Texas is being hit with record temperatures and escalating energy prices as cold weather has caused over 4 million customers to be without power and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the stateâs independent system operator which manages about 90 percent of the stateâs electric load, has found itself unprepared for the onslaught, losing wind turbines to icy conditions and gas lines to freezing temperatures. Furthermore, natural gas for heating homes and businesses is given priority over electrical generation and industrial supply needs, which limits natural gas supplies available to generating units.
About 30 gigawatts of capacity in Texas is not operable due to the weather conditions, and downed distribution lines are adding to the problem of getting electricity to customers. Nuclear and coal plants could help save the people in Texas from the freezing weather, but there is insufficient capacity as competition from subsidized renewable technologies and low cost na
What is the most we should take from a poor person to make somebody who is already four times as rich two-thirds of a percent richer yet? Most of us would probably argue for zero. If it does not seem fair to take anything from a poorer person to add less than one percent to the income of a much richer person, then you may need to rethink climate policy.
William Nordhaus, who is the only climate economist to win a Nobel prize, lays out the tradeoffs in the introduction to the model he created to analyze the impacts of CO2 emissions, climate change, and climate policy. If we do nothing to address CO2 emissions, he projects that (after adjusting for inflation and climate damage) annual world per capita consumption will rise from $8,768 in 2020 to $36,819 in 2100 and to $95,981 in the year 2200. Though I am sure even Nordhaus would not defend the precision of these estimates to five significant figures, other projections show income increasing by similar magnitudes. For instan