The fact that Texas has huge exploitable oil reserves is an accident of geology, not a political stance.

If you drive I20 west through Dallas and on toward Midland and Odessa, you will come to the Permian Basin. From there to I20’s merge with I10, the air will smell like a can of motor oil much of the time and at night the land will extend to the horizon with mercury vapor lights of pump jacks every few hundred yards.

Of course it’s West Texas and not many people go out that way - it’s the road from Atlanta to El Paso - making it out of sight; out of mind.

And if you take I10 west out of New Orleans, after the refineries of Louisiana, you will see refineries from the border to Houston and Port Arthur. Open your mouth and you might just taste the air.

The post colonial history of Texas is people arriving to extract its resources. The oil may just be chance. The roughnecks and their oil pumps are deliberate.

But has resulted in many oil companies being based there, which means lots of money flowing to politicians, which DOES make it a political stance.

'member Halliburton? ExxonMobil?

Virtually every large US-based oil company is headquartered in Houston.

And certainly not just domestically either, if you look at where much of the technical expertise came from that set up the modern organization of Saudi Aramco. Houston, mostly.

Uh, how is it not?

Texas produces 41% of US oil, more than 4x any other state.

They also dominate refinery capacity.

Sounds like Texas is a bastion of energy.

Maybe even the energy capital of the world.

> Sounds like Texas is a bastion of energy.

Sounds to me they are the bastion of the energy industry.

Which are historically the main opponents of any concern regarding climate change.

an opponent wouldn't be the top wind producer in the country and second in solar.

Only because all the original climate change activists were stridently anti-growth / borderline misanthropes.

And obviously the energy industry is firmly in the "growth" camp.

Yes, but if you think they'd put a price on carbon anytime soon then I have a bridge to sell you.

They're a bastion of climate denial, and bringing up their wind power is irrelevant whataboutism.

Except, wind lost generation capacity in the cold, just as all other forms of energy generation did.

Is it possible that warming temperatures in the oceans weren't considered to be an issue when we first started seeing arctic air being blown further south by the jetstream due to a changing climate from anthropogenic carbon sources? Possibly. There are certainly mitigation mechanisms they could have invested in. If the public heard their taxpayer dollars or utility fees were being wasted on winterizing efforts in notoroiously hot Texas, even if there were responsible decision-makers, their hands were tied at risk of being shamed for wasteful spending in the court of public opinion.

It is still a shame that they're left out in the cold, so to speak. Hopefully they can come up with more sensible remedies, if not out of a change of ideology, perhaps a sense of practicality?

> If the public heard their taxpayer dollars or utility fees were being wasted on winterizing efforts in notoroiously hot Texas

This is a direct consequence of the climate change denial coming, to a great extent, directly out of those same lawmakers.

If the public had instead been informed about the likely extreme weather events that will be brought about by climate change with the same zeal that they are being lied to today, this type of spending could have easily been presented as necessary.

Instead of taking this crisis as a time or reckoning, we're of course seeing everyone doubling down on this, insisting that it's proof global warming isn't happening and all the expected bs.

No one gets votes for disaster preparedness.

> Myopic Voters and Natural Disaster Policy

> Do voters effectively hold elected officials accountable for policy decisions? Using data on natural disasters, government spending, and election returns, we show that voters reward the incumbent presidential party for delivering disaster relief spending, but not for investing in disaster preparedness spending. These inconsistencies distort the incentives of public officials, leading the government to underinvest in disaster preparedness, thereby causing substantial public welfare losses. We estimate that $1 spent on preparedness is worth about $15 in terms of the future damage it mitigates. By estimating both the determinants of policy decisions and the consequences of those policies, we provide more complete evidence about citizen competence and government accountability.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-s...

Well, your source doesn't necessarily contradict my claim. If there had been similarly competent propaganda on the risks of more and more extreme cold events due to global warming, to the same extent as climate change denial propaganda, perhaps the trend in this study might change.

>Except, wind lost generation capacity in the cold, just as all other forms of energy generation did.

They don't in Iowa, or North Dakota. Or anywhere north, where they spend a few extra dollars to make sure they can handle the cold

Right... because getting cold is normal in those places.