SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
national weather service
Don’t Let the GOP Run the Summer Camp
A well-run camp strikes me as a reasonable analogue for a well-run society, in that it attempts to maximize opportunity while minimizing risk. Those things are always in a certain amount of tension, and balancing that tension is a big reason why we form governments and adopt rules.
No honest person can deny there’s real danger from a heating climate, and real opportunity from clean, cheap renewable power.
So, for example, going for a swim is a slightly perilous thing—we’re not really water-evolved creatures, and drowning is surprisingly easy. But swimming and sailing and waterskiing are great fun, and so we’ve figured out ways to lower the risk: We teach kids how to swim, we assign them swim buddies, we have lifeguards. As we learn more, we change those rules—my mother, for instance, was a devout believer in the conventional wisdom that required waiting half an hour (not a second less) after eating before you could jump in the pool, but it turns out that actual data shows that’s unnecessary. On the other hand, we understand a lot more about why you shouldn’t go in a lake with blue-green algae, and so we both close down beaches and try to clean up the pollution that causes it.
Camp’s not a perfect analogy for society, of course. Most of us are adults, and at least theoretically better equipped to make our own decisions, and the thing we’re most bent on maximizing is not fun but wealth (probably a mistake, but there it is). Still, unless we’re true libertarians we acknowledge the need to address risk and opportunity in some sensible fashion. Which we’re not doing at the moment. The huge budget bill that finally passed last week is a perfect example.
The Republicans who passed it—and this was an entirely Republican operation, stem to stern—clearly wanted to maximize the wealth of rich people: the most affluent 1% of families will receive a trillion dollars in new income. (This is the camp equivalent of giving almost all the s’mores to one or two kids). In return they were willing to embrace a wide variety of risks: not just the risks posed by a higher deficit in a time when we’re not at war or in recession, but the risk that comes from $930 billion in cuts to Medicaid. That will cause rural hospitals to close, for instance, making healthcare much harder to access and in the process surely endangering large numbers of lives. Or the 20% reduction in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program funding for food assistance, which will clearly raise the risk of people going hungry.
The only risk they really seemed to care about was violent crime by immigrants—that was the justification for tripling the Immigration and Customs Enforcement budget so we can have a quantum increase in the number of guys with neck gaiters shoving people into vans. This is not just immoral, it’s statistically dumb, the equivalent of waiting half an hour to swim: Immigrants are highly unlikely to be violent criminals compared with native-born Americans. If violent crime was your concern, you’d be better off deporting lots and lots of Americans and filling the returning planes with generally more peaceable immigrants. (But let’s don’t do that either).
And of course they’ve chosen to ignore one huge category of risk entirely—the risk (really at this point more a guarantee) that we’re going to damage in extraordinary ways the climate that sustains us. Consider Chip Roy, the congressman whose district was so damaged in the floods. He has been vehement in his opposition to subsidies or mandates or anything else that might help clean energy, and he has voted for everything that might help the fossil fuel industry. Let’s assume he’s acting in good faith, and not responding to the more than $671,788 in campaign contributions from the hydrocarbon industry. (Not perhaps a wise assumption, but it’s a day for acting in good faith). He’s expressed himself on this exact question of comparative risk, in a 2018 article in the San Antonio paper when he made his first run for Congress.
He explained that, in essence, he wanted to maximize the wealth and fun that came with hydrocarbons:
What I know is that our lives are made so immeasurably better by the availability of affordable, abundant energy.
And he said that he thought the risk was low, at least relative to the benefits of fossil fuels.
My belief is that the net positive impact of energy production relative to whatever the question-mark impact is on CO2 (carbon dioxide), to me, comes out very much on the positive.
Again, let’s take him in good faith. So—since 2018 two things have changed.
One is that it’s become ever more clear exactly how dangerous climate change is: Just in the past few days we’ve had a new report from the United Nations on how drought is devastating unprecedented swaths of the planet (“this is not a dry spell. This is a slow-moving global catastrophe, the worst I’ve ever seen,” one of its authors explained), had new data from the Antarctic on how rising salinity in the Southern Ocean is melting yet more polar ice (“we may have passed a tipping point and entered a new state defined by persistent sea ice decline, sustained by a newly discovered feedback loop”), and had firsthand accounts of life in the broiling European heatwave (“like swimming in soup.”)
The second thing that’s changed is that it is now far cheaper to use renewable energy than fossil fuels—the price of solar and wind has dropped almost 90% since that 2018 interview, and batteries that make them round-the-clock fuels are now cheap too. You know who realizes this? Energy regulators in Texas, where renewables are growing faster than anywhere in the country.
The famously developer-friendly Lone Star State has struggled to add new gas power plants lately, even after offering up billions of taxpayer dollars for a dedicated loan program to private gas developers. Solar and battery additions since last March average about 1 gigawatt per month, based on ERCOT’s figures, Texas energy analyst Doug Lewin said. In 2024, Texas produced almost twice as much wind and solar electricity as California.
When weather conditions align, the state’s abundant clean-energy resources come alive—and those conditions aligned last week amid sunny, windy, warm weather. On March 2 at 2:40 pm CST, renewables collectively met a record 76% of ERCOT demand.
Then, on Wednesday evening, solar production started to dip with the setting sun. More than 23,000 megawatts of thermal power plants were missing in action. Most of those were offline for scheduled repairs, but ERCOT data show that nearly half of all recent outages have been “forced,” meaning unscheduled.
At 6:15 pm CST, batteries jumped in and delivered more than 10% of ERCOT’s electricity demand—the first time they’ve ever crossed that threshold in the state.
“Batteries just don’t need the kind of maintenance windows that thermal plants do,” said Lewin, who authors The Texas Energy and Power Newsletter. “The fleet of thermal plants is pretty rickety and old at this point, so having the batteries on there, it’s not just a summertime thing or winter morning peak, they can bail us out in the spring, too.”
In other words, right there in Texas renewable power is the cheapest and most reliable way to have what Roy calls the “affordable, abundant energy” that makes our “lives so immeasurably better.” For me, these sets of facts should be enough. No honest person can deny there’s real danger from a heating climate, and real opportunity from clean, cheap renewable power (the rest of the world has clearly figured this out).
But either Roy hasn’t been paying attention to the new landscape, or those campaign contributions are too sweet, or the grip of ideology too strong. Roy not only voted to end all support for what he called, in a press release, the “Green New scam,” he also voted to close down the various programs of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service that even try to monitor the effects of climate change and warn us about emergencies like the weekend’s floods. (A good Times story reiterated something we talked about a few weeks ago in this newsletter: Many of the necessary posts at the relevant NWS offices were vacant). In summer camp terms, he and his colleagues fired the lifeguards and pulled in the buoy ropes that mark the safe place to swim, while declaring the buddy system to be socialism. Sink or swim on your own—even after the floods he called for “fewer bureaucrats” as the best response to the nightmare.
If an experience like this close to home won’t open his eyes, then we have to organize to make sure that people like him aren’t returned to office—both in an effort to help slow global warming, and, at this point, in an effort to help us survive what we can no longer avoid—an effort that will require solidarity, not the selfish solipsism that is the mark of MAGA.
Earth Day in 1970 turned into a (highly successful) drive six months later to defeat a ‘dirty dozen’ Congressmen. Hopefully the energy that comes out of SunDay in September will have something of the same effect. Our new poster came out today. Join in the effort at sunday.earth
Most Popular