Frost and snow in Texas have claimed dozens of lives. While some are blaming renewables for the blackouts, thousands of sea turtles have been rescued.
Since Monday 15 February, Texas, in the southern United States, has been grappling with a snowstorm that has claimed 31 lives, caused damage to buildings and brought a sharp drop in temperatures, which in some areas fell below zero. This is an exceptional situation for a state where in many areas the mercury had not dropped below ten degrees for decades. Neither humans nor other animals were prepared for this.
Texas residents, caught off guard, immediately turned on their heating, triggering a sudden surge in electricity demand that created an imbalance relative to generation capacity, forcing the company that manages the state's electricity grid (Ercot) to temporarily cut supply in some areas. The freeze also caused problems for natural gas power plants, resulting in delays to supplies. As a result, 2.7 million households were left without electricity.
Many people, including the homeless, sought shelter in reception centres, though at the risk of contracting Covid-19 due to the crowding. Videos circulating on major social networks show people wandering with their belongings in a bag, others sleeping in their cars. Those who chose to stay at home must boil their water due to malfunctions in treatment plants. Some hospitals, meanwhile, were left without water altogether. For this reason, United States president Joe Biden declared a state of emergency in Texas, heeding the appeal of Governor Greg Abbott.
Abbott, along with other Republican Party politicians, blamed the blackouts on renewable energy sources, arguing that wind turbines, for example, iced up and stopped during the storm, cutting off their electricity production. "This shows that we need fossil fuels," the governor declared on the Fox News channel. In Texas, however, clean energy still accounts for far less than the power produced by gas and coal plants, whose malfunction was therefore the real culprit.
The thesis put forward by the Republicans is aimed above all at discrediting the environmental policies adopted by Biden, who has suspended the issuing of new permits to drill on federal land, with the intention of steering the country towards renewables. Moving away from fossil fuels would, moreover, also help reduce the risk of extreme weather events: emissions must be cut to tackle climate change, which is responsible for the increasing frequency and intensity of storms. "These events are no longer so rare. We must be prepared," commented the mayor of the city of Austin, Steve Adler, of the Democratic Party.
In the meantime, the floors of the convention centre on South Padre Island, in Cameron County, became covered in shells of every size. These are the 4,700 sea turtles that had washed ashore due to extremely low ocean temperatures, recovered in an evident state of hypothermia — a condition that causes them to retreat into a kind of torpor, rendering them incapable of any movement — and rescued by staff at the research and conservation centre Sea turtle, inc. "An unprecedented phenomenon," commented director Wendy Knight to the news agency Reuters. The turtles were brought to the convention centre and laid on tarpaulins or placed in specially designed tanks, where they will have time to recover until the storm is over and their true home, the ocean, is once again ready to welcome them.
