> Texas is the only state in the lower 48 that has no major connections to neighboring power grids. That means growing energy demand in Texas must be met by new power generation in Texas.
> "Texas didn't [build solar farms and battery storage] for an energy transition reason at all," says Rhodes, "We just made it easy to build things here. And so people started building things here."
It's hard for me to reconcile the criticism of Texas's market structure with the fact that they seem to add more (clean) generation capacity than any other state.
Is it as simple as: Their state is growing very fast (both people and electricity per person due to datacenters) leading to supply/demand forecasting difficulty and mismatches?
TX generates 138% more electricity in 2023 vs. 2009 [1]. By contrast CA generated 5% less electricity in 2023 vs. 2009 [2] (roughly same for any 2 years around those start and stop years).
I do wish this topic were treated less politically and more pragmatically. At this point everyone seems to agree we need more electricity in the future with less carbon intensity and so far, TX is one of the few states actually achieving it at scale.
The absolute amount of clean generation mostly just correlates with the amount of electricity demand.
Texas uses 475 TWh / year of electricity, California 251, Florida 248, Ohio 149, and down it goes.
Meanwhile Texas only has 33% carbon free electricity vs 49% in California which are still below outliers like Vermont 80%, South Dakota 81%, and Washington 83%.
Unfortunately, WV and Kentucky are coal country with under 7% carbon free.
Yea. It's trite, but a lot of things are literally bigger in Texas. It's easy to do really misleading stats around Texas because it just does more of everything than the rest of the US. It can both build more green energy and still pollute more than everyone else.
California is also significantly bigger by economic output while using half as much electricity. There's probably some hidden factors there, like Texas engaging in more electricity intensive industries than California does or California using more fossil fuels for things Texas uses electricity for (this one seems improbable), but it seems like a very strange discrepancy.
I have to assume most of the electricity use in TX is cause it's over 100 degrees in most of the state for most of 9 months every year, and a lot of California barely gets over 75 for more than a few weeks. Texas lives and dies on air conditioning, which is a nearly fully electrical use. Colder places use energy, but it can be a mix of electricity, gas, propane, and other options. AC is almost always electricity.
Maybe there's also an industrial angle, but you can live in CA without power almost all year. There's a lot of Texas where if the power goes out for a few days, all your food is spoiled and you're probably about to die from heat with almost no alternative.
I had my AC go out in October in Texas and it was 88 degrees in my house within 6 hours. A lot of houses and apartments really aren't designed for natural ventilation in the way that you'd want in order to be able to naturally cool a space.
It’s a bunch of things. Home solar and insulation requirements isn’t directly showing up on these comparisons but they matter. In 2023 California got 19TWh/y from home Solar vs 3.7 for Texas. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1419901/us-residential-g...
The California as a wide range of temperatures, directly next to the ocean is milder assuming the wind is from the west, but it gets much worse with El Centro seeing average July high’s of 107!
https://www.currentresults.com/Weather/California/city-tempe...
PS: A less commonly considered advantage for solar is rooftop panels provide shade and by converting sunlight into electricity it effectively lowers their albido reducing local heat gain.
I mean, that table says the average high for almost all of is in the mid to high 90s. That's not that far off from what I said.
Additionally, sure, California has plenty of desert that's as hot as Texas, but most of the population is in LA, San Diego, or San Francisco, which are all coastal and relatively temperate. Most of Texas's population is in Dallas(97), Houston (93), San Antonio (95), or Austin (97) which are all generally in reliably hot areas. Houston may have an average summer high of 93, but that's also coupled with a brutal humidity.
The equivalent California population centers are SF (66), San Diego (75), LA (82), and Anaheim (87). All generally livable temperatures, especially given their overnight lows are in the 60s. Most of Texas has summer overnight lows in the mid to high 70s.
Yes, Texas isn't that much hotter than the rest of the US south, but it's also insanely more populated. Houston with it outlying suburbs nearly has the population of all of Mississippi put together. For the most part, large quantities of people don't live in the other really hot parts of the south except for Florida.
