Public policy is not developed nor implemented in a vacuum. Each policy or set of policies is developed with some mix of politicians, bureaucrats, technocrats, researchers, and the public at large (whether from government outreach to the community, or from community pressure toward government). The hope is always that each actor will operate in good faith and the team of good faith actors will develop policies that meet general policy goals, increase overall well-being, maximize equity and receive as much public support as possible. If there is ever a crisis or policy failure, we all owe it to each other to evaluate what went wrong, redesign the system so it is more resilient/cost-effective/equitable/etc. (depending on the policy goals) and stay vigilant as we learn more. We owe it to stakeholders in other areas to share our concerns, experiences and recommendations so those stakeholders don’t repeat our mistakes. Developing policy is also a serious matter and should be treated as such.
Unfortunately, there is a plethora of bad faith actors in the United States today that do not treat policy as a serious matter. If there is a crisis, these actors do not take it as a learning opportunity, propose concrete solutions, or even bother to do a balanced, apolitical analysis into what caused the crisis itself. Instead, they use crises to score political points, divert blame, attack their opponents, and shape disingenuous arguments to propose “solutions” that, if implemented, would be horrendous policy moves. At best, this slows down policymaking while the good-faith actors try to fix the problem at hand. At worst, this devolves into mocking people that are stuck in a crisis and blaming them for the emergency they are in, all as the wheels of fixing the crisis grind to a halt (or roll backwards).
Meanwhile, crises continue and people suffer. Oppressed and marginalized groups, including people with disabilities, are disproportionately affected. Those who try to speak up for justice and survival have their voices diluted by political trolls and bullies, all as the recovery process slows down as good-faith actors spend unnecessary time defending their policy choices from frivolous attacks. A controversy-seeking media (including the social media ecosystem) spends time on petty political battles instead of conveying the stories of those in need, explaining what went wrong, and exploring how to fix it. Political trolls use propaganda (including coordinated propaganda outlets and social media personalities) to delude their followers into believing up is down, harming our collective efforts to shape better policy going forward. Trolls and their followers often take to social media to mock people who are already in crisis and even blame them for their own suffering – turning a venue that could be used for outreach and help into a toxic stew that only makes the crisis feel heavier.
This is unsustainable. We cannot fix our ongoing policy problems unless we address the toxic nature of contemporary politics, media, social dynamics and public debate. In a time where adult politicians act like toddlers – and their followers emulate in kind – people need to grow up. Given the increasing intensity and frequency of crises, they need to grow up fast.
This has all come to mind because of the unprecedented winter freeze hitting nearly half the country, and the resulting energy and humanitarian crisis in the state of Texas. And for me, a Californian who admittedly spent too much of this summer doom-scrolling on Twitter, it’s a reminder of the politicization of a handful of rolling blackouts and the resulting harassment of Californians online. Finally, it’s a reminder of how our toxic political climate is hampering Americans’ ability to address the urgent issues facing our country.
California, where I live, had two days this summer with “rolling blackouts” as we had a “heat storm” that gave the Golden State 4 of its 5 hottest August days in the last 35 years. According to the Los Angeles Times, “just under half a million homes and businesses lost power for as little as 15 minutes and as long as 2½ hours on Aug. 14, with another 321,000 utility customers going dark for anywhere from eight to 90 minutes the following evening.” There were many reasons for the rolling blackouts. California is transforming its energy system to have more intermittent renewables, like solar and wind power, and is working to rely less on natural gas and other fossil-fuel products. An analysis by state agencies concluded that there wasn’t enough forward planning for so many extreme heat events (and higher power demand from air conditioning), which contributed to the crunch; some California power plants also agreed to send energy across state lines in the days before the heat wave, leaving us with less generation than we needed. The California Independent System Operator (ISO), which manages the electric grid and balances power generation with demand, sent out “flex alerts” for people to conserve power before the highest-demand timeframes (roughly 3-10 PM), but not enough people conserved energy and we ended up with a power crunch. After those two August days, Californians collectively responded to a couple more flex alerts to the point we saved the grid from being overwhelmed.
Of course, some of the most marginalized Californians were the ones who bore the brunt of those rolling blackouts. The hottest areas in the state often had high poverty rates, such as in the San Joaquin Valley (Southern Central Valley), poor areas of Los Angeles and San Diego Counties with urban heat-island effects, and the high desert areas of San Bernardino County. While people with air conditioning could cool their homes earlier in the day and make it through a 2-hour blackout without overheating, those who use fans can’t pre-cool their homes and might struggle with just a brief outage. Seniors and people with certain disabilities can be at higher risk of heat exhaustion or heatstroke should they lose fans or air conditioning, creating significant equity issues. And people with disabilities who use electric power equipment for survival (e.g. plug-in ventilators for folks with tracheostomies) are placed in possibly-mortal-danger should an outage last longer than their backup battery. Needless to say, the August rolling blackouts represented a troubling crisis and Californians – heck, the entire country – need to take it seriously and work to prevent future similar crises.
