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As his state gripped a massive blackout crisis that left millions of people without heat in freezing temperatures, the Texas governor turned to the airwaves to start blaming.
Its main focus was renewable energy, suggesting that when wind and solar power failed, it led to a system collapse.
“It just shows that fossil fuels are needed for the state of Texas as well as for other states to ensure that we will be able to heat our homes in the winter and cool our homes in the summer,” Governor Greg Abbott said, speaking on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show. Other conservative talk show hosts had already picked up on the theme.
As freezing weather grips the center of the country, causing widespread blackouts, freezing temperatures, slippery roads and weather-related deaths, Governor Abbott’s voice has been among the most striking in a chorus of political figures this week to quickly assert that green energy sources such as wind and solar are contributing to blackouts. The talking points, largely coming from the Conservatives, reignited a long-standing campaign to claim that emitting fossil fuels are too precious a resource to be abandoned.
The efforts were made despite the fact that the burning of fossil fuels – which causes climate change by releasing large amounts of global warming carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere – is helping to fuel the phenomenon of hurricanes and others. increasingly dangerous storms, as well as weather patterns.
“Green Power Fail” read the banner at the bottom of the screen for Fox News articles on power outages. Social media posts scoffed at renewables as “unreliable.” A Wall Street Journal editorial called for greater reliance on coal to help endure freezing temperatures. Some politicians and analysts are spreading lies and disinformation to promote their defense of fossil fuels.
“Whenever we have issues with the grid, whether it’s in California last summer or Texas right now, people are trying to turn it into a weapon for their favorite project, which is fossil fuels,” said Leah Stokes, assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, whose work has focused on battles over energy policy. “Our infrastructure cannot handle the extreme weather events, which these fossil fuels ironically cause.”
The politicization of the cold weather that is hitting huge swathes of the country is playing out as President Joseph R. Biden Jr. has made tackling climate change a key tenet of his administration. With a series of executive orders in his early days in office, Mr Biden joined the Paris Agreement among nations to tackle climate change, canceled the Keystone XL pipeline and issued a moratorium on fossil fuel drilling on federal lands, among others.
“Building resilient and sustainable infrastructure capable of withstanding extreme weather and climate change will play a critical role in creating millions of well-paying union jobs, creating a clean energy economy and achieving the president’s goal of achieving a net zero emissions future by 2050. ”said Vedant Patel, deputy White House press secretary.
Scientists are still analyzing what role human-caused climate change may have played in the current spate of winter storms, but it’s clear that global warming poses future threats to power systems nationwide with predictions more intense heat waves and water shortages. Many power grids are not equipped to handle these extreme conditions, which puts them at risk of widespread failure.
This was the case in Texas, where millions of people suffered continual blackouts. The networks in the Midwest and Southwest were also strained. Dozens of people died in the storm or its aftermath.
When Governor Abbott appeared on Fox News, stating that “this shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America,” said Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, one of the architects of the Green New Deal project, fired back on Twitter. “Gov. Abbott needs to quit television and start helping people, ”she wrote. “After that, he has to read a book about the energy supply of his own state.”
Tucker Carlson, a Fox News host, had a similar message in favor of fossil fuels earlier in the week. “Global warming is no longer a pressing concern here,” he said, speaking of this week’s freezing weather and citing the discredited claim that the cold weather refutes the world is heating up dangerously. “The windmills froze and the power grid broke,” he said.
The blades of some Texas wind turbines have frozen in place, but wind power is estimated to be only about 7% of the state’s total capacity at this time of year, in part because utilities are cutting back. their expectations in terms of wind power generation in winter in general.
Most of the power loss in Texas came from natural gas suppliers, regulators said, as pipelines froze, making it difficult for factories to get the fuel they needed. The production of coal and nuclear power plants also fell. A similar phenomenon has occurred in Kansas and other states.
Like Jesse Jenkins, an energy systems engineer at Princeton University, said on twitter, “In short, ALL types of generations are hammered out.”
Nonetheless, supporters of fossil fuels use the current crisis to highlight why they believe fossil fuels must be part of the overall mix of options to power the grid.
“The anti-carbon movement really didn’t value reliability,” said Alex Epstein, author of “The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels,” who expressed his opinions in a long Twitter thread.
Wind power has long been the target of criticism in America, with some opponents accusing the turbines of disrupting sights, taking land for hunting, or dislodging jobs from the fossil fuel industry. This week’s crisis in Texas provided a new rallying point for some of these political messages.
“We have Joe Biden who is kind and warm in his fossil fuel-fueled White House chanting kumbaya with his environmental extremists as Americans freeze to death,” said Rep. Lauren Boebert, Republican from Colorado, who introduced earlier this year a blocking measure. entry into the Paris climate agreement.
Ms Boebert mentioned a photo shared multiple times this week on social media of wind turbines that she said were in Texas and apparently helicopter-de-iced with a substance derived from fossil fuels. However, the image was debunked by the Gizmodo website: The photo was from a test seven years ago on turbines in Sweden.
In Kansas, one of the few states that rely heavily on wind power, the blades of some turbines have also frozen. However, just like in Texas, the biggest problem was that the state’s freezing temperatures were halting delivery of natural gas to fossil-fueled power plants.
That hasn’t stopped some Republicans from targeting green energy as the main culprit.
“The wind turbines are frozen. Solar is unnecessary, ”wrote Mike Thompson, a Kansas state senator, on his Facebook page. “This is why the expansion of renewable energies is dangerous.”
Mr Thompson, in an interview, called coal “our savior” and said the country must embrace fossil fuels. “Eliminate all of this at your own peril in such a freeze,” said Mr Thompson, a former television meteorologist and climate change denier.
State Representative Brandon Woodard of Kansas, a Democrat, recalled that on Monday, with the epic cold outside his door, he was sitting in his apartment in two layers of sweatpants and wrapped in blankets when he was alerted of power outages by email from a constituent.
“I hope you can explain to me how the state will prevent these so-called deployment failures from becoming a norm,” the email read.
Mr Woodard said the email, combined with this week’s deep freeze and power outages, should serve as a reminder for lawmakers to act.
“That’s why we need to have conversations about resilience to deal with changing climate trends,” said Mr. Woodard. “I don’t think this will be the last time we’ll see power outages.”
Lisa Friedman contribution to reports.
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