The Texas Syndrome… and the End of the World

In a new book titled The Precipice, Oxford University philosopher Toby Ord — who has spent his career thinking about doomsday scenarios — predicts that humanity has a one in six chance of self-destructing in the current century. His prognosis sounded dire to me, but my thoughts about the human race and our seeming predilection for mass destruction only grew bleaker after following the collapse of basic infrastructure in Texas this week. It’s not just the power outages, food and water crises, hospital blackouts and disappearance of other fundamental services that have turned major cities like Houston into Third World hellholes. It’s the collapse of political leadership in the state. Republican Governor Greg Abbott, who has cozy relations with the state’s all-powerful energy industry, lamely tried to blame the state’s widespread crisis on the freezing of solar and wind equipment, which supply a small percentage of the state’s electricity. Abbott now has “blood on his hands,” charged a Democratic state legislator, as Texans begin to die in the severe winter storm.

Abbott and his even more ideologically extreme lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, are simply incapable of addressing the the corporate politics of energy in Texas because they’re owned by fossil fuel giants and major utilities. And the voters of Texas put these men in office — and they again sent Senator John Cornyn and the even more ruthless opportunist Ted Cruz to Washington. None of these men are allowed to even whisper “climate crisis” in the wake of this latest freak storm, let alone confront real solutions to the corporate corruption that led to the collapse of Texas’s power grid this week.

As long as people remain enthralled by “leaders” like these men, humanity will keep marching inexorably toward the cliff. Will we shake ourselves free from our death wish — or are we all Texans at heart?