How To Create A Climate Disaster, Or What Happens When You Mess With Texas
Well, clearly, Mother Nature messed with Texas…and Texas froze and shut down. South Texas was reportedely colder than Alaska. The power outages, the outrageous electric bills, the burst pipes, the robber-baron-style profiteering.
How do we prevent this? It’s simple. Spend tons of money!!!! Well, that’s part of it.
What are the problems? One was getting power and water to all properties. While Texas maxed out its electrical capacity, California was sitting pretty with lots of extra energy…if only Texas could get to it!
Two, Texas’ power grid is designed to charge as much as humanly possible during peak demand. Uber would call this ‘surge pricing’. Everyone else would call it ‘price gouging’.
My idea to fix this is weird.
Step 1: Make all utilities a public corporation. Public as in government-owned. I want to take the profit motive and price gouging out of the American utility market.
Also public as in on the stock market. Here’s why. I want to leverage private funding to buy what is a government-owned monopoly. Let people purchase shares and build the system. This defrays the cost of the infrstructure rebuild that needs to happen.
Step 2: Create a wide grid. It’s necessary in order to avoid interruptions in service. Not just for electricity, for water and gas as well. How wide? Include Canada and Mexico. This covers a giant area! 8.4136 million square miles. That allows utilities to run free between these places that have extra resources to the areas that need them the most. This will also keep costs down.
Step 3: Renew. Not just adding green capacity, but also upgrading old equipment, lines, pipes, etc. It’s necessary. Adding additional capacity won’t work without doing steps 1–3, especially in Texas.
Step 4: Upgrade: Let’s also make sure that we can add enough internet, cable and cell phone capacity for emergency services and residential and commercial surges.
The government would not do ‘last-mile’ service for some things, so there would still be companies around to provide services. I don’t think people want to go to City Hall to buy the latest cell phone, for instance.
