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As Texas
battles a severe snowstorm and mass power outages this winter, Tim
Boyd, the now-former Republican mayor of Colorado City, revealed his
party’s plan for the deadly extreme temperatures linked to
climate
change.
In a lengthy Facebook
post
that was deleted soon after it went viral, then-Mayor Boyd told his
residents that they were
entirely on their own.
His honesty
was like catching a glimpse of a rare animal in the wild. “Sink
or swim[,] it’s your choice!” he wrote, without bothering
to couch his words in euphemisms. Boyd added, “The City and
County, along with power providers or any other service owes you
NOTHING!” For such an exhortation to come from the elected
leader of a city - a man literally chosen by his people to ensure
that local government works for them - was shocking.
Just as they
pay their mayor, Colorado City’s residents also pay authorities
to provide them with basic necessities like electricity and water.
But apparently, Boyd thought an expectation of services was out of
line. He conjectured, “If you don’t have electricity you
step up and come up with a game plan to keep your family warm and
safe.” Many Texans have tried to do just that, running their
car engine in their garage to warm their homes. So far in Harris
County, there have been at least 50
cases of carbon monoxide poisoning
and several people have died.
“If you
have no water you deal without and think outside of the box to
survive and supply water to your family,” posited Boyd,
expecting Texans who were searching for ways to provide their own
electricity to also deal with a lack of water as pipes
froze
in the plummeting temperatures.
Boyd’s
diatribe veered into familiar Republican territory as he blamed
residents for their own plight by saying, “If you are sitting
at home in the cold because you have no power and are sitting there
waiting for someone to come rescue you because your (sic) lazy [it]
is [a] direct result of your raising.” It is a long-simmering
idea among conservatives that Americans who depend on their
government are simply lazy.
Generally,
white conservatives have reserved the word “lazy” for
people of color who are victims of systemic racial discrimination.
Indeed, the weather-related blackouts in Texas impacted
the residents of minority neighborhoods
disproportionately. Boyd and those who share his views would likely
assume this must have been a direct result of their laziness.
Hours
after writing his screed, Boyd announced his resignation
and apologized.
But he qualified his apology by saying that he never meant to imply
that the helpless elderly were the lazy ones - just everyone else. “I
was only making the statement that those folks that are too lazy to
get up and fend for themselves but are capable should not be dealt a
handout,” he wrote in a manner that suggested he was “sorry,
not sorry.”
Most
Republicans are not as overt as Boyd in their faith in social
Darwinism. Take Texas Governor
Greg Abbott,
who instead of openly blaming Texans for their own suffering instead
decided to blame climate-mitigating policies and renewable energy
programs like wind power. Speaking on Fox News, Abbott railed against
the “Green New Deal,” claiming that a reliance on wind
turbines was disastrous because the state’s wind-generated
power “thrust Texas into a situation where it was lacking power
on a statewide basis.” For good measure, he added, “It
just shows that fossil fuel is necessary.”
The
conservative Wall
Street Journal,
which has long been hostile to tackling climate change through
renewable energy, repeated this claim in an editorial
blaming “stricter emissions regulation” and the loss of
coal-powered plants for widespread misery in the snow-blanketed
South.
In fact,
millions of Texans are going without power because of the Republican
emphasis on cheap
power over reliable power.
Seeing electricity generation as a profit-making enterprise rather
than the fulfillment of a public need, GOP policies in Texas have
made the state vulnerable to such mass outages. Moreover, plenty of
wintry areas successfully
run wind turbines
when properly prepared to do so. And, Abbott did not see fit to point
out that harsh winter temperatures lead to frozen
natural gas pipelines
- the real culprit in the outages.
Even as a
majority
of Texans
now believe that climate change is really happening, their governor
in late January vowed
to “protect the oil and gas industry from any type of hostile
attack from Washington.” Apparently protecting Texans from the
ravages of the fossil fuel industry is not in his purview. This is
hardly surprising given how much fossil
fuel industry contributions
have ensured Abbott’s loyalty to oil and gas interests.
The
conservative mindset can be counted on to prioritize private
interests over public ones. In a Republican utopia, the rich are
noble and deserving of basic necessities, comforts, and life itself.
If they have rigged the system to benefit themselves, it means they
are smart, not conniving. In the future that Republicans promise,
“Only the strong will survive and the weak will parish (sic),”
as per Boyd’s post. In other words, our lives are expendable,
and if we die, it is because we deserve it and were simply not smart
enough to survive.
This
was utterly predictable. Republicans have used this same approach on
health care - think of all the Republican governors who backed
lawsuits against the Affordable Care Act
and opted
their states out of the federal government’s Medicaid
program even though a majority
of Americans support Obamacare. Even more Americans support the
government nationalizing
health care,
but Republicans warn that if the program is expanded from Medicare
for those over
65
to all Americans, it will suddenly become “socialism” and
thus “evil.” Their solution for health care is the status
quo of a deregulated “Wild West” private insurance
market.
Republicans
have offered a similar approach to the coronavirus pandemic where any
public safety standards set by the government are anathema to
“personal
freedoms,”
even though a majority
of Americans
support such precautions. It is also how Republicans have approached
poverty and rising inequality: by opposing a federal government
increase to the minimum wage even though most
Americans
want a floor of $15 an hour.
Interestingly,
Republicans believe strongly in the idea of “big government”
when it comes to regulating their pet social issues such as harsh
anti-immigrant measures and attacks on abortion. (Meanwhile, most
Americans
support a pathway to legalization for the undocumented and a majority
supports reproductive choice.)
As Americans
are subject to the brutal impacts of inevitable climate change, we
face a clear choice: strong government intervention to save our
lives, or a “survival of the fittest” dystopia that
contemporary conservatism promises. The Texas debacle is a preview of
what is to come if the free-marketeers have their way while the
climate changes.
The
nation’s conservative party went from insisting that climate
change does not exist (it
is a “hoax!”)
to shrugging their shoulders and telling us, as Boyd did, that we’re
on our own when the consequences hit.
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