Neoliberalism is messing with texas The deregulation of Texas’s electrical grid is a haven for conservative lawmakers’ policies of free trade and low taxes. Even the Democratic Party leaders are enthralled by privatization, and this might have dire consequences in our climate change policies.
words by Meredith Clark | art by Jenny Katz & photos from Claudia Pharr
O
n Monday, Feb. 15, Claudia Pharr and the rest of San Antonio woke up to four inches of snow, the most that the city had seen since 2017. The Texas winter storm this past February ravaged the state with subfreezing temperatures, leaving nearly five million homes and businesses without heat or power. As snow seeped through the windows of her one-bedroom home, blankets were one of the only sources of warmth Pharr could find, but even bundled up, she was still so exposed to the below-freezing temperatures that the blankets felt wet. The weekend before the storm hit, Pharr and her fellow employees at the Housing First Community Coalition in San Antonio, where she works in development and case management, scrambled to find hotel rooms and bus passes for their unhoused clients. The rolling blackouts began in Pharr’s neighborhood Sunday night: first just 30 minutes of no power, then three hours, and some homes went without power for three days. In an effort to keep warm and charge her phone, Pharr (and her cats) piled together in her car as she listened to Texas Public Radio. It was then that she learned
about Texas’s electrical grid system, called ERCOT, and of Senator Ted Cruz’s brief family vacation to Cancún, Mexico. By March, it was reported that a total of 111 people died from the winter storm, the majority from hypothermia and others from carbon monoxide poisoning. As Texans froze to death in their homes, cars, and on the street, social media roared with tweets roasting Senator Cruz’s not-so-stealthy escape to Cancún — and even bullied him into flying back to Texas. With Cruz blaming his young daughters for his own badlytimed decision, telling the press they “asked to take a trip with friends,” the jokes wrote themselves. Other jokes, however, fell flat. On Feb. 16, author Stephen King tweeted, “Hey, Texas! Keep voting for officials who don’t believe in climate change and supported privatization of the power grid! Maybe in 4 years you can vote for Trump again. He believes in the latter but not the former. Perfect.” King, who seldomly leaves his reclusive retreat in Maine, insinuated that Texans were at fault for the mass power outage, a 130-car pile up on Interstate 35, and a failing infrastructure unfit for these winter weather conditions. The reality is that Texas
