Almost three years since the deadly Texas blackout of 2021, a panel of judges from the First Court of Appeals in Houston has ruled that big power companies cannot be held liable for failure to provide electricity during the crisis. The reason is Texas’ deregulated energy market.
The decision seems likely to protect the companies from lawsuits filed against them after the blackout. It leaves the families of those who died unsure where next to seek justice.
In February of 2021, a massive cold front descended on Texas, bringing days of ice and snow. The weather increased energy demand and reduced supply by freezing up power generators and the state’s natural gas supply chain. This led to a blackout that left millions of Texans without energy for nearly a week.
The state has said almost 250 people died because of the winter storm and blackout, but some analysts call that a serious undercount.
That’s communism and we are a capitalist country.
The right thing to do under a capitalist economy is to buy the government and give yourself a monopoly.
This isn’t a natural monopoly, it’s protected by legislature and cronyism.
A proper capitalist approach to utilities, then the pipes and wires need to be considered no different then the road they are installed on. Recoup money by selling metered wholesale access to the carriers and utilities.
But we don’t have proper capitalism. We have this bastardized American version that sucks.
We settled it before the damn constitution even started. How these nitwits in DC don’t see how publicly run infrastructure doesn’t provide for the common defense or promote general welfare is beyond me. But I guess running water, heat, affordable healthcare, and an ability to communicate with each other and the rest of the world doesn’t count under that, somehow.
Maybe if the courts took the founders intent from the Prologue instead of the secret letters to their mistresses, we’d have a functional system. But that’s just my opinion.
A government providing services is not communism, it’s a first-world standard.
I thought the sarcasm of my first two paragraphs was heavily laid on, but I suppose not.
I don’t disagree with you, however the majority of electoral college and senate voters agree with my first two paragraphs.
We are insistent that we must do things differently. This American Exceptionalism, as if there’s something fundamentally different between humans born inside its walls than the ones born out.
If we must be insistent that we’re different, we should at least be consistent in its application. The preamble basically implies that the ideal is exactly what you and the rest of my post is saying.
In the modern world a countries greatest strength is its ability to utilize its economies of scale. If for no other reason we should at least realize that the existing systems are unsustainably wasteful.
I’m sorry. I had someone argue something very similar to me. And since it was someone I knew IRL, I knew they were 100% serious…
You mean the dudes who owned slaves and thought that only white men were people? Ok yeah, they were righteous …
Many of them were either abolitionists or manumissionists. It’s hard to believe we had always been so conflicted since our founding (as many of the northern states had already abolished slavery before ratifying the constitution), yet still managed to have a reasonably functional government essentially made up entirely of rich white dudes who openly hated each others guts.
Also it’s easy to sit here and poo-poo the whole slavery thing now, 300 something years later. Washington got his first slaves from inheritance. When he was 11. That’s not me dismissing it, that’s just me demonstrating how normalized it was.