Fatal Consequences
What to Know: Nearly 200 people died in the February winter storm and the power failures that ensued, a new analysis shows.
The TPPF Take: Overreliance on wind and solar power helped to cause those power failures.
“In the last five years alone, Texas added some 20,000 megawatts of installed capacity of wind and solar while losing a net of 4,000 megawatts of coal and natural gas,” says TPPF’s Chuck DeVore. “This fact alone meant that had every thermal plant operated flawlessly during the height of the polar vortex, Texas still would have been short some 2,000 megawatts of potential demand—a new record in a state that is used to setting electricity consumption records in the summer.”
For more on the power failures, click here.
Children’s Books
What to Know: The New York Times has listed its “25 Best Children’s Books of 2020.”
The TPPF Take: The goal of that list seems to be making our children into Social Justice Warriors.
“Beginning with the ‘younger children’ section of the list, I found a number of them focus on race,” says TPPF’s Tom Lindsay. “For example, ‘The Talk: Conversations About Race, Love & Truth,’ edited by Wade Hudson and Cheryl Willis Hudson, seems intent on draining every last drop of joy from childhood. ‘The Talk’ promises to subject your kids to ‘hard conversations’ about race as it manifests itself in their ‘bewildering and hostile’ world.”
For more on children’s books, click here.
Border Crisis
What to Know: Seizures of the deadly drug fentanyl have increased 233% at the southern U.S. border.
The TPPF Take: America’s enemies are weaponizing the crisis at the border.
“Mexican organizations have replaced opium, the primary ingredient in heroin, with the deadly and China-supplied opioid fentanyl,” says TPPF’s Josh Jones. “As a result, hundreds of thousands of Americans have since died of fentanyl-related overdoses. The Chinese also readily provide Mexican criminal organizations with financial institutions and businesses to facilitate money laundering, a method of moving drug-related proceeds from the United States to Mexico that is extremely difficult for U.S. law enforcement to stop.”
For more on the border crisis, click here.