If the argument is temperature and therefore AC alone explains the drastic difference in per capita electricity use the numbers just don’t add up. If half of Texas electricity use was AC and all of California stayed 75 the sure however…
I agree there’s a big costal population in CA, but those city temperatures are really deceptive as even just the suburbs of those cities get hot. San Bernardino which still is part of the LA metro area and just 50 miles from the ocean jumps to 95f in July. The closer to the ocean you get the cooler things tend to be but most of the greater metro area is in the 90’s not 75f.
Just looking at the Central Valley Fresno, California population 550,000, 97F in July. Sacramento 525k 95f Bakersfield 420k 98f. And that’s not counting a host of smaller cities and towns or the southeast.
Something like half of the population of California see’s 95+ temperatures in July where they live. So yes San Francisco being surrounded by the ocean on one side and the bay on the other stays surprisingly cool, but it’s just not that much land, 875k people live in SF proper and most of the state is very different.
> But if you're going to claim that most of Texas only drops below 100 for winter, you're going to need a citation.
I didn't intend to imply that. I'm not insane, I literally live in Texas. I know it gets under 100 during the summer. I'd be shocked if anywhere in the world spent a single 24 hour period over 100 most years.
I was being hyperbolic, but not by much. In 2023, Houston saw 97 days over 95 degrees. Dallas saw 84, San Antonio 110 days, Austin 109. For most of those days, the low is still over 70. It gets to around half the year in most of the major population centers if you lower it to 85 degrees. Los Angeles only rarely gets over 100 days over 85 and SF almost never sees more than 100 days.
The practical effect is the same - you generally run your AC nearly 24/7 to keep your living areas below 80 degrees from April through November. It was already in the high 80s last week in a lot of the state.
In each of your examples, you show 3-4 months of days over 95. But yet you said "over 100 in most of the state for most of 9 months of the year". Not by much would be a fraction, not a difference of 200-350% of your example.
Just looking at electricity is unfair though. How much of Vermont's, South Dakota's and Washington's heat come from clean electricity and how much is natural gas? If you want to compare apples-to-apples you have to look at things like residential carbon intensity separately from industry.
Careful once you start adding elements individually you’ll tend to focus on those supporting your viewpoint rather than the total. Electricity is after all used by more than just residential homes. If you want to look at “Total Energy” in a more brand context than electricity that’s not just heating and electricity it also includes gasoline and industry etc.
So on average people in Texas drive 16,171 miles per year vs 10,949 for Washington state etc. Similarly the oil industry both flairs and burns a great deal of fuel in order to crack longer hydrocarbons into shorter ones etc.
However, in the widest definition all of this is just a rounding error. It’s actually plants on farms which have the largest energy supply/demand by a huge margin, but being free we rarely consider it in such calculations.
Yes, but a state like Vermont is going to outsource 100% of the carbon intensity it takes to produce gasoline and natural gas to another state. Then use a very small amount of electric energy compared to fuel and gas. Comparing only their electricity usage is very disingenuous.
Vermont is exporting a great deal of the electricity it generates as well.
A nationwide map of carbon intensity by demand would have very different numbers in the electricity column. Such a viewpoint is reasonable, but you need to maintain consistency in definitions for such comparisons to be meaningful.
> TX generates 138% more electricity in 2023 vs. 2009 [1]. By contrast CA generated 5% less electricity in 2023 vs. 2009 [2] (roughly same for any 2 years around those start and stop years).
Isn't some of that because Texas has no major connections to other grids? As your quote from the article points out that means that to meet increasing demand Texas has to build more power generation in Texas.
If California, which is well-connected to other states' grids, needs more electricity they can buy it from other states.
> I do wish this topic were treated less politically and more pragmatically. At this point everyone seems to agree we need more electricity in the future with less carbon intensity and so far, TX is one of the few states actually achieving it at scale.
That's good but its not the whole story. You've got to also look at the mix of renewables and non-renewables. Texas is moving in the right direction, but other states are too and many are farther ahead.
In 2022 Texas produced 139 TWh of renewable electricity [1], which is more than any other state--about 50% more than second place (Washington at 88 TWh)
But Texas also was #1 in non-renewable electricity production at 386 TWh. (Second most is Florida at about 240 TWh).
Percent of electricity from renewals is probably a better way to compare states. Of the top 10 electricity producing states California has the highest renewable precentage at 43%. New York and Texas are at 28% and 27%. The rest of the top 10 is a few around 12-13% and the rest in the 3-10% range.
CO2 Mt/TWh is also useful as it can give some idea of how dirty a state's non-renewables are. For example Delaware and Montana emit 505 and 504 Mt/TWh CO2, but Delaware is only using 3% renewable electricity whereas Montana is using 52% renewable. That suggests that Montana's non-renewables are quite a bit dirtier than Delaware's non-renewables.
Texas is 406 Mt/TWh. Combined with their 26% renewables this suggests that their non-renewables produce around 556 Mt/TWh CO2. There is way dirtier out there (Wyoming at almost 1100 and West Virginia at around 960 for example), but of the top 10 electricity producers only Ohio matches it. California is 380 and Florida is 401.
> Isn't some of that because Texas has no major connections to other grids? As your quote from the article points out that means that to meet increasing demand Texas has to build more power generation in Texas.
> If California, which is well-connected to other states' grids, needs more electricity they can buy it from other states.
Well, that's not quite right, in order to meet increasing demand the increased capacity still has to be built somewhere, but it doesn't have to be built in California.
Either that or you could make the other states use less electricity.
Is that CA number because more properties are generating lots of Solar PV and so need less from the grid?
You still have the problem, especially with PV, of the duck curve that requires other producers to ramp down (and potentially be paid for ramping down).
Texas only adds more clean generation because it’s way less capital intensive than building a natural gas or coal plant. Those plants require $500M+ minimum and the returns just aren’t that great. My wife is an energy attorney in Texas and handles power purchase and interconnection deals like these all day long.
Solar and wind deals require far less capital, go up faster, and aren’t subject to the supply risk of natural gas or coal.
Texas also has a lot of clean energy thanks to sun and terrain. The Edwards plateau creates some of the best wind generation opportunities in the US.
Texas also attracts energy heavy industries because it has relatively cheap power. Which we’ve learned partly results from not paying anyone to have excess capacity… which is all fun and games until you have winter storm Yuri roll in and your only option is to “shed load” which btw kills some people.
Another aspect of Texas is that we have demand response contracts whereby certain users get paid simply for the ability to “take” power when required. This is very attractive to bitcoin miners. Prices here go negative from time to time which is pretty wild.
All of this attracts a lot of energy-intensive industries to Texas.
> Texas is the only state in the lower 48 that has no major connections to neighboring power grids.
This may be true but it makes it sound like there's no connections, which is false. There are interconnections between other power grids but depending on their definition of "major connections", it may be technically true.
>This may be true but it makes it sound like there's no connections, which is false
It sounds more like there are no major connections, which is what a plain reading of that sentence says. And as you said, that's true, there's no alternate interpretation where interties that can carry around 1.5% of the grid's load are "major connections".
And you're ignoring the fact that the lack of interconnections is a deliberate political decision, not a technical oddity. By keeping their grid independent, the Texas grid can escape regulation by FERC. The limited interties they do have are used for used for scheduled and emergency power trades and are not treated as interconnections supporting interstate or international trade.
Except:
They had to interfere with the free market to force electric suppliers to harden their infrastructure against cold weather -- something they hadn't done before because of the race to lowest operating costs.
There's also other horror stories from under regulation:
> they just trusted that supply and demand works…and were correct.
