My cousins played a frigid version of the childhood game, musical chairs, last week — moving from one family’s house to another family’s house for heat and electricity. Like millions of other Texans, they were left to fend for themselves when ERCOT, the state’s independent utility company, failed during an epic snow-ice storm that brought freezing temperatures more typical of the Northeast.
My family members live in homes within a few miles of each other and kept moving between their three houses in the first days of the outage as the power came and went at each place. Fortunately for them, the power was never out long enough at any of their places for their food to spoil or their pipes to freeze. Lucky, I know.
And seriously lucky that they didn’t live near Dallas, one of the hardest-hit areas where thousands of residents were without power, some for nearly a week. By the weekend everybody in my relatives’ suburban Houston neighborhood was enjoying warm sunshiny 80-degree temperatures. Glad to have the freezing cold behind them. “How do you do it?” my cousin Drexel asked, wondering how I navigate a regular season of snow and bitter temperatures.
The ERCOT breakdown was at its peak when Sen. Ted Cruz booked his now infamous trip to Cancun to escape the cold linked to 15 deaths, one of them an 11-year-old boy who froze to death in his mobile home bed. The Senator taunted California officials last year, blaming the wildfires on the state’s Democratic leadership. But this time local residents turned on Cruz and Gov. Greg Abbott for claiming the disaster was connected to the failure of the state’s renewable energy sources — all 10 percent of it. But, not the 90 percent of fossil fuel energies like gas and oil for which Texas is well known.
Scientists have long predicted that the increase in climate change would lead to extreme weather events. They’ve been watching the jet stream slowly weaken, a weakening tied to a faster warming of the Arctic and more freezing temperatures in southern areas like Texas. Judah Cohen of Atmospheric and Environmental Research emphasized to The Guardian newspaper, “This is happening not in spite of climate change, it’s in part due to climate change.” No matter. My cousin told me there wasn’t enough storm motivated fervor to force big changes in reducing widespread fossil fuel usage. “Why not?” I asked him, “Money” he said, noting “now that the sun is out again,” nobody wants to talk about what it would cost to implement measures to address the climate crisis already underway. Last September, in a climate assessment report, scientists predicted that Houston summers will be longer and hotter, and the area hurricanes stronger.
Donations of food and drinkable water have poured in to help strapped storm victims. And six top ERCOT Board members to date have resigned as Abbott has pledged an overhaul of the utility. My cousin doesn’t think much of the lawmaker’s pledges to make necessary changes to Ercot. He’s biding his time waiting for the right moment to buy a generator.
