In Episode 34 of the Liberty Café, economist Robert Murphy and I revisit the Texas blackouts and look at the role renewable energy played in turning the lights off in Texas. But we don’t stop there. We take a look at how the Bible informs us of God’s wisdom about how to deal with the many public…
Posts
The Texas Legislature Should Give Texans Their Money Back
The feud between Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Gov. Greg Abbott has a new participant; Speaker of the Texas House Dade Phelan. On Monday, the Texas Senate did what few have ever witnessed: introducing, referring, hearing, and passing a bill on the same day. The bill requires the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUC) to reverse its…
The Liberty Café 33: Faith and Public Policy w/ Luke Macias
Jesus Christ is the King of all creation: “At the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” In Episode 33 of the Liberty Café, we discuss how this fact of…
The Power Hungry Podcast
I was recently a guest on Robert Bryce’s Power Hungry podcast. He wrote: “In the days immediately after the Texas Blackouts, numerous national media outlets published articles and TV segments which insisted that wind energy was not to blame for the electricity crisis. In this episode, Bill Peacock, policy director of The Energy Alliance, tells Robert about…
A $16 Billion Refund from the PUC is Not Enough
We should have seen it coming. The $16 billion (or more) of electricity overcharges in Texas seem to have caught everyone by surprise, but the truth is they had been in the works for years. For the last decade or so, the Texas Legislature and the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUC) have treated the…
The Liberty Café 32: Is Texas Government Descending into California-style Chaos?
After a year of the Texas government destroying businesses and jobs and harming millions of people, Texas’ leadership is doubling down on this dictatorial approach to dealing with pandemics. But this only follows years of Texas government defying rational thought and conservative principles, leading to events like the Texas blackouts. This week on the Liberty…
The Downfall of the Texas Electric Grid (Guest: Bill Peacock)
I recently was a guest on the Heartland Institute’s podcast hosted by H. Sterling Burnett. Here it is: Politicians interference in energy markets led to the failure of Texas’ energy grid during the polar vortex. Bill Peacock explains what went wrong. Texas politicians and regulators interference in energy markets resulted in the closure of baseload…
The Texas Electricity Market Never Had a Chance to Work During the Blackouts
If the theory that politicians are full of hot air is true, it is a wonder that the dome of the Texas capitol did not fly off into orbit last week. During hearings in both the Texas House and Senate last Thursday questioning electricity market regulators and participants about the Texas blackouts, most–though not all–legislators…
What the Bible Can Tell Us About the Texas Blackouts
The Bible may not have been the first place you turned to over the last couple of weeks to look for information about the Texas blackouts. This may be in part because some in the church today teach us that the Bible and Christianity are not really appropriate for the public square, that if we…
The Numbers Point to the Causes of the Texas Blackouts
There has been a lot of debate about why Texas had rolling blackouts last week in the midst of the historic winter storm. Poor winterization, lack of integration with the national grid, bureaucrats, deregulation, Enron’s Ken Lay, and frozen natural gas pipelines are frequent targets of politicians and media pundits for the blame. However, the…