If only it were that easy.
Instead, bad faith actors on the political right immediately used two days of rolling blackouts to attack California’s Democratic leadership and renewable energy goals in general. They didn’t even wait until the crisis was over – the attacks started on August 14. The Governor, Gavin Newsom, and California’s most prominent Democratic representatives in DC, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and then-VP-candidate Kamala Harris, became political punching bags. Political trolls mocked California as a failed state, pointing to an exodus of residents over recent years (which is partly due to spiking housing costs from the perverse incentives of the Prop 13 property tax scheme, plus NIMBY obstruction of new housing). They claimed that California was an example of how the Green New Deal, a policy framework that hadn’t even been implemented, was a failure.
On August 19, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) quote-tweeted California Governor’s Office’s request that people scale back energy use that day, commenting that “California is now unable to perform even basic functions of civilization, like having reliable electricity. Biden/Harris/AOC want to make CA’s failed energy policy the standard nationwide. Hope you don’t like air conditioning!” Texas Lieut. Gov. Dan Patrick (R) linked to a Forbes article about why California’s climate policies are causing electricity blackouts (a complex issue), saying “this is what happens when the Democrats are left in charge… #KAG.” Representative Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) retweeted on September 8 the Los Angeles mayor’s plea to his residents to save energy so others wouldn’t suffer, commenting “Alexa, show me what happens when you let Democrats control energy policy.” Other prominent political trolls and propaganda artists (I’m not shy with calling networks like Fox News and Newsmax propaganda outlets) piled on, with easy-to-remember talking points and slogans and attacks instead of actual political debate or journalism.
No policy analysis. No recommendations. No empathy for the people of California who were doing their best to team up and limit their energy use. No empathy for those who had power outages just days or weeks earlier and struggled through extreme heat. No consideration of people using life-saving electric equipment who weren’t sure if they would survive the rolling blackouts. Just mocking, trolling, and attempting to score political points.
The political trolling metastasized in the modern hellscape that is social media. As I said earlier, I spent more time than usual on social media over summer – using it as a bit of a canvassing-from-home opportunity during the election. A good amount was engaging people in serious political discussion, albeit with limited success given our country’s stark divisions. Like clockwork, the occasional online bully, emulating prominent political trolls, would notice my location (Berkeley, CA) and use it as an opportunity to attack me personally. The refrain about California was predictable and toxic. There were generic insults about how liberal policies were making California go down the drain (without any actual explanation of our policies or their outcomes), and that smart Californians were leaving en masse to lower-tax states because the Golden State is such a horrendous place to live. Homophobia and Ableism (especially using slang around developmental disabilities) made the occasional appearance as well. Again, predictable.
During the power outages, the rhetoric shifted to the emotionally-abusive tactic of blaming the victim for their abuse: “those power outages serve you right for voting in Democrats! Stupid libs!” No analysis, no recommendations, no knowledge of policies and outcomes in California – just toxic, online bullying that wasted my own time and forced me to take a moment to collect my emotions, asking “how can so many people act this way?” I was not alone: other connections received similar harassment online, even from old high school friends on Facebook. People they knew personally were mocking them during a time of suffering and need and insulted their home state (many of us have real affection for California), just to score political points and revel in others’ pain. It seems that, for some Americans, politics had switched from a means to improve public welfare to an opportunity to revive a middle-school level of bullying, harassment and even emotional abuse – whether to strangers or old friends.
Now, some social media trolls lived in California and decided to use this crisis to attack policymakers in Sacramento. I tried to implore a couple conservative Californians online to limit their energy use between 3-10 PM, as the ISO requested, and several shot back saying that the state should know better and other people who lose power should just deal with it. So, they kept running the AC in the evening and did laundry at dinnertime (some said they planned to do that just to rub my request back in my face). The toxic rhetoric, the blame-shifting, and the growing sense of entitlement and narcissism in a not-insignificant chunk of our country likely made those outages more widespread than they otherwise would be.
Now, this wasn’t the first time Californians experienced harassment for living in California this year. Similar rhetoric happened during our devastating wildfires, blaming Democratic leadership for not properly raking forests (even though only 3% of California’s forest land is state-owned; 57% is federal and 40% is private land). Never mind the fact that thousands of people lost their homes, far more had to evacuate in the middle of a pandemic, respiratory issues went through the roof, and nearly every impact disproportionately hit already marginalized and oppressed groups. A good amount of our state was dealing with some level of trauma, on top of the existing pandemic and economic catastrophe, and political trolls and online bullies decided to hit us while we were down. (Similar attacks happened to New Yorkers while they were in a horrendously traumatic stage in the pandemic, given NY is another favorite punching bag of political trolls on the right). It was emotional sadism.
