In case you had any doubts about the supposedly glorious utopian future of the cretinous “Green New Dealers”, Texas and South Australia have given us a couple of free previews.
The future of the climate emergency-besotted left is a grim and unappealing one: a world where energy is scarce, unreliable and ruinously expensive.
South Australia was completely blacked out in 2016, as wind farms across the state shut down in high winds. Widespread blackouts were repeated during a heatwave only a few months later. For the last few summers, Victoria’s grid has likewise tottered on the brink of catastrophic failure, as the state forces the shutdown of coal-fired power.
Then there’s Texas. The most energy-rich state in the US has experienced catastrophic power failures, with wind turbines frozen and solar panels blanketed in snow, even as its citizens endured record cold.
Now, to add insult to injury, Texans are being slammed with astonishing electricity bills.
The mayors of two of the largest cities in Texas said the state should help pay some of the eye-watering electricity bills sent to residents after the devastating and deadly winter storm that caused widespread blackouts.
Texas has a highly unusual deregulated energy market that allows consumers to choose between scores of competing electricity providers.
Some providers sell electricity at wholesale prices that rise in sync with demand, which skyrocketed as a record-breaking freeze gripped a state unaccustomed to extreme cold, killing at least two dozen people and knocking out power to more than 4 million people at its peak.
Still, at least some Texans were able to keep the power on. That has to be good, right?
As a result, some Texans who were still able to turn on lights or keep their fridge running found themselves with bills of $USD5000 ($6353) or more for only five days of usage, according to photos of invoices posted on social media by angry consumers.
The Dallas Morning News said one provider offering a wholesale tariff plan had urged its thousands of customers to switch suppliers ahead of the storm to avoid high prices, but many found it would take too long to change their provider.
While green types would no doubt point the finger of blame at “capitalism”, what this really seems to indicate is the sort of hybrid monster that green crony-capitalism so often breeds. Rather than “deregulated”, the market is so poorly regulated that prices are ridiculously distorted.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott called an emergency meeting of state lawmakers on Saturday to discuss the problem, saying in a statement that they had a responsibility to ensure Texans “do not get stuck with skyrocketing energy bills.”
Separately, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has issued civil investigative demands to power companies regarding the outages, their emergency plans and pricing, saying that the companies “grossly mishandled” the weather emergency.
Sydney Morning Herald
Meanwhile the high priestess of the “Green New Deal”, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is big-noting her fundraising for disaster-struck Texans. Which is a bit rich, considering that it’s the sort of lunatic policies she espouses which directly led to the disaster. In that context, her “charity” seems akin to a gangster who breaks a victim’s legs and then passes the hat around to buy them chocolates and flowers.
As ever, the green-left continues to learn nothing from the repeated, disastrous failure of their utopian ideologies.
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