Boot Hill

According to KTXS in Abilene, Texas, "Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry says that Texans find massive power outages preferable to having more federal government interference in the state's energy grid." And okay, I can live with that. Maybe Texans are really big on self-sufficiency, and if that means having an efficient power grid that lacks resiliency, that's their choice. People have chosen less rational hills to die on. Personally, if I were going to take pride in a statewide energy grid, I wouldn't choose widespread blackouts in the middle of Winter to make that point, but to each their own.

There's nothing wrong to selecting a hill and deciding to make one's last stand there. Of such tales are legends made. But if other people on that hill with you, it's something of a different story. While Texas lawmakers are busily pointing fingers at renewable energy as the source of their state's energy woes and swearing eternal fealty to fossil fuels, people are freezing to death, both in homes and outside of them. I'm not sure that many Texans would tell former Governor Perry that they'd rather die a miserable death than have federal regulation of the power grid.

I'm not going to fault anyone for letting their pride call the shots. I've certainly done that on occasion, even when wisdom quite clearly dictated otherwise. I've just been fortunate in that I've (hopefully) learned better without anyone going down with me.