Except when they weren't, like the sibling comment about 2021 winter and all the hoopla over needing to force them to invest in winter proofing; after a winter failure which cause hundreds of deaths due to multiple days long power outages.
And the more current rolling blackouts during the summer that no one is happy about but have little to no recourse for. It's so much fun having to reset digital clocks on appliances every morning. Or, working late and the unexpected joy of having the power grid tell me it's time for bed because the power for the entire neighborhood, including street lights, will be off for the next 3-5 hours. Hope you have good battery powered fans on before you went to bed or enjoy waking up in a humid mess.
I think one also needs to consider the cost differences between Texas and California power for consumers. Residential power in California is up to 40 cents per KWh ( one of the highest in th3 country) compared to about 18 cents per KWH in Texas. If somebody lives in Texas , it would be nicer to have cheaper power and invest in a generator that might be used one week in a year due to winter storms .
Understanding texas - it's not political, they just worship money. So if you can make money making solar / wind farms nobody will stop you, and that's why texas has a ton of solar / wind farms. If you can make money running a bitcoin farm and then get paid money to turn it off during peak hours, nobody will stop you. If you can invent a power billing company that is market based so customers save money when rates are low but suddenly have an insane energy bill when ERCOT breaks down nobody will stop you. There is no moral code stopping green energy, it's just pure free market vampire capitalism.
Texas is meaningfully less free than many other states. No legal cannabis, can’t watch adult content without it being attached to your identity, can’t get proper care when experiencing a miscarriage, etc…
For as much as Texans talk about Freedom, states like Colorado seem far more free.
Texas was literally founded to be a slave state. I know this, because my ancestors were there doing that. No surprise that it's still oppressing big chunks of its population.
One thing I will say, it's hard to put all the folks in Texas in a bucket.
Several classes of folks live there- most of my friends there are just trying to, like, keep the fresh tortillas in stock at the HEB or serve beers while keeping a functioning automobile. Regardless of the goodness or badness of their ideas (or even fantasies of sovereignty), they are still materially beholden to a powerful and oppressive state.
People who get joy out of watching things happen to poor folks in Texas really don't understand gerrymandering, cultural hegemony, or any of the other mechanics of how oppressive governments operate.
I can guarantee you that those same folks, in Texas, would be the conservative folks writing oppressive laws to empower their good ol' boy buddies to do horrible stuff to the population.
Because at it's base, the inability to see oneself in oppressed people is the same everywhere we go.
The view that the idiot lumpen serfs deserve to be oppressed (or, if you prefer, "deserve the government they 'elected'") is the same aesthetic position that leads the folks who own Texas to conclude they can do whatever they feel like to the people there.
Don't forget about the slave handle of Oklahoma. They gave away over 5000 square miles so they could keep slaves. And the reason they were forced to do this is that they wanted the US government's protection against Mexico and statehood prohibited slavery above the 36th parallel (Missouri Compromise. Quite ironic.
(Also, you are right, our country has lost almost all sense of empathy)
> (Also, you are right, our country has lost almost all sense of empathy)
From the outside, it looks worse than that. It seems more like the US has developed a weird active aversion to empathy, to the point where even enlightened self-interest gets rejected because it looks suspiciously like empathy.
Yup. It's odd what they do and don't teach in Texas History.
People tell me about how bad propaganda is in other places. Good thing they don't have it here, or those folks would probably be very mad at the systems who raise them- then they might have to examine their highly conflicted relationships to the abusive powers that be.
Personally, though, I do see empathy here and there.
In some places (especially among folks who think they are more likely to have been a plantation owner than a peasant anytime someone talks about 'land reform') it's notably attenuated.
Empathy is not a lost cause- lots of good folks, and lots of folks who want to be good but don't know how. But it's gonna take some work to get make it louder.
> For as much as Texans talk about Freedom, states like Colorado seem far more free.
A distinction that historian Timothy Snyder[1] wrote about in his recent book On Freedom, freedom to versus freedom from (positive versus negative):
> To the Ukrainians, freedom does not simply mean the absence of Russian soldiers, but also the reconstruction of society — of schools, hospitals, and roads — and making sure everything functions even better than it did before the war began.
