Austin American-Statesman. May 5, 2024.

Editorial: UT Austin took wrong approach with crackdown on protests, trampling free speech

Though entitled to their right to free speech, protesters bore responsibilities, too. Some failed them.

The scenes from the University of Texas were shocking: police in riot gear, pawing horses, dozens of state troopers – and unarmed student protesters in T-shirts and shorts dragged through the dirt or doused with pepper spray. It was a week of overreaction by UT to largely peaceful protests by its own students. In the process, the university made a mockery of its prized culture of free speech.

Campus protests about the war in Gaza are challenging for universities to navigate. Protesters nationwide are calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and divestment from school investments linked to Israel or the Israeli military. In this atmosphere, universities have to balance safety for their communities with the right to free speech. These are moments when principles of free speech, nonviolence and consistent enforcement of the law most need to be followed.

UT had a duty to respond to these challenges with targeted, proportionate choices that did not trample free speech in the process. In some cases, it failed utterly; we must note there were peaceful pro-Palestinian protests before and after the chaotic events of April 24 and April 29. We must note, as well, that protesters bear responsibilities. They are entitled to free speech but not to vandalism, destruction of property or violations of other city and campus regulations like camping. Some protesters reportedly had weapons. There is no place for them in a peaceful protest.

Militarized presence inflamed tensions, instead of cooling them

There is blame to go around, but some falls on UT’s administration and Gov. Greg Abbott, who together launched the militarized presence that inflamed tensions instead of cooling them. Thankfully, the pepper spray, zip ties, horses and weaponry did only limited physical harm. But the damage to free speech and the school’s values may be long-term. First Amendment scholars are questioning the validity of preemptive crackdowns on protesters. Meanwhile, research shows that repressing protesters with violence can give them a spotlight – and can ignite radicalism.

Force has no place on either side in any political protest. The militarized response was perhaps especially searing at UT, where just six months earlier the university cheerfully celebrated Free Speech Week. Under a 2019 law, outdoor spaces at Texas public universities are open both to students and the public if they don’t break the law or materially disrupt the school’s functions.

Yet on April 24, UT dispatched state, city and campus police pre-emptively. In a Houston Chronicle op-ed, UT president Jay C. Hartzell said they took the action because protesters had publicly stated an intent to break rules, rebuffed administration attempts to meet, and planned encampments banned by UT rules. As American-Statesman reporter Bayliss Wagner noted in her reporting last week, it isn’t clear if the university had the right to cancel a protest in advance or to order students to leave.

UT could have consulted its own experts to head off a crisis

What is clear: UT had choices about what to do once the students had gathered. After the Vietnam era, a whole research field began to focus on protest movements. UT, rich with specialists in history, communications, and conflict resolution, should have consulted its own experts for a strategy to head off this crisis.

At the same time, it is up to protesters to reject bad actors. University officials claim that police confiscated guns from some, although no weapons or assault charges have been filed. Guns, even when legally carried, have no place in a protest crowd -- and organizers should have been vigilant. The short-lived tent encampment also challenged UT’s ban on encampments. Yet instead of ripping tents down in front of an agitated crowd, law enforcers could have waited until twilight or dawn when there were fewer bystanders.

Instead, UT’s military-style drama drew bystanders and non-students into the melee – hurting its whole community. Aggressive crackdowns, research shows, can turn peaceful crowds violent, goad neutral students into the fray, and embolden radicals. “Attention is activist fuel,” a recent essay in Scientific American noted. “The more attention that a protest gets, the easier it is to get other people to participate and the greater pressure they can exert on their targets.”

UT still has alternatives, said protest specialist Alessandro Piazza, the Jones School Distinguished Assistant Professor of Strategic Management at Rice Business. While many protesters know they will lose effectiveness if they’re violent, they also know that being disruptive gains attention, he said. So it makes sense for institutions to bring protesters to the bargaining table early on. “Students may feel ultimately that they want to be disruptive,” Piazza told the Editorial Board, “but not be suspended or charged by police.”

Nurturing dialogue before a crisis explodes is the ideal

Ideally, universities should nurture dialogue with activists on simmering issues long before a crisis explodes. These relationships can create solutions even when disagreement seems hopeless. Because administrations have little direct power over investments, for example, they may have limited ability to address some protester demands, Piazza said. That’s all the more reason to defuse tensions with ongoing talks, he said.

