https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210216/08491746253/texas-power-phone-outages-again-highlight-how-infrastructure-underinvestment-will-be-fatal-moving-forward.shtml

If you hadn't noticed, the United States isn't really prepared for climate change. In part because corporations and disinformation mills have convinced countless Americans a destabilizing climate isn't actually happening. But also because we were already perpetually underinvesting in our core infrastructure before the symptoms of an unstable climate began to manifest. It's a massive problem that, as John Oliver highlighted six years ago, doesn't get the same attention as other pressing issues of the day. You know, like the latest influencer drama or mortal threat posed by TikTok.

Infrastructure policy is treated as annoying and boring... until a crisis hits and suddenly everybody cares. As millions of Texans found out this week when the state's energy infrastructure crumbled like a rotten old house under the weight of heating energy demands, leaving millions without power during a major cold snap. While outlets like the Wall Street Journal and Fox News quickly tried to weaponize the crisis by blaming the renewable energy sector for the problems, deeper, more technical dives seem to indicate a lack of wind power output wasn't the underlying problem: