You forgot about the trees and the above ground power lines!

As somebody who grew up in California but has been living in oklahoma for the last 13 years, I can tell you that honestly this cold front is seriously exceptional, I mean we've had some pretty cold winters but atleast I haven't experience anything like this.

It's so cold the water is freezing in the lines underground. Its so cold I can actually walk and ice skate on my salt pool right now. The snow is so high in some places that if you threw a cat into the middle of it you know that it will die because there is nothing it will be able to do to see to know which way to go in order to get out.

I mean its absolutely crazy how exceptionally cold this winter was.

And the reality is this.

1.) it's only lasting 4 days and the last time it was recorded being this cold in the midwest was 100 years ago. (which btw it got even colder in oklahoma than it did in texas and we didn't lose power, just food for thought)

2.) It's not a national problem because the coasts don't get as cold. The coldest day in recorded new york city history is -15 f and that was on February 9th, 1934. The coldest day recorded in LA is like the low 40 f, but here in Oklahoma City we've just about hit -15 degrees EVERY SINGLE YEAR SINCE THE THERMOMETER WAS INVENTED.

Like i said we are used to being cold, but we've never actually experienced anything like this before.

3.) Being connected to the coastal grids would mean that if we actually had to use it, we'd end up being forced to saw off limbs in order to pay for it. That is just how capitalism works and therefore we find that it's better for us to be independent because in exchange for having to suffer a power outage every now and then, at least we understand that when we pay for energy here it is going to energy companies who create energy here, who employ people who live here, etc etc.

The midwest doesn't have the same economic opportunities as the coasts have, nor do we receive the same kind of "federal government assistance" when it comes to these matters regardless of which party is in power. Out here poor people vote for lower taxes, because that is the only way they are personally going to see any of that money actually make it's way back to their bank accounts.

4. The problem with winterizing is that you can really only do so much. The issue is more of an implicit limitation of physics than any individual companies negligence out here in the midwest (because as I pointed out, were used to getting cold weather like this every year and it's never been a problem on the scale of a state of emergency until now).

The problem is that if you have to raise the temperature so that you can actually produce energy, you have to use most of that energy you produce to raise the temperature and keep it up, and when you also have a bunch of people who need to use that energy to keep spaces like homes that don't help produce energy, you can see how this situation becomes quickly and increasingly insurmountable. The reality is that energy companies out here know that when they don't do their job well, people out here die.

If your argument is that greedy oil men don't care enough about "grandma baptist" dying to ensure they go above and beyond to ensure our power grid is prepared to "weather the storm" frankly you don't understand that one of the many unwritten rules of capitalism is "It's not considered good business to kill your customer.", while I understand in places like Silicon Valley (be cause like i said i grew up there) the general belief is that Government is king. But out here Business is king. And so while it might be advantageous for a politician to kill off a bunch of old people. It is not advantageous for a business to because in Government you need 75,000,000+ votes to fire the boss. In a corporation you only need like 10 votes to kick out a crappy CEO.

And while there are millions of reasons why it makes sense for us to keep firing our politicians. There is really only one reason why a board of directors will fire it's CEO. And thats because they stop earning. Like I said blackouts aren't good for business, and if you want to argue whether keeping energy surpluses artificially low in order to jack up prices is a problem, then sure let's have that discussion. But lets not pretend that people on the coast are on team "cheap energy" here and lets not pretend that's because they don't know that's the only thing we have that they desperately need.

All im saying if you isolate the politics from the underlying economics and science, you will surely find that nobody's head deserves to roll for this. (unless you can catch mother nature)