“Use a mediator. Try and build coalitions. Keep communication channels open. Make sure the students know your incentives. And make sure you know theirs.”

These options may sound naïve. But they can change a battleground to a field of debate. One day after a second crackdown when UT pepper-sprayed protesters and made 79 more arrests, Brown University announced an accord with protesters. The school’s highest governing body will vote on divestment from Israeli-linked firms. The students took down their encampment. No promises. But no horses, no weapons, and, perhaps, no more chaos.

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Dallas Morning News. May 1, 2024.

Editorial: The power grid puts Texas growth at risk again Texas must diversify power sources and add transmission lines.

Transmission lines are to energy reliability as good roads and highways are to economic growth. Without the infrastructure in place, growth and prosperity are at risk.

Pablo Vegas, the chief executive of the Texas Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the state’s power grid operator, warned that the shortfall of electricity transmission could impede new investment in Texas and take years to rectify.

ERCOT recently increased its forecast for electricity needed to support new large-scale users from 111 gigawatts to 152 gigawatts, a 37% increase to 2030. It is the latest indication of how the state’s explosive industrial growth continues to add to the already substantial power demands from population growth. Toward that end, the grid operator and the Public Utility Commission are more actively planning for the long-term impact of large, new industrial facilities on electricity consumption and transmission.

This is an important rethinking of forecasting power requirements statewide. A recent history of blistering hot days and damaging cold snaps has created valid concerns that the grid remains vulnerable to extreme weather events. Power usage set all-time highs during the past two summers and is expected to do the same this summer, a prediction based in part on energy trading prices that signal more stress on the grid as temperatures soar.

Texas continues to benefit from a relatively cheap mix of solar, wind and natural gas power that have made the state an attractive destination for large industrial facilities such as power-sucking data centers, bitcoin mining, hydrogen-related manufacturing and oil and gas production in the Permian Basin. The flip side is that the energy infrastructure has to keep pace.

In recent sessions, lawmakers have tried to tilt energy policy in favor of fossil fuels and against renewables at a time when the state’s economic vitality depends on its ability to add power from natural gas generation, solar, wind and batteries that can flexibly dispatch stored power when needed to avert energy emergencies.

For example, battery usage recently exceeded 2,000 megawatts for only the second time, accounting for a record of 4% of the total load, according to energy expert Doug Lewin. And on one day in late February, the power grid moved 82.8% carbon-free power, 71.2% of which was provided by renewables, a mix that underscores the importance of diverse and cleaner energy sources.

The bottom line is that Texas’ growth depends on state policy staying ahead of the demands brought on by a pro-growth economic environment. Texas’ free market approach to energy competition has served it well but isn’t without challenges. Lawmakers must recommit to improve the reliability of the grid, support diversified power sources without undue favor and make sure that ample supplies of electricity are produced and efficiently delivered to homes and industries statewide.

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Fort Worth Star-Telegram. May 2, 2024.

Editorial: Texas needs to air-condition prisons before a federal court turns up the heat again

It often takes a federal court’s involvement to get Texas to do right by the vulnerable or underserved. From appalling prison conditions and segregated schools to shameful care for foster children, judges have made the state pay dearly for its intransigence.

It might be happening again, over an entirely avoidable problem: the lack of air conditioning in Texas’ prisons.

Several nonprofit groups recently joined a lawsuit against the state over the issue, bringing all 130,000 of Texas’ inmates into the case. The suit, originally brought by Bernie Tiede, the infamous killer played by Jack Black in a movie, contends that prisoners have faced temperatures in excess of 110 degrees.

We understand the impulse to be tough on criminals, especially as horrific random violence from around the nation splashes on our TVs and social media feeds. And, hey, if they can’t stand the heat, they should have thought about that before breaking the law, right?

But tough is one thing. Cruel is another. It’s wrong, it’s unconstitutional — and it’s potentially expensive. If the court imposes the fix, it could cost more, all at once, than if the state for once takes the initiative.

About two-thirds of the state’s 87 prison and jail facilities have no or partial air conditioning, Texas Department of Criminal Justice officials said last year.

