TEXAS WEATHER / GEOPOLITICAL FUTURES

Texas Weather

Thoughts in and around geopolitics.

By: George Friedman

Somewhere I heard the saying that climate is what you expect, and weather is what you get. I live in Texas and we certainly got weather this week. 

The climate of Texas reflects the state itself: Tornadoes, droughts, weeks where the daytime temperature never goes below 100 F, and gully washers – sudden downpours that fill the limestone aquifers below our property to overflowing and fill our gullies with roaring water. 

My favorite happened a couple of years ago when days of a biblical rain came to celebrate itself. Our house is on top of a hill, and thinks itself above much of this. 

But when we came out and went down our long and steep driveway, we met a new property covered with limestone rocks that have, over time, decided to leave for unknown reasons. It left remnants to remind us who really owns Texas.

But we have never seen anything like what happened – and is still happening – this week. Temperatures were a tad above zero, rains fell and froze. Then came snow that covered the ice. 

In the more than 20 years I have lived in Texas, I have never seen this. 

Previously, I lived in upstate New York, central Pennsylvania and Maryland, so like old memories of Washington, D.C., bars, I have a point of reference. 

But I thought I had left the places where the cold can kill you. 

We watched the herd of white-tailed deer that infests our property walking around (or lying down to cover delicate parts) and reflected that God on the whole does not create challenges that you cannot overcome.

Fairly quickly, the philosophical ruminations stopped, as power went out all around us. 

For reasons incomprehensible, it did not go out in our house, but we were the exception. 

Almost everyone we know has lost their power and water, including some well-connected people who undoubtedly thought they could bargain themselves out of this. 

But they were sitting in their cars, recharging their phones to tell us that they hadn’t had power for days. 

I was tempted to gloat, but in a war, when the dead and dying are all around you, you realize that you are alive not through any virtue but through either randomness or God’s will. 

And this is not a trivial event. Days without power, with temperatures below freezing, roads impassable and inadequate food, are not a joke.

Since this is America, and especially since this is 2021, someone must be blamed, for incompetence, corruption or perhaps a vast conspiracy. 

Stuff happens, but we want to blame someone. 

And in fact there is kind of someone to blame.

There are three electrical grids in the United States: the eastern, the western and Texas. 

Yes, Texas refused to join the national grid because it didn’t trust the federal government and because, well, they’re Texans. 

That means that drawing on the other grids is, if not impossible, complex. One much-discussed but somewhat exaggerated problem concerns wind power. 

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, Texas electricity is fairly reliant on the super ecological wind. Now, the problem is that the windmills were showered with freezing rain, and the mechanisms that turn (remember, it’s a windmill) froze, and Texas had not made any plans for the preposterous idea that they might freeze, so they contained no heating elements.

We all know now that this was stupid, and we are all certain that we wouldn’t have made that mistake. 

It’s easy to say now that the people who ran the grid should have spent large amounts of money in expectation of near-arctic weather in Texas. 

So the plan became that there would be rolling blackouts, with some neighborhoods losing power for 40 minutes, then the next and so on. Well, that didn’t work. 

The power in a neighborhood went off and stayed off, and power did as power does and didn’t heed the rapidly invented plans of the energy companies. 

So we will now have investigations, recriminations and possible indictments. (Someone must have made a lot of money from the blackout, right?)

We can all speak of the climate, but we live with weather, and weather can surprise us and break our ability to plan. 

Weather like Texas is now seeing is, if not unprecedented, at least unknown in the memory of most Texans. It is common in the north, but then they don’t have to cope with weeks of temperatures in the triple digits. 

If they got that they would be stunned, and investigations would be readied on why they didn’t plan for it.

Nature is disorderly and willful. God humbles us with what may happen that we never planned for, and was once inconceivable. We will recover from this and likely make changes, but the fact is that nature always has something new to offer us, and our ability to resist and survive is what makes us human. 

I am sitting in a heated house, not built to keep the temperature at comfortable levels in freezing conditions, but survival and comfort are very different things. There are large numbers of people confronting the lack of power in northern-type cold, unable to go to a hotel – some don’t have the money for a hotel stay, and the hotel likely wouldn’t have power anyway. 

There will be deaths, usually of the abandoned elderly. There may also be hunger, and that affects small children. 

The worst should be over shortly, but this is not the end.

Nature has enormous power over our lives, and it uses that power capriciously. And we are now in a time when nature wants to act. 

This is only Texas (never use “only” here), and it is only some cold and precipitation. 

Yet it can disrupt our lives and even kill. Climate may be under human control, but the weather is not. This weather came from nowhere, has not explained itself, and will leave when it is ready. 

And all our planning, all our task forces, all our certainties, and all our demanding makes no difference to the weather. It comes when it wants, and goes when it will. Even in Texas.

P.S. To top it off, we just received an urgent notice to conserve water to prevent a shortage