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19 Feb, 13 tweets, 4 min read
1/OK, here's a thread about my beloved home state of Texas.

I strongly believe that Texas CAN be The Future if it wants to. But not if it clings to dying technologies.

noahpinion.substack.com/p/texas-vs-the…
2/Texas governor Greg Abbott is going on TV and lying through his teeth about the causes of the blackouts!

3/And this is providing fuel for culture-warrior liars like Tucker Carlson to go on a crusade against renewable energy:

4/Look, I get it. Despite having diversified a lot since the 70s, Texas is still Oil and Gas Land. Especially Houston.

I'm sure Abbott, Cornyn, etc. feel a need to defend the state's flagship industry by any means necessary.

eenews.net/stories/106008…
5/But the problem with Abbott's and Carlson's narrative is that it's just a complete lie.

Wind was only a small percent of Texas' power problems. Most was just gas, coal, and nuclear plants freezing up!

bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
6/Hell, solar plants produced more power than usual!

7/The real reason for the blackouts was that Texas' eternally-ruling Republican leaders were too short-sighted and cheap to prepare for this, even though they've known for a decade that this was coming at some point.

nytimes.com/2021/02/18/opi…
8/The fact that Canada and Scandinavia have plenty of wind power should be a clue that cold weather doesn't kill wind, by the way. You can winterize wind turbines. Texas chose not to, just like they chose not to winterize gas and nuclear.

forbes.com/sites/scottcar…
9/But anyway, back to Texas politics.

By standing in the way of renewables, Texas' Republican leaders are standing in the way of the technological future.
10/And conservative media's attempt to turn a technological issue into yet more culture-war bullshit is real failed-state kind of stuff.
11/Renewables aren't just a way to stop climate change -- they promise to make energy CHEAPER THAN IT HAS EVER BEEN, spurring a productivity boom!

THAT is what Abbott & co. are standing in the way of.

noahpinion.substack.com/p/why-im-so-ex…
12/Texas can't afford to shackle itself to the corpse of the Fossil Fuel Age.

Texans, please elect leaders who want Texas to BE the future instead of FIGHTING the future.

(end)

noahpinion.substack.com/p/texas-vs-the…
And remember, if you like this post, you can sign up for my Substack's free email list, and get stuff like this delivered directly to your inbox! 😁

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More from @Noahpinion

Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
19 Feb
1/Here's a thread about the column that Larry Summers called "the year's most naive".

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
2/Inflation is low. So why are Summers and a couple other people (like Olivier Blanchard) warning that government borrowing and spending could lead to rampant inflation?

Heck, the spending they're scared about is smaller than the CARES Act!

noahpinion.substack.com/p/larry-summer…
3/Well, my (charitable) answer is that they are afraid of a POLICY REGIME CHANGE.

To most people, "regime change" sounds like a war, but in econ, it means a change in the way policymakers make policy.
Read 19 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
18 Feb
LOLLLLLLLLL
By the way, this appears to be a reboot of the theory of "race suicide" from the early 20th century. W.S. Wallace claimed that immigrants caused native-born people to work harder and have fewer kids, this negating the effect of immigration on population.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_suic…
But note that Wallace argued that immigration lowers fertility by making people work HARDER! Carney argues that immigration lowers fertility by REDUCING work.

Remember, the only thing that matters to the anti-immigration people is the policy conclusion: Brown Men Bad.
Read 4 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
15 Feb
1/Today's Substack post is about the U.S. vaccination effort.

It's not good enough. BUT, it's better than almost the entire rest of the world!

And I don't think Americans have collectively realized this fact yet.

noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-us-vacci…
2/This is not yet enough vaccination.

New variants are spreading, some more transmissible, some more antibody-resistant. To outrun them, we need to keep ramping up both production and distribution as quickly as possible.

bloomberg.com/graphics/covid…
3/BUT, while it's not good enough yet, the U.S. is ahead of nearly every country in the world!

Israel is tops, as everyone knows. But the only sizeable country ahead of the U.S. is the UK.
Read 21 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
13 Feb
1/Today's Substack post is about Biden's chances of becoming a truly transformational president -- someone who will move U.S. economic policy onto a leftward track, as Reagan once moved it onto a rightward track.

noahpinion.substack.com/p/is-biden-the…
2/Political scientist Stephen Skowronek has a theory that says we're due for a "reconstructive" President who will define a new paradigm for the next few decades.

thenation.com/article/archiv…
3/Like most people, I thought Biden would be an incrementalist centrist who would get little done other than restoring competence and morality to the executive branch (and that alone would have been plenty of reason to vote for him!).
Read 15 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
13 Feb
1/OK folks, let's talk about BITCOIN!!

Many many people have proclaimed the death of Bitcoin over the years, but it looks like it's here to stay.

noahpinion.substack.com/p/triumph-of-t…
2/Remember the big Bitcoin bubble and crash of late 2017/2018?

Well if you bought at the TOP of that bubble, you've now TRIPLED your investment.
3/In fact, this is typical. Asset classes that experience bubbles and crashes usually recover.

Here's the NASDAQ (in inflation-adjusted terms). It's way past its 2000 bubble peak!
Read 23 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
12 Feb
1/Here's a @bopinion post about why we need a National Population Strategy.

People don't realize it, but our country is headed for the kind of rapid aging that other rich countries have experienced.

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
2/First let's talk about fertility rates.

America used to have substantially higher fertility than other rich countries. That is pretty much over.
3/Much of this is due to a huge decline among Hispanic women's fertility rates.

(Which in turn was driven by the end of large-scale Hispanic immigration.)

childtrends.org/publications/h…
Read 14 tweets

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