The state has reported no deaths from heat in prisons since 2012, but that’s almost assuredly creative bookkeeping. Plenty of prisoners have underlying health conditions and heat deaths can show up as other causes. The Texas Tribune found 41 deaths in prisons during the brutal 2023 summer, including among young and otherwise healthy inmates.

Remember, too, that it’s not just the inmates sweltering in there. It’s also corrections officers and the staff and contractors that make the place run. They have more access to air conditioning and other respite, but it’s hard enough to hire and keep personnel in Texas’ far-flung prisons. Asking them to risk their health in unreasonable heat doesn’t help.

And no one is suggesting that prisons need to be kept as cold as a Texas mall entrance, where a 40-degree swing can hit you as soon as you walk in the door. The suggestion is to set a maximum of 85 degrees — an indoor temperature that would have most Texans throwing cash at an AC repairman. It’s not comfortable, but it is survivable.

The state has defended itself by noting that it is gradually adding more air conditioning to various units. And the Legislature allocated $85 million last year for delayed repairs at Texas Department of Criminal Justice facilities, much of which, officials indicated, would go to more cooling areas.

So the argument of whether it’s necessary is essentially settled. Now, it’s a question of how aggressively to do it. The House overwhelmingly passed a bill last year that would have added AC at 16 prisons for $226 million. But the bill died in the Senate.

As the old saying goes, pay now or pay more later. Texas has the money. It just needs the political will to acknowledge that while no one wants to coddle prisoners, when they are in state custody, we must provide them a minimum standard of care.

It’s time for the Legislature to do so — and do it, for once, before a court demands it.

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Houston Chronicle. May 1, 2024.

Editorial: Texas wants to lead in AI. Can our electric grid handle it?

We don’t think much about our carbon footprint when we punch some words into Google. Yet did you know your average monthly Google searches are roughly equal to running a 60-watt light bulb for three hours?

Thirteen years ago, Google revealed a closely held industry secret: The company’s data centers — massive facilities across the globe that house millions of computer servers running 24/7 — continuously draw almost 260 million watts of energy. That’s enough to power roughly 200,000 homes, and that consumption has likely grown as Google has built even more data centers.

Now multiply a Google search by 10. That’s roughly how much electricity it takes for OpenAI’s ChatGPT model to process a single request. The promise of artificial intelligence, we’re told by our billionaire tech overlords, is that it will help solve intractable real world problems through increased productivity and innovation. In Texas, though, we fear the artificial intelligence revolution could crash our wobbly grid by adding way more load to the electric grid than it can currently handle. On a global scale, it could undermine efforts to slow climate change. Mike Sommers, the CEO of the American Petroleum Institute, told us last week the vast amount of energy required by AI development would increase the need for “ dispatchable ” energy sources such as natural gas and coal.

The International Energy Agency projects that the world will need an additional 10 terawatt-hours of electricity generation every year if Google were to one day fully implement AI requests into its search engine. That’s the equivalent of lighting 10 million homes for a year. Here in the U.S., data centers already account for 4% of power consumption, but that number will surely grow.

Grid operators are adjusting their demand forecasts accordingly. Pablo Vega, the CEO of ERCOT, Texas’ grid manager, acknowledged during a recent podcast interview that the speed at which data centers are being built in Texas has “fundamentally changed” how the state will have to plan for transmission.

Texas has roughly 276 data centers across the state. The vast majority of these facilities are in the Dallas area, where companies are taking advantage of affordable real estate and cheaper power costs than most other regions. Last year alone, 386 megawatts of data center space came online in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, the equivalent power demand of about 77,000 homes. Meta is in the process of building an $800 million data center in Temple to support its AI development.

This boom in power demand will surely test a shaky grid which is already warning of power shortfalls months before the summer temperatures keep our air conditioners running all day. ERCOT reported last month that peak power loads will rise 6% by 2030, though that projection seems cautious. It doesn’t fully account for the additional 62 gigawatts of load waiting to connect to the grid, including major energy guzzlers such as data centers, semiconductor plants and cryptocurrency mining facilities. And unlike the computers generating new cryptocurrency that can shut down at a moment’s notice when grid conditions get tight — and get paid handsomely for it — data centers must run continuously to meet the demands of cloud-based computing, streaming, gaming and analytics.

