I’m writing from Texas so I’ll try to finish this column before the electricity goes out.
As you may have heard, we’ve had an unusually powerful winter storm here, and despite the fact that every third household has a four-wheel-drive super-duty pickup, Texas has come to a halt. When a tiny bit of ice settled on the highway, half a dozen people were killed in the subsequent stack of 135 cars.
Meanwhile, after years of mocking Californians for their self-imposed energy woes, Texans are experiencing rolling blackouts – and a whole lot of blackouts that refuse to roll on but instead stubbornly stay in place – as our power grid spike in demand for .
As in California, Texas energy scarcity is largely artificial: the state produces an extraordinary amount of natural gas, but there has been a woeful underinvestment in infrastructure ranging from pipelines to winter equipment at utility companies. You might as well not have the fuel at all if you can’t get it where it’s needed, or use it once it’s there.
What Texas has invested in is renewables, especially wind. These have performed particularly poorly: the state’s power grid regulator reports that while wind and solar still make up a relatively small portion of the state’s total energy mix, they accounted for 40 percent of the capacity generated by the storm was shut down: of the 45 gigawatts that went dark, 18 gigawatts came from wind and sun.
Wind is a good bet for Texas in many ways, especially in the western and northern parts of the state, the Saudi Arabia of storms. The sunny parts of the state also generate quite a bit of solar energy, which is welcome too. The problem is that these power sources are unreliable. Solar panels don’t work with a few inches of snow on top, and an icy storm can cause those huge wind turbines to freeze and stop working. Right now, most of those Texas turbines aren’t working power sources – they’re modern art.
It may seem perverse to think of global warming when it’s so cold outside, but the situation in Texas is an immediate answer to that question. There are disputes about climate policy in good faith.
The Left wants to use the threat of climate change as a permit to reshape the entire economy and government along its preferred lines – energy policy, yes, but also everything from transportation to architecture, and from labor law to foreign relations and trade. The argument for replacing natural gas electricity with wind and solar is that reducing our use of fossil fuels, if the practice were widespread enough, could help mitigate the effects of the climate change that is already underway.
But there is another way of looking at the question. If the predictions are accurate and we will experience more extreme weather events, including unusually powerful winter storms, then it may be better to invest in adaptation than in the much-uncertain project to severely limit greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, a global effort that supports the willing and require fair cooperation from countries like India and China, which are unlikely to comply.
We have a lot of natural gas in the United States, but we have an infrastructure that is inadequate, making much of that fuel useless in a situation like this. We need more oil and gas pipeline capacity instead of less – an issue the Biden administration is on the wrong side of. Gas-fired power plants are much cleaner than coal-fired power plants, and they depend on a fuel that we have in abundance. We should add gas-fired generation capacity on a large scale. And instead of trying to figure out how to run a modern industrial economy on pixie dust and unicorn power, we could invest some of that money to make sure that the infrastructure we already have is functioning under the conditions we can. expect.
Of course we could add a lot of electricity capacity at a very low carbon cost, if we were so inclined: that means more nuclear power – which, unlike wind and solar power, provides a reliable basis for generation. The new flexible reactors being developed by Bill Gates’ TerraPower could be a game-changer – and the challenges facing nuclear power are more a matter of finance and regulation than science and engineering. Making it easier to bring nuclear power online is something that can be resolved by policy.
Climate change, despite the insistence of some of my conservative friends, is not a fraud. But giving in to its reality is not the same as giving in to the far-reaching plans of the left, right down to the so-called Green New Deal. Instead, we should look at making intelligent, economic decisions that maximize the use of the desirable resources we already have at our disposal, balancing environmental issues with other pressing questions, such as the ability to protect the homes of Americans keep their lights heated and there is a little snowfall in San Antonio.
Kevin D. Williamson’s book “Big White Ghetto: Dead Broke, Stone-Cold Stupid, and High on Rage in the Dank Woolly Wilds of the ‘Real America'” (Regnery) is out now.