> The Ukrainian definition of freedom is very different from how it’s commonly defined in the United States, where overuse has divested the term from its true meaning. When contemporary Americans talk about freedom, they’re usually referring to what the Russian-British philosopher Isaiah Berlin called negative freedom: freedom from something, like a dictator invading your land, or the government taking away your right to bear arms. By contrast, Ukrainians tend to talk about positive freedom: the freedom to do something, like building robust social institutions.
The distinction between positive and negative freedom always struck me as a deceptive wordgame. The person empowered to write the definitions can make whatever they wish appear as a positive or negative freedom. If we're only interested in protecting negative freedoms, how about we protect the Freedom From Want?
It's not some neutral objective "natural" definition. When you separate freedoms into positive and negative, you get to choose how to do it to suit your agenda.
The point that's missing is where rights and freedoms "originate", so to speak.
The US view, called out specifically in the Constitution, is that all freedoms and rights are inherent in being, and not granted by the government. As such, the government cannot give or guarantee rights, it is only capable of taking them away.
The role of the Constitution and the amendments (in particular, the first ten known as the bill of rights) do NOT specify what rights people have, they specify those rights that the government may NOT curtail.
Hence, the discussion of negative versus positive rights is entirely not about what rights exist, but what authority the government may or may not exercise over them.
Of course, any brief look at America's history shows the government failing to abide by its own restrictions. The government we have now is significantly different from what the original authors had intended, as they were more concerned with finding a way for the disparate states to coordinate at all after the failure of the previous Articles of confederation.
Now, we have an overarching federal government that renders individual states to be little more important that municipal organizations, much more in line with other countries.
So when the rights of two individuals conflict, I guess you'd say the correct way to deal with it is not with a criminal charge, but for me to sue the other person? Do you think the American system would rule in favor of people who caught Covid if they sue people who went out in public without taking precautions? Do you think that's a realistic way of having one's rights made whole? How do I sue a class of individuals?
Furthermore, do you really think this is a plausible way of managing disease outbreaks, which affect large populations in aggregate and not just single individuals? Systems like private insurance don't work if all the individual risks are correlated.
Even murder, except for certain circumstances, is not a crime at the federal level.
Under the original framing, anything not specifically mentioned by the Constitution was delegated to the individual states to decide. It wasn't until after the civil war that the amendments to the Constitution itself applied to the individual states.
I’m not sure this is totally true in every case. Usually negative freedoms prevent others from interacting with you in some way, while positive freedoms force someone to interact with you in a certain way.
For example, trying to phrase “the freedom to eat as many hot dogs as I want for free” can’t really be expressed as a negative right “the freedom from people not giving me unlimited hot dogs” because “giving me a hot dog” is a forced interaction, not a forced non-interaction.
It’s not as simple as “negative rights include the word ‘not’” so you just add “not not” and call everything a negative right.
But I agree that some things are obstacles, and others are creative acts. But so what, I'm not going to let you or somebody called Snyder tell me that one of these is virtuous and the other is mean-spirited, because that's bullshit, and the two sides of it go together, and he's only trying to prise them apart because he's more comfortable in a world where people declare their intentions in advance so that they can be vetted for constructiveness by some overbearing authority.
And you can definitely virtuously overcome obstacles, or be creatively evil.
One clarification to make - While I haven't read On Freedom, Tim Snyder is a scholar of Ukrainian (and slavic) history who is a major opponent of the far right's agenda. One of his big ideas is the different approach to time promoted by authoritarian vs liberal regimes, to try to inoculate people against the talking points of the authoritarian view.
I might disagree with the positive/negative freedom argument on a more fundamental level than he does, but he's not engaging with it because he's trying to promote it.
