MSNBC’s Chris Hayes it offered a dismantling of a nascent narrative in the right-wing media that an excessive reliance on green or renewable energy is the main cause of the catastrophic blackouts in Texas.
On Tuesday night, Hayes started his program by running a series of clips from Fox news programs and opinion programs in the past 24 hours, all blaming everything from frozen windmills to wobbly solar panels for the huge outages after low temperatures throughout this state.
“This is a terrible situation, driven by a complex confluence of factors,” noted Hayes. “But it is clear that Fox News and other Republicans saw some kind of suffering, some kind of problem somewhere and immediately without missing a beat tried to turn this into a cultural war, in this case against those damn liberal hippies and their clean energy. “
When California suffered blackouts last summer, Hayes pointed out that conservative media and Republican politicians scoffed at “liberal California” for pursuing foolish energy policies.
“Imagine how stupid you would have to think your audience is, the contempt you have for containing them, looking at the camera and trying to convince them that windmills don’t work when it’s cold,” Hayes said. that idea. “After Texas, Iowa is the state with the most wind energy in the country. If you’ve ever been to Iowa in the winter, I can tell you from experience, it’s very cold in Iowa. Denmark derives almost half of its energy from wind energy. I don’t know if you researched this, someone from Fox News, but Denmark, a very cold place in winter. “
In fact, noted the host of MSNBC, the agency that controls the power grid in Texas, explained that frozen wind farms are the “least significant factor” for massive blackouts. In a Bloomberg article, one of the agency’s senior directors said that the main culprits for the millions of people without power were the frozen instruments of natural gas, coal and even nuclear power plants, many of which failed to prepare their facilities for the winter.
“It’s just a lie that wind turbines, green energy, are the main causes of the problems in Texas right now,” said Hayes. “It’s a lie how Donald Trump won the election, a lie as if there were widespread electoral fraud, a lie injected into the brains of millions of people while watching TV. And let’s be clear, this is probably as important a lie as any other about the election because energy and how we produce it is the biggest problem this country will face in the medium term. “
“Republicans and the right-wing media want to take every political issue and turn it into a painful idiocy of cultural war,” he continued. “Fossil fuel companies want that too. They want to turn into a cultural war as if the libs don’t want you to have the power. We have an opportunity, we have a collective choice as a country. We don’t need to have a policy on where we get our energy divided along the lines of abortion or policing. There is no reason for this to be connected. We can create a modern energy infrastructure that is more resistant to climate change and also cheaper and also serves people better, and can also withstand extreme weather events, and also does not heat the planet until we are in a terrible situation. We can do all of that. In fact, there is a lot of good news happening on that front. But the biggest obstacle will be these charlatans who will take every opportunity to lie to people for profit and power. “
Watch the video above, via MSNBC.
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