So here we are, almost exactly 6 months later, and the Texas electric grid has been in freefall for at least a day and a half due to an unprecedented cold spell that has brought snow to the Gulf Coast and well-below-freezing temperatures statewide. Tens of gigawatts of fossil fuel and nuclear power have been rendered unusable because the extreme cold interfered with fuel supply, operating equipment, or other key systems. Several wind turbines stopped spinning because they were not properly weatherized for extreme cold, partly due to lax oversight and cost-cutting at the state level. A large swath of Texas is covered by its own independent electric grid, simply to avoid federal oversight and regulation, so the state cannot easily import energy from other regions. Over 70 different residential utility service providers create a complex set of business models and fee structures, making it extremely difficult to coordinate during a crisis and sending some customers’ bills sky-high. The Washington Post notes that “[in] the name of deregulation and free markets, critics say, Texas has created an electric grid that puts an emphasis on cheap prices over reliable service.”
The humanitarian toll is larger than California’s August 2020 rolling blackouts. Instead of a maximum 2.5 hours of downtime, some homes have so far spent almost a full day without power. Disadvantaged groups are taking a huge toll as seniors, people with disabilities, the homeless population, and people in poverty with poorly insulated homes face even colder conditions and/or are not as physically able to manage the extreme cold. A lack of running water raises dangers for health and hygiene. People with disability-related power needs may be at risk of medical emergencies or death. Wide areas of Texas don’t have snowplows or the ability to put salt on icy roads, so transportation is nearly shut down – again disproportionately harming already-disadvantaged groups.
The failure of the Texas electric system is largely due to the state leaders’ extreme embrace of “states’ rights” policies, conservative deregulation, ignoring climate trends and dangers (including an erratic jet stream), and plenty of hubris. Many Californians, who dealt with what was essentially emotional abuse from political trolls and online bullies during our times of crisis, understandably are feeling a bit of schadenfreude (aimed at the political trolls and online bullies, not the general Texan public). Liberals on news programs and social media are understandably calling out politicians such as Ted Cruz, Dan Patrick and Dan Crenshaw for their horrendous early behavior and hubris. They are also, for the most part, correctly digging into the cause of this blackout and what kinds of actions could prevent it in the future.
Of course, you’d hope that the political trolls might take a step back and focus on fixing the logistical and humanitarian crisis in a red state. But instead, they seem to be doubling down. Fox News propaganda artist Tucker Carlson made a whole segment on how this proves wind turbines and green energy are a colossal failure, while trolls across the right wing extended that narrative to attack the Green New Deal. It even seems like some are blaming this power failure on the GND – a policy framework that has no bearing in law, and certainly didn’t influence the Texas electric grid. The trolls and propaganda artists are using a crisis caused largely by free market deregulation to score political points against Democrats and progressive energy policies. One Mayor in Texas wrote a since-deleted Facebook post that essentially told the public to pick themselves up by their bootstraps – while the entire electric grid was down and out of their control. The son of the former president tweeted “I know someone who used to talk about how overrated wind turbines are. He said they do the most when you need them least and do the least when you need them most… That and they kill a lot of birds.” A poor-taste attempt at a joke from a prominent public figure amid a humanitarian crisis.
The Texas Governor even visited Sean Hannity to place blame on wind turbines and attack progressive climate efforts.
Meanwhile, people across the state are freezing and the costs of this disaster will almost surely be well over $1 billion. The political trolls are taking a humanitarian catastrophe and using it to attack their enemies for something the enemies did not cause. Or simply to make juvenile jokes about the very types of renewable energy that we need to limit climate catastrophes like California’s heatwave and Texas’s winter storm. These are not statements or jokes sent into the ether – they are sadistic online bullying of people already traumatized and struggling during horrible crises. And the prominent politicians and propagandists will lead their followers to act in kind, pushing them down a rabbit hole of harassment instead of lifting them up to address the urgent issues at hand.
Honestly, I’m a bit at a loss for how to overcome this widespread trolling and childishness from people in positions of power and responsibility. I’m not sure how, if, or when we will be able to turn around the culture of bullying that has become so pervasive in the past 5 years. I’m not sure how well we’ll be able to wake people up, get them to grow up, and work as a whole society to ensure our safety into the future. It may be a numbers game, and all we can do is enlighten some of the trolls and bullies while de-platforming or otherwise shunning those who are not serious about real-world problems.
Because darn it, people have to grow up or we are all pretty screwed.