As more than 3 million Texans are still without power for the fourth day, former Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke put the blame squarely on the Republican leaders in Texas for what he says was a failure to prepare for widespread power outages caused by a massive winter storm that slammed the State this week.
“So much of this was avoidable,” O’Rourke said during an appearance Tuesday on MSNBC. “Going back to the deregulation of our electric grid here in Texas, which has actually created an incentive to not weatherize or protect against these events.” (The state is the only one in the continental United States to operate on an independent grid. Texas had said they wanted to be ‘free of government regulation’.)
Texas officials have tried to shift the blame from everything from frozen wind turbines (false) to the Green New Deal (what? ) but most of the issues can be traced back to when Texas decided to isolate its energy grid from the rest of the US.
“The energy capital of North America cannot provide enough energy to warm and power people’s homes,” O’Rourke said. “We are nearing a failed state in Texas. And it has nothing to do with God or natural disasters. It has everything to do with those in positions of public trust who have failed us.”
Meanwhile, the Federal government is coming to the State’s aid, providing generators, water and food.