It's about our attitudes towards time, and the stories we tell about our relationship to it. For example, authoritarian regimes tend to eliminate the future from discourse - the future is not possible because we are beset by enemies and danger surrounds us. All we can do is aspire to restore some mythical past. By contrast, the one idea that ties together disparate definitions of Progressivism across history is the belief that a better future is possible.
Snyder has a framework for discussing how ideologies relate to time in these sorts of ways.
Well yes, kind of, and in conclusion no. Certainly the mythical golden past is a component of populism, and can be seen in Mussolini wanting continuity with Romans, and Putin weaving his own myths about Russian history - I forget the details, but it entails more territory for Russia because historicist destiny - and "Little Englanders" (the look-backward, xenophobic kind, not the original ones who were just isolationists).
On the other hand, Musk kind of likes looking toward the future. So this thing about a mythologized past is at most a tendancy, and a way of stirring up a sense of injustice, while your non-authoritarians don't have the monopoly on looking to the future. In fact I don't see that these are even polar opposites, I think authoritarian progressives would make sense as a concept, and we may be seeing a bunch of them rise to power.
It doesn't have to work in every case, and it doesn't have to be simple, but nevertheless there remains significant disagreement and ambiguity that gets to be decided by the person in power. In the end, it's a false dichotomy.
Consider the freedom from being infected by disease. Does your positive freedom to use a public space trump my negative freedom from you interfering with me by bringing a contagious disease to it?
> If we're only interested in protecting negative freedoms, how about we protect the Freedom From Want?
From some book reviews:
> “Freedom is not just an absence of evil,” Snyder writes, “but a presence of good.... It takes collective work to build structures of freedom, for the young as for the old.”
> In other words, we are not born free; we are born helpless. Many others are involved in making us free, including our parents, the builders of our playgrounds, our fellow citizens and the caregivers of our old age. “We need structures,” Snyder says, “just the right ones, moral as well as political. Virtue is an inseparable part of freedom.”
> He sees five “forms of freedom” that create free individuals within society. There’s sovereignty, which Snyder defines as “the learned capacity to make choices”; unpredictability, “the power to adapt physical regularities to personal purposes”; mobility, “the capacity to move through space and time following values”; factuality, “the grip on the world that allows us to change it”; and solidarity, “the recognition that freedom is for everyone.”
> So a child on the way to sovereignty becomes familiar with both their own body and a world containing other people and objects, and can imagine how to change the world. By choosing a mix of values in dealing with the world and choosing a future, the sovereign person becomes unpredictable.
> Negative views of freedom foster a zero-sum mindset, as though each of us must strive to be free from the burden of being part of a society. This fuels racism, xenophobia and misogyny as tools to keep others from getting a piece of the pie. A population so resentful of others’ progress is an easy target for leaders who promise a strict government regime to curb others’ access to education, health and safety. Even now, mass incarceration mimics an apartheid state, depriving millions of civil rights such as voting, largely along racial lines.
> Snyder takes readers through historical and contemporary examples to demonstrate how we can make progress, and are much better served, by embracing positive freedoms. A positive freedom that guarantees everyone access to affordable healthcare would give many in the middle class the liberty to pursue career opportunities without losing health benefits. The development of children’s minds in well-funded schools ensures creative and thoughtful individuals who invent new solutions that will benefit our nation’s future.
> What we see in the United States today — attacks on the governmental institutions that provide support to all and the emergence of an educational system devoted to maintaining white supremacism — robs the American people of the critical skills they need to recognize authoritarian rhetoric and to see the promise of democracy and equality.
I have not yet read the book On Freedom yet (on hold list at my library), but have read some of his other work (e.g. Bloodlands). I have listened/watched some of his book tour talks and find he makes a reasonable argument (and given his knowledge of history, he has plenty of examples to show how things have gone down in the past).
