> The reality of that catastrophe has very little to do with politics.
"Politics" means "the activities associated with making decisions in groups." Anything that impacts the lives of groups of people where people made decisions (like the decision to have an isolated electrical grid [0]) is politics.
I live in Chicago. We have far worse ice storms than Texas but we also see over weeks 100F in the summers. We realized that A) power is a critical utility that people need to literally live, and B) it's technologically unnecessary and economically irrational to let inadequate infrastructure cause mass casualty events and cost us $195 BILLION [1] in damage, contamination, and lost economic opportunity, so we made the decision to engineer a resilient power grid and we don't experience the kinds of massive, protracted failures that Texas keeps having, despite the Public Utilities Commission of Texas and the Texas Railroad Commission investigating the failures when Texas' grid went down for the same reasons back in 2011 [2]. By definition, that's politics.
> And those charged high rates agreed to variable pricing.
My power bill each month ranges from $100 to $150 and I just pay for what I consume. People in Texas were getting automatically charged rates as high as $11,000 in a month where they received terrible service. [3] It's just bullshit to say anyone agreed to that.
> The ultimate reason why Texas had a problem was because of a nasty ice storm took out infrastructure.
Why was that infrastructure vulnerable to a nasty ice storm? It is possible to build infrastructure that can easily operate in those conditions.
From what I heard there were plenty of warnings, but EPCOT either refused to demand weather-hardening infrastructure, or did not have the authority to demand this hardening.
And those charged high rates agreed to variable pricing.
The ultimate reason why Texas had a problem was because of a nasty ice storm took out infrastructure.