Vox Sentences - Winter is messing with Texas

Extreme winter weather exposes cracks in Southern energy grids; France considers controversial legislation on secularism.

Tonight's Sentences was written by Gabby Birenbaum.

• Winter Storm Uri has covered 75 percent of the continental United States in snow, with another storm expected to hit the already-strained American South. [The Wall Street Journal / Talal Ansari and Elizabeth Findell]
• Across the South, whose energy grids are largely unwinterized, power outages have left people without heat and water, causing rolling — and in some cases continual — power outages. [Vox / Umair Irfan]
• In hard-hit Texas, deregulation has disincentivized power companies from securing their grids for winter weather. Now, pipelines have frozen, power plants have gone dark, and the price of electricity is soaring — and over 4 million Texans are without power. [The Washington Post / Will Englund]
• The natural gas companies that primarily power the grid have enforced rolling blackouts in order to reduce the load at the direction of state regulators, with some areas experiencing persistent outages. [The Houston Chronicle / Marcy de Luna and Amanda Drane]
• The outages, combined with nearly a year of the coronavirus pandemic, have pushed many Texans to the physical and mental brink: People are unable to charge their medical devices, sleeping in their cars, and losing access to water and grocery stores. [The Texas Tribune / Shannon Najmabadi and Marissa Martinez]
• Minority neighborhoods were among the first to lose power and could be the last to see it returned. Their houses often lack proper insulation and will be at risk of pollution exposure due to proximity to stopping-and-starting industrial sites. [The New York Times / James Dobbins and Hiroko Tabuchi]
• Across Texas, hundreds of cases of hypothermia and carbon monoxide poisoning have been reported in hospitals as people desperately try to get warm using stoves, grills, gas ovens, and other dangerous means. [The Dallas Morning News / Joseph Hoyt]
• A political battle has ensued, as Republicans have blamed wind and solar energy shutdowns for the blackouts and used it as an opportunity to criticize the Green New Deal — which has not been passed. In actuality, natural gas, coal, and nuclear energy are responsible for the vast majority of outages. [The Associated Press / Ali Swenson and Arijeta Lajka]