Schumer Mocks Texas Over Deadly Energy Crisis: 'Hope They Learned a Lesson'
Democrat leader says state is 'paying the price' with winter storm
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Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) mocked Texas over the deadly energy crisis following the state's unprecedented winter storm.
On Sunday, the New York senator blasted Lone Star State citizens amid their suffering, saying he hopes Texans "learned a lesson."
Texas is battling an energy crisis triggered by record-breaking winter weather last week.
When blistering arctic air engulfed Texas and the deep south with snow and ice, millions of Texans were left for days without heat and light.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) has come under fire for vulnerabilities in the Texas power grid.
The council is responsible for supplying the majority of the state's electricity for more than 25 million Texans.
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In fact, Texas was just "seconds and minutes" away from experiencing catastrophic failure with its energy grid that would have left the state in the dark for months, the Texas Tribute reported.
More from the New York Post:
Texas is the only state in the continental US to run its own stand-alone electricity grid and had not been forced to weatherize because it is not subject to federal oversight.
The exact number of people who died from the extreme cold is not yet known, according to The Blaze.
Sen. Schumer said he hopes Texas "learned a lesson," attributing the significant energy issues to officials who have "ignored climate change."
"The bottom line is, Texas thought it could go it alone and built a system that ignored climate change," Schumer said while speaking in Manhattan, the New York Post reported.
"It was not what's called resilient, and now Texas is paying the price," he mocked.
"I hope they learned a lesson."
Schumer went on to bash Texas officials for allegedly not considering the effects of climate change when constructing their energy systems.
"When we build power, when we build anything now, we have to take into account that climate change is real, or people will have to be caught the way the people in Texas were," Schumer said.
"When I wrote the [Hurricane] Sandy bill, $60 billion for New York, we made sure everything was resilient," he added.
"When they built back the subways, built back this, built back that, they were going to be resistant to climate changes, and we have to do that."
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Meanwhile, the family of an 11-year-old boy, who died in a Texas home that suffered power loss during the cold snap last week, is suing power company Entergy and ERCOT for more than $100 million, according to reports.
The wrongful death lawsuit, filed in Jefferson County District Court, alleges that widespread blackouts contributed to the suspected hypothermia death of the boy, Cristian Pavón Pineda, the Houston Chronicle reported.
"Despite having knowledge of the dire weather forecast for at least a week in advance, and the knowledge that the system was not prepared for more than a decade, ERCOT and Entergy failed to take any preemptory action that could have averted the crisis and were wholly unprepared to deal with the crisis at hand," the lawsuit stated, according to ABC News.
