes come March 2022.
It’s a roll of the dice. If Abbott comes up short, he opens himself up to charges of incompetence and dereliction of duty from not only Citizen West but former state Rep. Don Huffines and right-wing political commentator Chad Prather. All seek to unseat Abbott as the party’s gubernatorial candidate in 2022. The problem in Abbott’s obvious gamble over power grid reliability is that if the dice come up wrong and power begins to go out across Texas this summer or even this winter, many of us will lose right along with the governor, even as some of us pay a steeper price. It’s also not so terrific for the so-called “Texas Miracle.” Continued success in maintaining this economic miracle means paying attention to sometimes mundane but critically important issues such as transportation, water, health care, education and, yes, energy reliability in weather of all kinds. Texas old-timers admittedly skeptical of such confounding concepts as climate change will nonetheless tell you that weather of all kinds comes pretty close to defining Texas past and present.
Yet corporate sensibilities are gradually showing other expectations, and not only to strike a more positive and compassionate business profile but to demonstrate meaningful regard for the increasing diversity and challenging predicaments of employees and their families whose destiny is, after all, tied to economic success or failure. This means focusing on not only the quality of life that individual states offer but their respect for fundamental human rights — priorities that understandably relegated Texas to a very humbling fourth place in CNBC’s 2021 study of state competitiveness, released just last week. CNBC said Texas’ ebbing ranking reflected the study’s sharper focus on everything from inclusiveness to equity to health care. “While none of us should put too much stock in one media company’s analysis of our economic competitiveness, it’s hard to disagree with this assessment,” former Texas House Speaker Joe Straus wrote in a July 15 column for the Houston Chronicle. “Unfortunately, partisan political rancor and state government gridlock are starting to define Texas more and more to the rest of the world. With Democratic state legislators pledging to spend the next few weeks outside Texas in order to stop election reform legislation, and with Republican leaders talking about arresting the Democrats when they return, all sides seem to be digging in. It’s not clear how any of this ends, but it is clear that this state’s proud tradition of bipartisan governance is eroding. Ultimately, it’s the people of our state who suffer.” Straus, of course, symbolizes the politically tolerant, pro-business road not taken by Texas Republicans under the strong pull of the former president and a base enraptured by his demagoguery and deceit.
One thing’s sure: Power outages have a way of cutting down to size frivolous culture wars and stressing what’s really important in Texas: Comfortably surviving the elements.
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