- Some Fox hosts and guests mistakenly blamed the collapse of the Texas power grid on renewable energy and climate policies.
- Fox’s Tucker Carlson falsely claimed that millions of Texans lost energy because wind turbines froze.
- Governor Abbott and former Governor Perry wrongly argued that the New Green Deal would cause future energy crises.
- Visit the Insider Business section for more stories.
While millions of Texans suffered from power outages in the midst of the extreme winter, a series of Fox News hosts and guests tricked their viewers into blaming the state’s power grid collapse on renewable energy and progressive climate policies.
Prominent Republicans, including the governor of Texas, the former energy secretary of President Donald Trump and Fox’s prime-time hosts, attributed the problem to wind and solar energy, the New Green Deal and President Joe Biden’s administration for the failure of state infrastructure.
We verify these claims.
‘The windmills froze’
“The windmills froze, so the electricity grids failed,” Fox presenter Tucker Carlson said Monday night. “It seems very clear that a reckless dependence on windmills is the cause of this disaster.”
Fact check: Most of the energy sources that went down in Texas were not wind turbines, but fossil fuel plants, including natural gas. Although Texas produces more wind energy than any other state, the state’s network manager, ERCOT, expected wind farms to produce 7% of their energy in the winter alone.
The term “windmill” is also not entirely correct. Windmills are used to mill corn and other grains into flour and pump water. Wind turbines generate electricity.
A Fox News spokesman declined to comment on the record, but pointed to Insider for Carlson’s clarification on Wednesday that wind power does not make up most of Texas’s offline power sources.
Also this week, Fox News contributor and former Republican Party congressman Sean Duffy falsely stated that the United States must depend on fossil fuel sources because renewable technology is unreliable in bad weather.
“Windmills don’t work when it’s freezing and solar panels don’t work when it’s really cloudy and snowy. We need fossil fuels,” Duffy told Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo.
Fact check: Wind turbines have been producing energy in the United States for at least four decades.
Wind turbines are perfectly capable of generating energy in freezing temperatures, if they are properly protected against the weather. Since Texas rarely goes through arctic spells like this, the state’s energy producers simply did not invest in bad weather in their equipment, including wind turbines and pipes that carry natural gas.
Experts say that if Texas energy producers had weathered their equipment – which the federal government recommended they do in the past – the state would not be experiencing such a severe crisis.
Offline solar panels contributed little to the outages across the state. And, like wind turbines, solar panels can operate in freezing temperatures. Heavy snowfall can limit the amount of electricity they generate, but normally any drop in production is only temporary.
Denying climate science
Carlson also said on Monday that Texas’ extreme winter is evidence that “global warming is no longer an urgent concern” in the state.
Carlson is an outspoken denier of climate science. During a December interview with conservative activist Charlie Kirk, the Fox presenter argued that climate change is fabricated by “crazy narcissist[s]”who believe that” God does not exist “.
Fact check: While climate change is not making winter colder, research shows that it can make certain weather events more extreme, including hurricanes and forest fires. Climate change can also alter the jet stream, which can cause polar air to plunge south. Ironically, relying on fossil fuels, which emit carbon, only worsens climate change.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program.
Screenshot / Fox News
Blaming Biden and the New Green Deal
Tuesday night, Carlson claimed that the New Green Deal, a proposal presented by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and some of his Democratic colleagues, is to blame for the Texas crisis.
“Without the knowledge of most people, the Green New Deal arrived in Texas [and] the power grid in the state has become totally dependent on windmills, “he said.” The same energy policies that destroyed Texas this week are being applied across the country – they are coming to your state. ”
Fact check: New Deal Green legislation has not been passed in Texas or at the federal level and is not responsible for Texas’ growing renewable energy sector. Texas has a lot of wind energy because Texas is windy, there is an abundance of land and wind turbines produce cheap energy. In fact, some of the country’s lowest-cost electricity can be found in Texas, according to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA).
On Tuesday, Rick Perry, former Texas governor and energy secretary to President Donald Trump, argued that the United States must depend at least in part on natural gas, coal and nuclear power to avert crises like the one Texas is facing. .
“The key here is to have the wisdom to have multiple sources of energy,” said Perry. “If this New Green Agreement moves forward the way the Biden government seems to want it, then we will have more events like the ones we had in Texas across the country, while we strangle the diversity that we will need to keep this country going.”
Republican state governor Greg Abbott made a similar point during an interview with Fox on Tuesday night and called the Green New Deal a “deadly deal”.
“It just shows that fossil fuel is necessary for the state of Texas, as well as other states, to ensure that we will be able to heat our homes in the winter and cool our homes in the summer,” Abbott told Fox News opinion leader, Sean. Hannity.
Abbott subsequently revised his comments, pointing out that “all the sources of energy that the state of Texas has been compromised.”
Former Energy Secretary Rick Perry.
J. Scott Applewhite / AP Photo
Fact check: Wind turbines and solar panels produce energy intermittently, which proponents of oil and gas often use to emphasize the value of fossil fuel plants, which can generally operate at any time. Newer technologies, such as batteries that last for days and high voltage lines, however, can make the intermittency problem obsolete. Other sources of energy that do not depend on fossil fuels, such as hydroelectric and nuclear energy, are not intermittent.
The Biden government did not endorse the Green New Deal, but proposed a nearly $ 2 trillion plan that would make the network carbon-free by 2035 and achieve zero net emissions by 2050. Renewable energy provided about a fifth of the country’s energy in the last year, according to the EIA.
Since taking office last month, Biden has signed a series of executive orders reversing Trump-era climate policies, including returning to the Paris Climate Agreement, blocking the Keystone XL pipeline and suspending the lease at the Arctic National wildlife refuge. from Alaska.