OK, that's really fatuous. He's a statist, he doesn't like Musk, he likes regulations, he like communities pulling together and public services, fair enough. But then he's fabricated this thing about "positive freedoms" like it's the big philosophical insight that distinguishes his allies from his enemies. That's some post hoc justification, he isn't really informed by that philosophy at all, he's just a fan the string bag of assorted values I previously mentioned. People invariably want both kinds: "I don't want to be coerced, because I want to do [whatever]". And this stuff about gravity, where he gets into justifying state control like it's a law of nature and helps us walk around, good grief.
I find it interesting that discussions of freedom in the context of states like Texas tend to be more about freedom for businesses instead of personal freedom.
The 1980's when Reagan turned this country upside down and showed the GOP that cutting taxes wins them elections, even if it makes the debt go out of control and you can no longer pay for anything the government buys.
The personal freedom thing has always been rules for thee and not for me, particularly in the religious South. Lawrence v. Texas led to legalizing consensual homosexual activity.
The personal freedom thing might gain traction again because people are realizing that explicitly endorsing Christianity as core to the identity of the country often goes hand in hand with picking a favorite version of it and demonizing others, which is why the separation was historically included.
> Like Heather, she spent her time in Dallas lying to people about products to stay ahead of vice officers.
> “This was my first experience as a white girl from Wisconsin at fearing the police,” she says. “My heart was in my throat. I had to say with a straight face, ‘no, this three-pound dildo is a cake topper.’ I would have to talk around any reference to the body parts these were supposed to be used on. Even with regulars who I knew were okay, I never changed the words in case I got used to telling the truth and slipped up when a cop was around.”
(f) A person who possesses six or more obscene devices or identical or similar obscene articles is presumed to possess them with intent to promote the same.
I'm not sure a word like "freedom" has an objective measure.
If you click on the "personal" tab it ranks Texas as dead last - I suspect the person you are replying to is using a definition closer to that: https://www.freedominthe50states.org/personal
As someone who's lived in both states (which both hold a special place in my heart), here's my 2¢.
While ∆9-Tetrahydrocannabinol remains illegal in Texas, almost all other cannabinoids have functionally been recreationally legal in Texas since Trump's 2018 federal Farm Bill, operationally legal (able to purchase and transport from stores without fear of prosecution) since early COVID in most of the major metro areas (e.g. Austin, Houston, DFW). Now to your credit, a handful of police departments are being pains in the rear about this, but even more departments have simply stopped enforcing laws against minor cannabis possession. Being unregulated, it doesn't come without risks, but it does come at a price about 1 order of magnitude lower than what you'd pay in Colorado, gram for gram.
You can have a gender identity that doesn't conform to traditional gender norms, hell, you can even have a gender identity that doesn't conform to a common notion that gender is a binary value, rather than a spectrum. You can have a sexual and romantic attraction to whoever you want. Just don't go around shoving it in everyone's faces, unable to even discuss anything else without bringing it up. That's annoying in the same way a car guy who never shuts up about cars is annoying. I say this as someone with an identity that doesn't conform to traditional gender stereotypes, with a partner of the same biological sex, so trust me when I say that I also understand how unforgiving Texas can be when you do go around doing PDAs in a relationship like mine, especially out in the more rural areas. Thankfully, that's what firearms are for - protecting yourself and your loved ones from crazy bad guys who aren't acting rationally and might pose a danger to the life of myself or my loved ones.
But hey, you can also watch whatever you want. There shouldn't be anyone on all of HN that believes the state government of Texas is actually logistically capable of blocking all adult video entertainment from the entire internet from ever being streamed into their state without photo ID verification. I can (but won't) name a half dozen such sites that haven't appeared to perform any amount of effort to comply with the Texas law whatsoever, probably hosted in jurisdictions that Texas can't even do anything about.
I say this after having returned from Colorado's front range last year - a magical place full of whimsy and charm, my favorite kind of climate, and the most breathtaking natural scenery I've ever seen in my life.
