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Texas builds clean power – but it isn't a climate champion

Texas is meant to be a deregulated, free-market clean power hero that proves killing government scores climate progress. So I checked the numbers.

It presents the possibility that clean power doesn’t need to be fiercely progressive or left-wing: it can be conservative, right-wing, capitalist, and driven by a free, unregulated market. Demsas and Jenkins link this to a live debate in the US centring around the aggressive deregulation of energy development, purportedly in the name of accelerating climate action, relating to ‘permitting reform’ to cut red tape around approvals for large renewables and power lines – but also for major multi-decade fossil fuel infrastructure projects. It has been the largest in the US for a while, and it has risen badly in the past few years due to increased cooling, Bitcoin mines, data centres and fossil fuel extraction power demand

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