Friday, March 26, 2021

Cornpone Texas Buffoon In WSJ Claims Failure Of Wind, Solar Caused Texas Power Out - What Brand Of MJ Candy Is He Gobbling?

"This nonsense has already been debunked dozens of times. Does this right-wing propaganda rag believe its readers are this gullible?"  Poster on Reddit - reacting to WSJ op-ed that wind and solar failures caused power breakdown in TX

As we've seen during the pandemic, the WSJ op-ed pages have featured a never-ending procession of buffoons, liars, disinformationists, propagandists and just plain fools.  Their sole task: to alter the thinking and neuronal 'wiring' of enough readers to believe claptrap and codswallop.   In the latest iteration - or at least one - a Texas cornpone Repuke (Wayne Christian) is trying to convince readers that a breakdown in wind and solar generating capacity created the recent freezing fiasco in his state. See, e.g. 

Texas’ Blackouts Blew In on the Wind - WSJ

But as one Reddit responder put it, does the WSJ really believe its readers are this gullible? Well, clearly the editors (like Paul Gigot)  do so believe -   or at least that their readers lack the background information and smarts to challenge patent BS when they see it.   

According to Christian:  

"Texas taxpayers and ratepayers will shell out an estimated $36 billion by the end  of the decade to subsidize wind and solar energy. These subsidies have tripled wind and solar capacity in the Lone Star state in the past 10 years, but as Texans learned first hand during the storm there is a huge difference between capacity and generation."   

Well, of course there is, especially when you crackers and cornpones fuck up the investment in back up capacity critically needed when an extraordinary event - like the February freeze hits!  E.g.

As I noted in that post:

Ultimately, this outage, like many of the biggest blackouts before it, reflects the challenge of unanticipated events and consequences.  But it also reflects a "wholesale" market system that- in order to keep costs generally cheap- plays the margins and has deregulated to an astounding extent.  Among the benefits, the state could set goals, foster investment and expand transmission without input from other state or federal agencies.   But the downsides of the cheap energy model include NO incentive to winterize the infrastructure - whether insulating windmill turbines, or natural gas pipelines, etc.

 Thus, the  gamble taken was only advantageous until a "black swan" event occurred - such as the expanding polar vortex this past week.   The Texas system then had "bet the house" that saving investment money - by not winterizing generators, not insulating them, might work - and lost that bet

The lack of winterizing in Texas applied to both wind turbines and solar infrastructure which the Texans simply ignored, in the hope of keeping costs to consumers low.  They blew it.  Even a WSJ Business Exchange contributor (Charley Grant) skewered this twaddle just one day later in his column, e.g.

Losing Dollars by Pinching Pennies: When Short-Termism Goes Bad - WSJ

Writing:  "Severe winter weather in Texas last month froze generators' water intake facilities and knocked out power for days, snarling local economic activity in the process. Utilities were caught off guard by the weather, even though such extremes aren't entirely new.  In a business world where maximizing return on investment has long been the highest priority, corporate America has a way of costing itself big by not adequately preparing for trouble".

Mr. Grant is correct though is too polite to directly call out his WSJ buffoon counterpart like I did.  Indeed, if Christian had half a brain he'd have known that   wind makes up just a fraction — 7 percent or so, by some estimates — of the state’s overall mix of power generation.   But just like Minnesota, Texas could have insulated its wind turbines as opposed to letting them be exposed to the elements, just like it could have winterized its natural gas pipelines and solar collectors.  But it chose not to in order to keep costs down, and thus bet the house nothing terrible would happen.  It lost.  

Apart from that lapse this cornpone fool is oblivious to the fact that the main immediate problem was frigid temperatures that stalled natural gas production, which is responsible for the majority of Texas’ power supply.  Even Texas' snarky governor, Greg Abbott, admitted as much during one press conference with a local news outlet when he said:  

"The companies that generate the power, their operations have frozen up and trip wired, and become non-operational. This is why there is a lack of power, a lack of natural gas arriving at power generation centers across the state.  That's because the ability to both manufacture and transport the natural gas has been frozen also. It's been frozen in the pipeline, frozen in the rig,  frozen in the transmission line."   

Hmmm....natural gas frozen in the transmission line. But maybe Christian doesn't believe his own governor.  Still, he shouldn't be spouting boneheaded baloney without getting his facts straight. That includes raging against green ( solar and wind) subsidies when his own fossil fuel cohort are being subsidized for taking unwise risks - like in refusing to winterize infrastructure, betting the extra costs could be ignored to save $$$.   

But as Michele Wucker noted in the same WSJ Exchange Grant column:

 "Too many businesses are being subsidized for taking unwise risks when the consequences of bad decisions fall mainly on customers and taxpayers."   

 And so, as a result: "The benefits of risk taking are privatized while the consequences of the bad decisions can be socialized.

 Which is exactly what happened in Texas last month  - so Mr. Wayne Christian and the toadies on his commission could sit pretty reaping the benefits of the risk they imposed on Texans - while the hoi polloi had to suffer the consequences of their folly. Welcome to the US of A, where the real socialism is now the redistribution of suffering in the wake of corporate folly.  In the case of Texas, the folly of trying to pinch pennies to avoid investment in winterizing energy infrastructure that could have spared suffering for tens of thousands.  

But never mind, MJ candy- munching toads like Christian and his Texas Railroad Commission will keep on blaming subsidies to solar and wind power for their own stupid failures of foresight and foolish penny-pinching just to save a few bucks.  

What about the parade of WSJ op-ed liars, disinformationists and media manipulators?  Any chance of impeding their hog swill?  Not so long as demented trolls like one (D.C. Circuit Court Of Appeals) Judge Laurence Silberman (WSJ, 'Reconsidering Times vs. Sullivan, March 23, p. A14) pop off about how the WSJ's actual news section is more like a "liberal broadsheet" (like the WaPo and NYT),  while its op-ed pages - along with FOX News- are banners of journalistic fairness and objective enlightenment.  Has anyone given a dementia test to this fool lately, especially after blabbering that "a press so one-sided is dangerous to democracy."    No, judge, yellow Reich wing journalism - so full of disinformation -  is dangerous to democracy! 

But even minus Silberman's insane takes on the sources and value of real news, there will be those who defend the WSJ op-ed stable of twits (like Holman Jenkins Jr., Kim Strassel et al) as providing real insights. Thus, it is up to the reader to be aware of the mental landmines that lay in wait when s/he reads the WSJ op-ed pages.

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by Basav Sen | March 26, 2021 - 6:14am | permalink

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