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As I write this, on the afternoon of June 13, nearly 650,000 homes and businesses in Texas remain without utility-provided electricity due to the effects of Hurricane Beryl.

Naturally, Texas politicians know where to put the blame.

No, not on a massive storm which, at times, hit Category 5 — the top of the Saffir-Simpson wind scale — wreaking havoc on power delivery to millions across the Caribbean, Mexico, and across a wide swath of the United States, but on the private sector and government utilities which actually generate and deliver electricity.

State senator Molly Cook (D-Houston), the Houston Chronicle reports, wants to know “Why is this happening? Why is it happening here? Who’s responsible? How do we fix it? What needs to happen at each level of government so that it does not keep happening?”

Why is this happening, ma’am? Well, there’s this thing called “weather.”

Why is it happening in Texas? Because hurricanes love the Gulf of Mexico and the Texas coastline on that body of water is either 367 miles long (if you ask the Congressional Research Service) or 3,359 miles long (if you ask the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration).

Who’s responsible? Interesting question with many plausible answers, but for the sake of brevity let’s just go with “The Almighty.”

How do we fix it? Again, many plausible answers, but definitely not the answer Cook seems to imply in the final question: What needs to happen at each level of government so that it does not keep happening?

Her colleague in the state senate, Boris Miles, wants “highly enhanced oversight provisions” and a legislative study on the “feasibility” of burying power lines. All, of course, with a “significant investment of state dollars” that somehow magically doesn’t “[pass] the cost on to those whose lives are affected.”

A better answer would be for the state legislature to dissolve itself, perhaps designating Cook and Miles to exit the state Capitol last, turning out the lights as they go.

Failing that, the legislature could at least stop trying to centrally plan the generation and delivery of electricity over long-distance “grids” — which always and inevitably produces results like the Beryl outages — and let power companies and their customers figure out decentralized solutions that reduce the carnage.

Yes, such solutions MIGHT include burying power lines.

Such solutions would almost certainly include hyper-local (even down to the household level) power generation so that downed lines and blown transformers black out — at most — city blocks rather than entire cities.

Household-level solar and wind would mean that even if your power goes out, your neighbor’s might very well not.

Small nuclear reactors of the newer, more efficient, safer generation might mean that an outage in Pearland need not extend to Stafford.

Absent some really amazing technological developments, we can count on occasional terrible weather events forever.

And so long as government insists on blocking innovation and substituting its central planning for real solutions we can count on the fallout from those terrible weather events remaining worse than it has to be.