Texas, you just got punked by Mother Nature. Californians know climate change is real

It would be tempting for Californians to gloat about the difficulties Texans faced this past week amid power outages caused by unusually frigid weather.

It was just last August that California endured rolling blackouts when a heat wave baked the state. Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz tweeted then that “California is now unable to perform even basic functions of civilization, like having reliable electricity.” Nearly 1 million people were affected.

Snow and ice brought widespread misery to Texas this past week, however, with temperatures staying below freezing as far south as Houston. At one point, 4 million Texans were without power, unable to heat their homes or keep their food from spoiling in refrigerators left idle. Water pipes froze and burst inside residences. Some people took to burning their kids’ toy blocks to stay warm. Texans had to boil water to make it safe to drink.

This time, Cruz was humbled. “I got no defense,” he tweeted Tuesday.

This is how climate change can bring states as big and powerful as California and Texas to their knees.

Cold, yet warming planet

As counterintuitive as it appears, the deep freeze in Texas is the result of changes wrought by the warming planet, scientists say. The mass of bitterly cold air that would normally sit over the Arctic instead dropped south into the middle of America.

Now, as warmer days are forecast and the thawing starts, key takeaways are these:

▪ States and nations that ignore the impact of climate change on their utility systems do so at their own peril.

▪ Doubling down on using fossil fuels to generate power — the very sources that cause climate change in the first place — is a non-starter. Instead, efforts to develop renewable, clean energy must be accelerated.

California’s goal is to rely on 100% clean power by 2045. Texas has substantial wind and solar power now, but still gets most of its energy from coal and natural gas. Republican Gov. Greg Abbott made false statements on Fox News that solar and wind power systems were to blame for Texas’ latest woes. The real culprits were the natural gas power plants and related systems that did not function properly in the chill.

“I would call it a bit of karma for some of the officials in Texas and elsewhere who were saying California doesn’t know how to run a grid,” Severin Borenstein, of California’s Independent System Operator, told Dale Kasler of The Sacramento Bee.

Power grids need improvements

In reporting on the Texas cold spell, Los Angeles Times climate specialist Sammy Roth said, “Extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and more severe as the climate crisis worsens. And the U.S. power grid is not prepared to handle the hotter heat storms, more frigid cold snaps and stronger hurricanes of a changing planet.”

California has big ambitions for its renewable energy future. Besides being all clean by 2045, the sale of new gas- and diesel-powered vehicles will be banned 10 years earlier. That will require an extensive network of electric charging stations to power all the new electric vehicles.

But as last year’s heat wave confirmed, renewable energy supplies could not meet California’s air conditioning demand during still-hot evening hours.

It is good to know California’s Public Utilities Commission has ordered PG&E Corp., Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas and Electric to secure additional power supplies in preparation for the coming summer.

Even if that happens, technological improvements to power storage are badly needed to cover the times when renewable sources fall short. California’s elected leaders need to focus attention on this.

For most of last week, California was one of the few states untouched by big chill across the nation.

But, “we shouldn’t feel smug,” said Jim Bushnell, a member of the Independent System Operator.