“Historically, we’ve always been able to have years to contemplate a massive manufacturing facility coming online and the potential supply built to support that and transmission to support it,” Vega said. “Today, it’s a whole different paradigm. We need to be able to plan and invest in transmission based on reasonable and prudent forecasts of where load is going to go.”

The good news — or bad if you believe the advancement of artificial intelligence is an apocalyptic nightmare in the making — is that AI technology is rapidly becoming more efficient. Nvidia, one of the leading AI developers, announced in March that its latest AI “superchip” is 25 times more energy-efficient. In the same way that Y2K-era fears that the Internet would hopelessly drain our grid never quite came true, these developments give us reason to believe AI will eventually be a seamless fit.

Yet Vega is correct to underscore the transmission challenges. The fundamental problem with Texas’ grid is our transmission lines can’t funnel energy where it’s most needed. Even when energy-rich areas such as West Texas have wind turbines producing massive amounts of electricity, it often ends up congested because there is not enough transmission capacity to get it to urban centers such as Houston. That should soon change thanks to a bill passed by the Legislature last session which allows the Public Utility Commission to expedite transmission development by requiring the state to consider future load growth in permitting construction.

What would help inform this construction planning is if we could track the energy impacts of artificial intelligence data centers, in Texas and across the nation. Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., has introduced a bill that would do just that. This bill would order the National Institute of Standards and Technology to develop needs and standards for AI’s energy usage. It would also require the EPA to study the environmental impacts of AI within two years. We urge Congress to pass this bill.

AI development doesn’t have to be all doom and gloom. We believe in its positive applications, even as we’ve warned that it requires substantial regulation. We are eager to see Texas play a role in realizing AI’s promise, as long as we can keep the lights on to do so.

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AIM Media Texas. May 2, 2024.

Editorial: State laws shouldn’t be used to deny access to Medicaid and other federal programs

A new battle has erupted in the war between the states and the federal government. A Virginia-based federal court last week ruled against states invoking gender-restriction laws to deny Medicaid coverage for some gender-related treatments to transgender residents.

If the case goes to the Supreme Court, and the court sides with the states, might this embolden officials in Texas and other conservative states to deny coverage to immigrants, even if they’re entitled to have it?

It’s a valid question. After all, the state already has denied coverage to many residents, including U.S. citizens in all demographic categories, by rejecting Medicaid expansion that was part of the Affordable Care Act. Might currently eligible immigrants lose access to government-funded health care under a state denial of services?

It could be a major issue for the Rio Grande Valley, where more than 1 in 4 residents were born in other countries and about one-third of all residents have Medicare coverage.

Under current federal law, Medicare can pay for emergency treatment for immigrants, both legal and illegal, under certain conditions. Moreover, legal residents can receive coverage under Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program and other federal healthcare programs once they have had “qualified non-citizen” status for five years. This would apply to “green card” holders and those with special refugee status, among others.

Many people who seek tighter immigration restrictions contend that immigrants come to this country only to take advantage of government benefits, and thus harm native-American taxpayers. Thus, officials in Texas and other conservative states could seek to deny immigrants access to such benefit programs, including healthcare plans.

Medicaid is a federal program administered jointly with the states. Both fund them and the federal government sets guidelines for their management and application. The federal government, and courts, have held that gender-related restrictions are discriminatory, and thus illegal.

Such opinions haven’t stopped states from trying to deny services to illegal residents, including public school enrollment and lunch programs. To date, those efforts have been struck down, including by several Supreme Court decisions.

The court’s current conservative majority, however, has shown little respect for past decisions and overturned several previous rulings. This has emboldened officials in some states to challenge some of those rulings, and they have succeed in matters such as abortion and voting rights.

Legal experts have long held that except where specifically stated otherwise, the rights guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution are not reserved to citizens but are basic human rights that apply to everyone, regardless of nationality or legal status. This includes provisions prohibiting discrimination and mandating equal protection of the laws.

Ideally, the high court would decide not to take any appeal of the gender-related Medicare denial case, and let the lower court ruling stand. Otherwise, many Valley residents might have reason to fear the loss of the only healthcare coverage they can get.

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