I heard/read that the greed-based Texas Republicans didn't want to follow federal mandates to "winterize" (add anti-freeze to fluids, add warming wires to liquid flow lines) - so their systems froze.

I'd share memes...but the "add photo" feature's not working for me?

p.S.their solution was to jump the price of electricity up by thousands of percentage points...

Poor? Texan? Suffer. (that's them speaking, not me).

Texas operates an independent grid closed off from the rest of the country. On Wednesday, power prices in Dallas and Fort Worth hit $8,800 per megawatt-hour (MWh), compared with the more typical average of roughly $26 per MWh. Over time, the state's grid operator, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), could impose higher costs to consumers to prepare for subsequent, similar events.

[ca.news.yahoo.com]

The international standard for wind power generation is to have built in self regulating defrost systems.
Conservative Texans in a large area cut their power grid off from much of the rest of the state grid so they could deregulate by saving money on what their culturally biased opinion was “common sense says we’ll never have that problem” so order without the defrost option, maybe pocket the difference?
No one in regulated areas are having this problem.
Conservatism always fails, it ignores nuances because they’re deficient in the mental capacity to face change. Extraordinary things are beginning to happen in every aspect of life and if we fail to prepare we will suffer.
Conservatives say “No nothing changes, its always been this way” but it hasn’t.
We directly and dramatically effect our environment and I can give you two solid examples in history
The first was the Dust Bowl where dirt farmers had no guidelines for land management and erosion washed off much of the top soil so there were apocalyptic dust storms. Conservatives at the time opposed regulation for land management solutions like contour ploughing that’s erosion resistant and retains moisture better. But a super dust storm blew all the way from the Kansas Oklahoma area to Washington DC. So regulations were implemented and we don’t have dust storms of that magnitude anymore.
The second is the hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica which grew so large a large part of South America was unprotected from ultraviolet radiation, UV light is blocked by ozone so animals were going blind. So were people, especially those that worked outside, like cattle men.
We discovered that CFCs were causing the problem. CFCs are used for air conditioning and refrigeration so regulations to use alternative refrigerants that doesn’t destroy ozone when leaked into the atmosphere were enacted and over the decades since the hole has been closing.
However when the regulations were first proposed they were controversial, scandalous really. Conservatives showed their ass with preposterous arguments passionately arguing against it. The financial impact was so slight that the refrigerant industry had for the most part already switched over voluntarily before the regulations were published.
Rush Limbaugh for example claimed there would be a bigger black market for CFC refrigerants then the drug black market. If Americans didn’t make it some Latin American country would causing more immigration problems. Then as he slowly realized over the years that companies had voluntarily complied he argued that the regulations had been unnecessary. This is because he failed to realize that the regulations also provided the resources necessary to safely dispose of CFCs, like old refrigerators and commercial buildings that had been abandoned.
I am pro regulation and propose a regulation evaluation bureaucracy to keep everything oiled and well tuned.