The following is an excerpt from “The Green Raw Deal” chapter in Sean Spicer’s new book, Radical Nation: Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s Dangerous Plan for America.
On Monday, February 15, 2021, eleven-year-old Cristian Pavon Pineda was excitedly playing in the snow outside his family’s mobile home in Conroe, a suburb of Houston. The sixth-grader had never seen snow before. The snowstorm was more severe than any living Texans had ever experienced.
It caused massive power outages, food and water shortages, and deaths all across the state. Cristian’s home had been without electricity and heat for two days.
That night, as the temperature outside dropped to 12 degrees, Cristian’s mother bundled him up alongside his three-year-old brother under a pile of blankets. The next morning, she went in to check on Cristian and his brother—and found Cristian dead. The suspected cause: hypothermia.
The “Great Texas Blackout of 2021” took the lives of more than 80 people. Causes ranged from hypothermia to carbon monoxide poisoning to house fires to traffic accidents.
Those deaths were caused by political decisions. A decade earlier, federal regulators had explicitly warned Texas that its electric grid would likely fail under extremely cold conditions. That warning went unheeded.
The storm froze wind turbines, solar panels, and natural gas pipeline equipment. Unlike other states, Texas has its own independent power grid, separate from the two major interstate power grids.
Suddenly, the most energy-rich state in the Union could not generate its own power—and it could not import electricity from other states.
Nearby states were just as cold but kept the power on. The tragedy of the Texas blackout was partially the result of the growth of the green energy industry.
Texas conducted an experiment with a limited version of the Green New Deal: 42 percent of the state’s electricity came from wind energy. But when the storm froze half the state’s wind turbines, that figure dropped to 8 percent.
Texas lacked an adequate infrastructure of coal and nuclear power plants to make up for the sudden shortfall in renewable energy.
For decades, political leaders of both parties have enacted laws that create cash incentives to convert the power grid to renewable—and unreliable—energy sources.
Across the nation, we are retiring coal and nuclear plants in favor of undependable green energy sources. As the Wall Street Journal noted, many states:
…have renewable mandates that will force more fossil-fuel generators to shut down. New York has required that renewables account for 70 percent of state power by 2030. Then layer on Democratic policies at the federal level that limits fossil-fuel production and distribution.
When you look at the environmental and energy policies of the Biden-Harris administration, it’s clear that Joe Biden refuses to learn the lessons of the Great Texas Blackout of 2021.
President Biden and his Democratic allies are dragging the entire nation into a suicide pact with the radical environmental left. I call that suicide pact the “Green Raw Deal.”
During the first Biden-Trump debate in Cleveland on September 29, 2020, moderator Chris Wallace asked Joe Biden whether America needed to balance environmental concerns with economic concerns.
When Biden started to talk about rejoining the Paris Agreement and building green infrastructure, Trump said, “He’s talking about the Green New Deal.” Over the next few minutes, Biden made a confusing and contradictory series of statements:
“That is not my plan. The Green New Deal is not my plan.”
“The Green New Deal will pay for itself as we move forward.”
“No, I don’t support the Green New Deal.”
“I support the Biden plan that I put forward. The Biden plan, which is different than what he [Trump] calls the radical Green New Deal.”
Moments later, Twitter went wild with tweets about this statement on Joe Biden’s campaign website, which seemed to contradict the candidate’s statements in the debate: “Biden believes the Green New Deal is a crucial framework for meeting the climate challenges we face.”
Also on that webpage: “As president, Biden will lead the world to address the climate emergency and lead through the power of example, by ensuring the U.S. achieves a 100 percent clean energy economy and net-zero emissions no later than 2050.”
Whether Joe Biden embraces the crucial framework of the Green New Deal or advances his own Joe Biden version, he intends to take America down a perilous road of complete reliance on unreliable energy sources.
He intends to rerun the failed Texas blackout experiment all over again—but on a national scale and with the security and survival of the American people as the stakes.
Read more at RealClearEnergy
POLITICIAN’S ARE THE LOWEST FORM OF LIFE ON EARTH LIBERAL DEMOCRATS ARE THE LOWEST FROM OF POLITICIAN.Patton
I’ve read too much of this Green energy versus fossil fuels argument about the Texas freeze up. Years ago on a motorcycle trip, I saw energy infrastructure that lacked cladding. The explanation was that it wasn’t needed, it was the South. I accepted that.
You might expect that climate change / global warming would not push the operators to insulate their equipment against a deep freeze event. OOPS! Any rotating equipment needs cooling of some sort, natural gas compressors included. Were the cooling water lines to these vital machines insulated? No, so the compressors shut down on high lube temperature.
Don’t blame the monkey wrench, blame the monkeys.