Thread by @doctorow

The collapse of Texas's power grid during a lethal cold snap has put Texas politics under a spotlight. There's no better place to start than @deconstruct_pod, where @ryangrim delivers a historically informed, timely series of interviews.

theintercept.com/2021/02/19/dec…

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Grim reminds us that the roots of Texas's woes are in the 2002 midterms, when the GOP took the Texas House for the first time in a generation, then engaged in brutal gerrymandering to keep it, and embarked on a string of ideology-driven deregulation adventures.

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The GOP ideology holds that businesses are "efficient" because every penny they squeeze out of their costs is converted to profit. There's a kernel of truth to this - indeed, the most prominent early theorist of this was Karl Marx!

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In an unregulated market, capitalists increase profits by reducing labor and input costs, and/or by raising prices. Competition is supposed to prevent prices from going up, so when market proponents talk about "efficiency" they really mean reducing labor and input costs.

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Markets do squeeze input costs. The "dematerialization" of goods and buildings has been a steady march for more than a century - from the steel in your car to the concrete in your home to the energy consumed by your TV, the world uses less stuff and energy to make more.

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But material and energy efficiencies require innovation. Reducing labor costs, on the other hand, merely requires POWER. Capitalists whose workers are denied collective bargaining and a social safety net can squeeze wages far more easily than energy or materials.

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And of course, not all material and energy savings are created equal. It's one thing for Ikea to figure out how to shave material inputs from composite shelves by inventing better glue - it's another for a company to reduce material costs by dumping toxic waste.

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Again, the difference is between innovation and power. Making stronger, cheaper, more efficient materials requires investment in R&D. Saving by externalizing your costs - by imposing harms on others - merely requires the power to get away with it.

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The GOP experiment involves granting unlimited power to corporations, through "deregulation" - stripping worker protections, environmental protections, and operating standards. And, as our right wing friends like to remind us, "incentives matter."

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Relieved of the need to negotiate with workers, compensate the public for harms, or provide high-quality services, "the market" responds by slashing wages, harming the public, and tightening the slack in the system that allows it to cope gracefully with abnormal conditions.

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Hence "we are experiencing unexpected call volumes, please hold." That's "efficiency" - squeezing down staff levels to levels that barely cope with median load, so any bobble results in long lines. Hence aviation breakdowns when a single hub airport (like DFW) is snowed in.

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Hence a power-grid that is fully isolated from neighboring states. Hence generation facilities that were not weatherized despite multiple historical events that proved they'd be needed, someday, one as recent as 2011.

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There are windmills in northern Canada. In Norway. At the ANTARCTIC RESEARCH STATIONS. If Texas's windmills shut down during the storm, it's not because we don't know how to make cold-weather windmills - it's because allowing windmills to fail in cold weather was profitable.

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Lysenkoism was the Soviet Union's disastrous foray into politicized science. For ideological reasons, Stalin bought into the beliefs of Lysenko, who said that the traits a parent acquired in their life could be genetically passed onto their children.

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Stalin insisted on applying Lysenkoism to wheat cultivation, to prove that his ideology would work. The result was the famine of 1932-3, which killed tens of millions of people. So many people that there weren't enough survivors to count the dead.

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The Republican insistence that selfishness is optimal, that companies should only care about maximizing shareholder returns, that deregulation produces efficiencies, that states cannot perform - this is American Lysenkoism.

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American Lysenkoism is why Red States like Texas refused to lock down and have told each county to design its own vaccination and public health program. It's also why those states refuse climate science.

pluralistic.net/2020/05/03/giv…

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American Lysenkoism kills. It's why the pandemic has killed 500k Americans. It's why so many Texans are in danger of freezing to death now. It's also why Republicans - the "party of life" - are performatively refusing to care about these deaths.

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You can't be an American Lysenkoist unless you deny that we have a shared destiny. That's why climate, pandemic, energy, education and health are so confounding to conservatives. These are systems that require collective responses.

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Energy is a collective enterprise (Lenin: "Communism is soviet power plus electrification of the whole country"). It requires failover to nearby grids. It requires "overinvestment" in peak capacity. It requires cooperation and coordination to smooth out discontinuities.

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Maybe a market could accomplish this, but so far it hasn't. Instead, deregulated power systems strip out safety margins, undermaintain facilities, underinvest in improvements, and price-gouge.

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As James K Galbraith writes for @INETeconomics: "Demand for electricity is what economists call inelastic: it doesn’t respond much to price, but it does respond to changes in the weather, and at such times, of heat or cold, the demand becomes even more inelastic."

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And "Supply has to exactly equal demand every single minute of every single day. If it doesn’t, the entire system can fail."

Only a Lysenkoist could see these truths and still opt for deregulating energy.

ineteconomics.org/perspectives/b…

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Now Texas is in the grips of a double-whammy. The covid-overloaded hospitals are treating exposure and CO-poisoning cases. Potentially infectious families are doubling up in the few heated homes.

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As @mckinneykelsey writes for @DefectorMedia, Texas epitomizes America's failed love-affair with Lysenkoism, battered by climate (hurricanes, floods, freezes), pandemic without public health, and a dematerialized energy grid, destined to fail.

defector.com/texas-energy-c…

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Lysenkoism demands a hard heart. To survive watching your neighbors die for your ideology, you must somehow shift the blame to them. Small wonder that Ted Cruz feels empowered to take his germ-ridden family to a Cancun resort, abandoning his constituents.

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Tim Boyd, the Texas mayor who had to resign after telling his residents that their city owed them nothing, that the strong would survive and the weak would perish? He was just being a good Lysenkoist.

cbsnews.com/news/tim-boyd-…

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You can't embrace an ideology that kills your neighbors and still look yourself in the mirror unless you can find a way to make it all your neighbors' fault. Lysenko is a monstrous ideology, and it makes monsters of its adherents.

eof/

ETA, if you'd prefer to read or share this thread as a blog post, here's a version on pluralistic.net, free from ads, tracking or surveillance: pluralistic.net/2021/02/19/tex…