I am very sorry if you’re one of the hundreds of thousands of people in the state of Texas (USA) who are suffering without power right now, on February 18th, 2021. It is likely a dire situation for quite a few people, and probably quite unanticipated. This could be a new normal for at least a while – what do you wish you had done differently to be prepared for grid outages? This makes me think of the doomsday preppers who have spent years getting ready for what they call ‘SHTF’ – the time when society collapses. I’ve always said that the doomsday preppers were right for the wrong reasons – I think that their efforts to prepare for the collapse of society will help them deal with climate change much more successfully, even though they often don’t believe in climate change. For instance, doomsday preppers probably had water, food and backup energy sources ready to go when this awful weather hit Texas. I wonder if there are other ways to manipulate right-wingers to do the right thing by constructing some conspiracy theory that would get them to do the right thing, like convincing them that gasoline powered cars are endorsed by the devil or something, so that they’d all go buy electric vehicles?
I attended a lecture at a Skepticon conference some years ago that encouraged us all to have a Pre-Apolcalypse party with our neighbors, to encourage everybody to think about and actually take actions to prepare themselves for increasingly unpredictable and severe weather events that, until we became accustomed to them, would interrupt the modern just-in-time systems that we have become used to, that we expect to meet our needs whenever we want them to – always available fresh food in always open grocery stores, always on energy sources delivered to our homes, always passable roadways with always available gas stations, and on and on. It’s public knowledge that enemies of the United States have been learning ways to attack our energy grids, so mother nature isn’t the only one we need to fear. But knowledge is power, and this severe weather needs to be a good test case to show us what we need to do harden our infrastructure for a better tomorrow.
Please check out these different disaster-preparedness websites here and here today, so you can have peace of mind now and later!
SolarRationalist 