The second week of February saw a massive snowstorm hit a large portion of North America, wreaking unprecedented havoc. The American state of Texas specifically seems to have been hit the hardest by the storm and the carnage left in its wake. Many froze to death in the cold as state-wide power outages crippled heating systems, and the collapse of the state’s water provision infrastructure resulted in some Texans having to boil river water for survival. Many more were displaced from their houses and sent roaming in search of basic necessities as state facilities and local storages ceased functioning.

Many have voiced their concerns, however, that the disaster in Texas could have been mostly averted had certain measures been taken previously. Almost universally lambasted was the Texan government’s response to the storm, which was lacking at best. Texas Senator Ted Cruz was widely criticized for fleeing to Cancun, Mexico amidst the nation-wide disaster, leaving the people of Texas freezing while he was vacationing.

Also mentioned was the hypocrisy of Cruz, who had previously mocked the Californian Democrats’ response to the California power outages of 2020, quoting “California is now unable to perform even basic functions of civilization, like having reliable electricity.  Biden/Harris/AOC want to make CA’s failed energy policy the standard nationwide. Hope you don’t like air conditioning!” Tom Boyd, mayor of Colorado City, Texas, further stoked the outrage of the Texan populace by writing on his Facebook feed that “only the strong will survive and the weak will parish [sic].” While the post was later deleted, the impression it left on the people remained, with many condemning how detached from reality many local government officials were.

Catastrophic Counteractions

This distrust did not subside even after the Texan government finally responded to the storm. The usual response to such climate related electric failures is to pull electricity from surrounding interconnected grids. The Texan administration, however, had shot themselves in the foot several years prior in an attempt to avoid all federal restrictions on electricity production; they had completely isolated themselves electrically from all of North America. Thus, their only available option was to issue rotating outages – referring to situations where an electric grid is periodically shut down intentionally, mostly used to avoid burning out the entire system due to excess power demand – resulting in over five million Texans being stranded with no electricity in sub-zero temperatures.

Professor Shin Yong-june (Yonsei University, Department of Electrical Engineering) emphasized how Texas’s electrical isolation crippled the state’s efforts to react against the storm, while also expressing his regrets on how the Tres Amigas project – a plan to connect the Texas grid with the U.S.’s Eastern and Western grids – fell through sometime during the early 2000s.

On top of this, Professor Shin further noted how the Texan senate had passed a bill back in 2002, deregulating retail electricity providers in Texas. While the bill was marketed to be a solution to incumbent price undercutting and inflated power bills, a 2014 study by the Texas Coalition for Affordable Power (TCAP) showed that the deregulation bill, due to a vast miscalculation, had cost Texas over 22 billion United States (U.S.) dollars from 2002 to 2012. This bill would then continue on to land a coup de grâce on the freezing Texan citizenry 19 years later, as electric bills soared to record highs, costing 9000 dollars per megawatt-hour at its highest point.

“Electricity is a quintessential consumer good, while also showing the characteristics of a public good,” said Professor Shin, explaining that “the production and transportation of electricity is therefore both too complicated and inefficient for just the market to handle. Whilst the same would apply if the administrative management was to be transferred entirely to the government, it would be best to adjust restrictions to allow both parties to influence the system, in accordance with the national situation.”

Casualties of Climate Change?

Another point hotly contested by many was the previous warnings by climatologists that had gone repeatedly ignored. Judah Cohen, Director of Seasonal Forecasting at Atmospheric and Environmental Research (AER), stated that “this (the storm) is happening not in spite of climate change, it’s in part due to climate change.” He continued on, explaining how fellow scientists had previously predicted that Texas would face more abnormal climate events such as unusually long summers and stronger hurricanes.

Cohen ultimately tied the issue back to the problem of Texas’s legislation however, stating how “now that the sun is out again, nobody wants to talk about what it would cost to implement measures to address the climate crisis already underway.” What this means is that the underlying problem behind the Texas disaster encompasses not only the lack of will to prevent climate change, but also the absence of any countermeasures against the effects of climate change itself.

The combination of such multiple factors leading to the complete collapse of the emergency response of the Texan government does not limit its effects to Texas, however. Instead, it throws a question to the people outside the state, are we ready to face the same situation and come out unscathed?

Are We Ready?

This question raises further doubt with domestic readers, especially under the Moon administration’s energy policies. The constant campaign to shut down the nation’s nuclear reactors, already under fire for suspected ties to North Korea, seems even more dangerous in the face of Texas’s current dilemma. The fact that Korea – should its nuclear reactors be unilaterally shut down as the current government wants – has zero backup solutions to generate the missing power supply, makes it questionable at best whether it could survive a situation similar to Texas.

Additionally, while Korea’s temperate weather does allow it some respite in the department of climate-related disasters, Professor Shin has mentioned his worries about how Korea’s electric grid, akin to Texas, is globally isolated. He further opined on the need to consider an international electric grid that spans Northeast Asia, along with a call to review some of Korea’s power generation infrastructure in the face of global climate change.

“United we stand, divided we fall,” a phrase first written by Æsop and widely used during the American Revolution, encompasses what went wrong in Texas. It is obvious that the strategy Texas was aiming for when it instituted its electric grid and the related legal regulations was the exact opposite of this phrase. A completely self-sustaining system based on a free market may sound like a good idea on paper, but reality is not a simulation. The 2021 winter storm has made clear that the paradigm of the world has changed too much for the Lone Star State to stand on its own forever. Complete isolation is no longer a functioning system, and perhaps it is time that, Texas, and by extension everyone around the globe, learns to reach out with cooperation in mind.