The Honorable Jason Isaac is the Director of Life:Powered at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. Prior to joining the Foundation, Jason, a fourth-generation native Texan, was elected four times as the State Representative for Hays and Blanco counties in the Texas Hill Country. During his eight years of service, he successfully passed legislation to reduce taxes, strengthen election integrity, improve public education, preserve Second Amendment rights, protect local groundwater, and protect private property rights.
You’d think ERCOT would have learned its lesson. I warned last year that summer blackouts were coming to Texas; it is likely we would have had outages in August 2020 if not for lower electricity demand caused by the COVID-19 economic shutdowns. The winter outages that killed 111 Texans — and the close call on...
Between the pandemic, divisive politics, and a media culture obsessed with rare but headline-grabbing shootings, it’s been a heavy year and a half for many Americans. This Earth Day, environmentalists will only perpetuate the doom-and-gloom zeitgeist by fixating on minuscule, insignificant changes in air pollution and overblown fears of apocalyptic climate change. But we can...
If the February blackouts weren’t a wakeup call to the Texas Legislature, this week’s electricity conservation alerts — unheard of in mild April weather with demand nowhere close to peak levels — should make them bolt upright. It’s clear we desperately need market reform that prioritizes reliability, not just capacity. Unfortunately, “Texas-style blackouts” is already...
Let’s start with a simple fact: It’s not economic “stimulus” when someone comes along, takes money from your right pocket and puts some of it back in your left pocket (keeping much of it for “other uses”). That’s sleight-of-hand, not stimulus, which is a reason the government can’t stimulate anything other than more government. That’s...
With President Biden wasting little time in office, he has clearly set his sights on Texas’ prosperity — first by canceling the Keystone Pipeline and thousands of jobs along with it, then by rejoining the Paris Climate Agreement, and lastly by banning fracking on federal land. Who could expect him to remember his promise on...
Astronauts. Ballerinas. Doctors. Firefighters. Oilfield workers? One of these things is not like the others. When children daydream about what they want to be when they grow up, oil and gas jobs rarely make the list — even in Texas, the country’s top energy-producing state. That needs to change for sake of the future of...
As Texans reel from ongoing blackouts at the worst possible time, during a nationwide cold snap that has sent temperatures plummeting to single digits, the news has left people in other states wondering: How could this happen in Texas, the nation’s energy powerhouse? But policy experts have seen this moment coming for years. The only...
The story of how Texas was brought to its knees by crippling cold weather leaving millions without power is a complex one, yet entirely predictable and avoidable. The details matter, so it is important to know the long story, but let’s start with the short version: For years, Texas’ grid operator (ERCOT) has overestimated the...
The coming inauguration of Joe Biden as the next president of the United States sets the stage for a policy agenda that openly and proudly demonizes the affordable, reliable energy resources we all rely upon. Biden’s energy plans are bad for our national security, economy, public health, and overall quality of life. But the American people’s ingenuity and creativity...
In recent years, climate change activists have increasingly turned their attention from issues like the Paris Climate Accord – which President-elect Joe Biden promises to rejoin – to corporate climate activism. A small but vocal minority of climate catastrophists is pressuring large corporations into making lofty net-zero pledges and promising to divest from fossil fuels....
With little fanfare and next to no media coverage, an obscure rule change from the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) could lead to big changes for America’s electric grid. FASB’s proposed changes to federally recognized accounting standards may enable utilities to hide the upfront cost of tens of billions of dollars in bad renewable energy...
A new report projects that it could take as many as four years to recover the 22 million jobs lost at the hands of the coronavirus shutdowns, a devastating blow to too many struggling families. With the stated goal of mitigating economic damages, Congress is deep in negotiations for a new stimulus and spending package. Unfortunately for...