Today is Thursday, February 18th, and you're listening to the morning announcements.

I'm Sammy Sage.

You may have been hearing a bunch of whispers about the Texas power grid.

Up to 4 million households in Texas have been without power for days now as a result of

ice storms and extremely cold temperatures.

Republicans were quick to turn this into a culture war issue and blame the outages on renewable

energy, frozen wind turbines, and they get to be passed green new deal.

Fact-tack alert, wind accounts for only 10% of power in Texas generated during the winter,

and in this case the loss of power has been caused by shutdowns on thermal power plants

that rely on natural gas.

According to senior management at Ircott, Texas' power supplier, most of the plants that went

offline were fueled by cold gas or nuclear power.

Another complicating fact is that Texas is the only state on the mainland U.S. to have

its own independent power grid, which has prevented Texas from importing

as much electricity as its power plants went down.

And if you're wondering the reason why their own separate power grid, it's because

they didn't want to be regulated so that they could let private companies run the energy

supply in Texas, and you know, let the free market do it over the fuck it wants.

According to the president of Ircott, it is unknown when millions of Texas families

will get their power back and can't give them a timeline.

And that's just capitalism, baby.

The conservative media figure Rush Limbaugh has passed away at age 70 from stage 4 lung cancer.

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