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Comment by ipv6ipv4 | Hacker News Reader

A social political decline is what happened and continues to happen.

When California encountered power issues, it was easier for Texas politicians (and many of their followers) to espouse malicious soundbites about Commifornia than to empathize, offer support and self reflect on what lessons can be learned and applied locally.

Now that Texas is reaping its own fruits of decades of anti-"other side" politics and political mismanagement it's all too easy for whatever "other side" to treat Texas with the same derision and malice instead of empathy and support.

The government run Texas grid is ill prepared because the responsible parties are more interested in playing division politics than in governing.

Cold and snow are not novel, it's not a technical problem.

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Please don't take HN threads further into regional flamewar. We're trying for something opposite to that here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Governing is hard. Owning the libs/cons is fun and easy!

Anyway seems like this storm is so bad Texas would be in trouble no matter what, but letting utilities under-invest in winterizing and not joining either of the major grid corridors just made a bad situation 100x worse.

The good news is this is fixable going forward, and hopefully Texans will demand their politicians address it.

If you invest in winterizing and the winter doesn't come till the next election your opposition will have you voted out.

Yes governing is hard.

>Anyway seems like this storm is so bad Texas would be in trouble no matter what, but letting utilities under-invest in winterizing and not joining either of the major grid corridors just made a bad situation 100x worse.

The weather in Texas is in the single digits. The weather in Minnesota is in the double digit negatives.

Texas would not be in trouble "no matter what" if they had bothered to spend the money on winterizing their power plants. They chose not to, and this is the end result.

The roads shut down due to lack of snow removal is completely understandable - and quite frankly most people should be perfectly capable of surviving in their homes for a week if they have heat and water.

The lack of updating power plants so they can function in below-freezing weather is just straight incompetence. This type of weather isn't some 1,000 year storm. They have extended below freezing temperatures on a fairly regular basis.

The most bizarre part is people referring to this as a once in a century storm. It’s more like a once in a decade or 15 years storm, seeing as similar temperatures were seen in 2011 and 1989. Things that happen on that cadence shouldn’t result in people freezing for days in their homes.

From what I understand the average low temperature in Texas around this time usually doesn't go below 30-35 degrees. Meanwhile the average high temperature around this time doesn't get above 20-35 degrees in Minnesota.

To demand every state spend the same resources that Minnesota does to winterize their infrastructure is completely unrealistic.

>This type of weather isn't some 1,000 year storm.

Not according to this professor of meteorology:

>“We’re living through a really historic event going on right now,” said Jason Furtado, a professor of meteorology at the University of Oklahoma, pointing to all of Texas under a winter storm warning and the extent of the freezing temperatures.

https://apnews.com/article/2-dead-texas-subfreezing-winter-w...

>From what I understand the average low temperature in Texas around this time usually doesn't go below 30-35 degrees. Meanwhile the average high temperature around this time doesn't get above 20-35 degrees in Minnesota. To demand every state spend the same resources that Minnesota does to winterize their infrastructure is completely unrealistic.

I don't recall saying every state, I said Texas. Because this type of weather happens on a somewhat regular basis.

>Not according to this professor of meteorology:

I guess finding a soundbite from one individual isn't very interesting to me. The entire state of Texas was told in a report in 2011 after a similar storm that they needed to winterize their power plants and chose not to. If by "historic" you mean "first time in 10 years" - I guess? I don't really consider that "historic".

>Ed Hirs, an energy fellow in the Department of Economics at the University of Houston, blamed the failures on the state’s deregulated power system, which doesn’t provide power generators with the returns needed to invest in maintaining and improving power plants.

Is Texas as a state poorer than Minnesota or something? What makes it unrealistic, other than laziness?

It's not more taxing on Minnesota to implement the infrastructure than anyone else

It's as unrealistic as it is to expect a credit agency to encrypt their data, because credit agencies don't get hacked

As a Californian, it is also very easy to espouse malicious soundbites about our self inflicted dysfunction...

What can we, private citizens with entrepreneurial skill and talent, do to combat this partisan schadenfreude?

Stop giving cover to politicians that think government always sucks and private business is always better?

I think that's true most of the time, but not when it comes to things like this. Preparing for a once in decades event is something private business has a hard time doing without getting eaten by more aggressive competitors. The only way to get this kind of preparedness is to have it be part of the level playing field (i.e. regulation/government).

What can we do with our unique skills that every other American cannot?

I don't understand where you are going with this. I can think of two significant things that would make sense to do here:

- More transmission lines with the rest of the US to spread the load.

- Improve the natural gas infrastructure to better withstand freezing temperatures.

Neither one of these things are about unique skills, let alone ours.

besides getting a government job and not participating in partisanship?

Vote?

Get rid of party primaries and move to ranked choice, approval, or straight ranked voting, like Alaska did.

That goes both ways. It seems like you can’t live in CA without shitting on the middle of the country despite the govt here being in worse shape generally.

the weather patterns induced by climate change are novel though

Novel, but predictable (and, indeed, they were predicted decades ago, which should have given plenty of time to prepare).

They make weather extremes more common, but those weather extremes have always existed.

No, the extremes not only get more frequent, but also more intense.

I believe they are also more intense, summer temps are record breaking every year

Couldn't agree more. It's like "where can I vote for a political party that just wants government to work." I know that's kind of an amorphous statement, but I do feel like both sides are more interested in tribal warfare and ideological battles than functioning government. Republicans have long derided "government is the problem", until they find out citizens really want government to work when it comes to things like ensuring reliable power delivery or distributing vaccines during a pandemic. On the flip side, I feel like Democrats are so keen on social justice issues that they ignore policies most people actually want to keep in their cities, like a functioning police force and streets not covered in homeless encampments.

It's just so depressing that the extremes control more and more of the political discourse.

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