It was also full of a bunch of condescending, unkind, prejudiced, close-minded people who seemed almost incapable of engaging in an honest, good-faith dialogue on the lived experiences and perspectives of people from outside of their cultural "tribe", and as a relatively decent income earner, I felt that the price I was paying to live there (a state income tax bill over $2000/month, more than my rent), was too much for a place that felt very culturally intolerant of me based on dehumanizing stereotypes that serve little purpose other than to vilify and otherize, and which I felt unfairly compacted the nuances of some of my lived experiences into trite anecdotes to be mocked, so I respected their wishes and I left.
Colorado talks a good game about their empathy, kindness, diversity, and tolerance, but I sure feel a whole lot more empathy, kindness, and tolerance from the middle aged southern waitress in Texas that calls me "hun" and actually listens to me when I'm talking to her, than the tatted up cute bartender chicks in Colorado that would roll their eyes at me in smug condescension and start using words with fewer syllables after I respond "Texas" to her question of where I'd moved from. Those two couldn't be any better representations of my lived experiences in TX vs CO.
I assume from your response that you are a man since you didn’t mention the most important freedom of all that I mentioned, the right to have reproductive healthcare.
I generally like Texans but your government is wack. Also the property taxes are pretty insane so I wouldn’t exactly say you have no tax burden there.
You aren’t wrong about prejudice towards southerners in blue states though. Sorry you had to deal with that.
No disagreement about the wack government. I'm not big on the conservative christian bits, but I respect those people's beliefs and their right to hold those beliefs, no matter how much I may personally disagree on some fundamental aspects of those beliefs. I find that most people, even most of those people, are willing to be kind, respectful, and accepting of others who treat them with the same kindness, respect, and acceptance... even if you don't personally accept every idea they believe. To your point, though, I wouldn't object to a little bit less of the conservative Christian stuff in my state government, all else equal.
I'm a renter, property taxes are baked into my rent. I live in an exceedingly safe and quiet area, a high income, low crime primarily suburban zip code. This isn't a discrimination thing, this is part of how I've learned to cope with feelings that I struggled with after being the victim of a traumatic, violent, and unprovoked attack I experienced a few years ago in a less safe environment. I have an attached fully enclosed garage in a townhouse-style apartment where I have nobody above or below me, and I pay less in rent for that than I paid for a condo-style apartment in a rough part of town in the cheaper southern side of the front range.
My (rent + state income taxes) in CO were about $2400/mo more expensive than my (rent + property taxes) here in TX, and that was living in a place with 6x as much violent crime per capita. To get somewhere as safe in CO as I am here in TX would've been even more expensive.
For as many downsides as you point out, there is still a lot to be said about the power of the market efficiencies made possible through the lax regulatory and pro-business environment that Texas has produced for itself.
As for your assumption, I absolutely understand the frustration with the changes to medical care laws down here, but that doesn't affect my partner or I, as neither of us are engaging in any kind of activity that could ever get either of us pregnant, so the question of medical care in the event one of us ever did get pregnant is functionally moot for us.
> For example, he says, if one data center is considering five different locations to open up shop in Texas, "the way that the law was written, we have to consider it like all five of those data centers are coming."
definitely sounds like a bureaucracy free utopia /s.
> "Texas didn't [build solar farms and battery storage] for an energy transition reason at all," says Rhodes, "We just made it easy to build things here. And so people started building things here."
It's hard for me to reconcile the criticism of Texas's market structure with the fact that they seem to add more (clean) generation capacity than any other state.
Is it as simple as: Their state is growing very fast (both people and electricity per person due to datacenters) leading to supply/demand forecasting difficulty and mismatches?
TX generates 138% more electricity in 2023 vs. 2009 [1]. By contrast CA generated 5% less electricity in 2023 vs. 2009 [2] (roughly same for any 2 years around those start and stop years).
I do wish this topic were treated less politically and more pragmatically. At this point everyone seems to agree we need more electricity in the future with less carbon intensity and so far, TX is one of the few states actually achieving it at scale.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/#/topic/0?agg=2... [2] https://www.energy.ca.gov/media/7311