Golis: California and Texas discover one thing in common

Poor Ted Cruz. First, he gets caught being a hypocrite, and then he gets caught sneaking off to sunny Mexico, while millions of his Texas constituents are huddled in the dark, trying to survive subfreezing temperatures without electricity, heat or water.

It’s enough to give politicians a bad name.

“As Texans froze, Ted Cruz got a ticket to paradise,” declared a Houston Chronicle editorial. “Paradise can have him.”

During the summer blackouts in California, Cruz, a Republican senator from Texas, seemed to be enjoying the Golden State’s distress. “California is now unable to perform even basic functions of civilization, like having reliable electricity,” Cruz tweeted. “Biden/Harris/AOC want to make CA’s failed energy policy the standard nationwide. Hope you don’t like air conditioning!”

But now we learn his home state has its own problems. In the midst of a record cold wave, more than 4 million residents of the Lone Star State were trying to survive without electricity last week. People were suffering from hypothermia, carbon monoxide poisoning, failed water systems, polluted drinking water and hospitals in crisis.

So much for the basic functions of civilization.

Cruz, meanwhile, was enjoying the sun at a ritzy beach resort, or at least he was until his Mexican travels took a star turn on Twitter. You’ll be reassured to know he’s home again.

When it turned cold, Texas was left unprepared. The Washington Post energy writer Will Englund blamed Texas politicians and utility executives who couldn’t be bothered to invest in the long-term reliability of electrical production.

“When it gets really cold, it can be hard to produce electricity …” Englund wrote, “but it’s not impossible. Operators in Alaska, Canada, Maine, Norway and Siberia do it all the time.”

Casting about for someone other than himself to blame, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott settled on the agency that operates the electrical grid in Texas, the agency with the ironic name: the Electric Reliability Council of Texas.

Abbott also tried to blame renewable energy, but those claims fell flat when experts noted that most of the missing energy production came from old-fashioned, gas-powered generators.

Welcome to the politics of our time — when every event becomes politicized and weaponized. When things go wrong, politicians try to explain the problem in partisan terms, hoping to distract their followers from the facts on the ground and the culpability of the people in charge.

Even now, wind turbines account for less than 10% of Texas’ energy production. Fossil fuel or renewable energy, any system will breakdown if it isn’t protected against extremes of weather.

Texans learned last week, or they should have learned, that the extremes of weather that define climate change are not confined to the left coast.

Still, Californians would be wise not to feel superior about a rival’s distress. What happened in California last summer can’t match the disaster in Texas, but both events were caused by a failure of leadership. Close to a million Californians suffered through rolling blackouts last summer, which means that California leaders have their own screw-ups to explain.

For anyone paying attention, it’s not a secret that the country’s power grid is coming unstuck. One day there will be a major systemwide failure, and people will act surprised. Why didn’t someone say something? (The Texas Tribune reported on Thursday that the electrical grid in Texas — Texas insists on having its own grid — was “seconds and minutes” away from a “catastrophic failure.”)

What happened in Texas becomes only the latest example of why good government matters.

In so many ways, American institutions have decided they don’t want to sacrifice for the sake of a healthy, prosperous future. Whether maintaining existing public improvements or planning for a worldwide pandemic, we need to do better.

And California needs to puts its own house in order. It’s not OK that hundreds of thousands of people and dozens of communities must live without electricity during summer blackouts.

For Texas Republicans, California and its liberal politics have become a perennial villain. During the California blackout, Twitter was alive with Texas Republicans poking fun at California Democrats.

But politicians in Texas and California have more in common than they know (or want to know).

Both states failed to maintain systems that can sustain electrical production during times of stress and high demand. Blistering heat or withering cold, both states failed to acknowledge their obligation to prepare for sudden bursts of harsh weather.

So, what have we learned? Whether it’s a hurricane in Houston or record cold temperatures in Austin, not even Texas can avoid the adversities that come with climate change. Also, politicians need to summon the courage to tell consumers and taxpayers they must invest in the reliability of electrical systems, or face more Texas-size disasters.

Pete Golis is a columnist for The Press Democrat. Email him at golispd@gmail.com.

You can send letters to the editor to letters@pressdemocrat.com.