At this point, it has become clear that the power grid in Texas is in far worse shape than anyone ever imagined. When extremely cold weather hit the state, demand for energy surged dramatically. At the same time, about half of the wind turbines that Texas relies upon froze, and the rest of the system simply could not handle the massive increase in demand.

According to one expert, the state really was right on the verge of a “worst case scenario”: Demand for power outstrips the supply of power generation available on the grid, causing equipment to catch fire, substations to blow and power lines to go down. If the grid had gone totally offline, the physical damage to power infrastructure from overwhelming the grid could have taken months to repair, said Bernadette Johnson, senior vice president of power and renewables at Enverus, an oil and gas software and information company headquartered in Austin.

Most Americans don’t realize that much of the rest of the world actually has much better power infrastructure than we do. Just check out these numbers…In Japan, the average home sees only 4 minutes of power outages per year. In the American Midwest, the figure is 92 minutes per year. In the Northeast, it’s 214 minutes; all those figures cover only regular outages and not those caused by extreme weather or fires.

America is literally crumbling all around us, and it getting worse with each passing year. Our water systems are another example. In Texas, the cold weather literally caused thousands of pipes to burst. The damage caused by all of these ruined pipes is going to be in the billions of dollars. Without water, none of us can survive for long...