While his state was plagued by a massive electricity shortage that left millions of people without heat at high temperatures, the governor of Texas turned to television radio waves to start blaming.
Its main objective was renewable energy, suggesting that when wind and solar power failed, it led to a breakdown in the entire system.
“It just shows that fossil fuel is needed by 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.” said Governor Greg Abbott, speaking on Sean Hannity’s program on Fox News. Other conservative talk show hosts had already touched on the topic.
As cold weather hits the center of the nation, causing widespread power outages, freezing temperatures, slippery roads and climate-related deaths, Governor Abbott’s voice was among the most prominent in a chorus of political figures this week to quickly state what sources of green energy, as wind and solar contributed to blackouts. The talking points, coming in large part from conservatives, have reinvigorated a long-running campaign to claim that fossil fuels that emit emissions are too valuable a resource to be abandoned.
The efforts came despite the fact that burning fossil fuels – which cause climate change by releasing large amounts of carbon dioxide emissions that heat the planet into the atmosphere – is helping to fuel the phenomenon of hurricanes and other increasingly dangerous storms , as well as unusual weather patterns.
“Green power failure” said the banner at the bottom of the screen in Fox News stories about power outages. Social media posts scoffed at renewable energy as “unreliable”. A Wall Street Journal editorial called for more dependence on coal to help withstand cold temperatures. Some politicians and analysts spread lies and misinformation to promote their defense of fossil fuels.
“Every time we have challenges with the network, whether in California last summer or in Texas now, people try to turn it into a weapon for their pet project, which is fossil fuels,” said Leah Stokes, assistant professor of Political Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, whose work focused on battles over energy policy. “Our infrastructure cannot handle extreme weather events, which these fossil fuels are ironically causing.”
The politicization of the cold climate that affects large areas of the country is unfolding while President Joseph R. Biden Jr. has made combating climate change a fundamental principle of his government. With a wide range of executive orders in his early days in office, Biden re-joined the Paris Agreement between nations to combat climate change, canceled the Keystone XL pipeline and issued a moratorium on drilling for fossil fuels on federal land, Among other things.
“Building a resilient and sustainable infrastructure that can withstand extreme weather conditions and climate change will play a key role in creating millions of well-paid union jobs, creating a clean energy economy and meeting the president’s goal. achieve a net zero emissions future by 2050, ”said Vedant Patel, assistant press secretary for the White House.
Scientists are still analyzing what role human-made climate change may have played in the current round of winter storms, but it is clear that global warming poses future threats to energy systems across the country, with more heat wave forecasts. and water scarcity. Many electrical networks are not equipped to deal with these extreme conditions, putting them at risk of widespread failure.
It happened in Texas, where millions of people suffered continuous blackouts. The bars in the midwest and southwest were also tense. Dozens of people died in the storm or its aftermath.
When Governor Abbott appeared on Fox News, saying “it shows how the New Green Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America”, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, one of the architects of the proposed New Green Deal, shot back on Twitter. “Gov. Abbott needs to get off the TV pointing fingers and start helping people, ”she wrote. “After that, he needs to read a book about his own state’s power supply.”
Tucker Carlson, a Fox News presenter, had a similar fossil fuel message earlier in the week. “Global warming is no longer an urgent concern here,” he said, talking about this week’s cold weather and invoking the discredited claim that the cold refutes that the world is warming up dangerously. “The windmills froze and the power grid failed,” he said.
The blades of some Texas wind turbines froze at the site, but wind power is estimated to represent only 7% or more of the state’s total capacity at this time of year, in part because utilities lower their expectations for wind generation in winter in general.
Most of the energy loss in Texas came from natural gas suppliers, according to regulators, as the pipelines froze, making it difficult for power plants to obtain the fuel they needed. Production of coal and nuclear power plants also fell. A similar phenomenon occurred in Kansas and other states.
Like Jesse Jenkins, a power systems engineer at Princeton University, said on Twitter, “In short, ALL types of generation are being hammered.”
However, proponents of fossil fuels are using the current crisis to emphasize why they think fossil fuels need to be part of the overall mix of options to supply energy to 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 topic on Twitter.
Wind power has long been criticized in the United States, with some opponents blaming turbines for disrupting landscapes, occupying hunting grounds or transferring jobs from the fossil fuel industry. This week’s Texas crisis provided a new meeting place for some of these political messages.
“We have Joe Biden who is friendly and warm in his fossil-fueled White House singing kumbaya with his environmental extremists while Americans die of cold,” said Rep. Lauren Boebert, Republican of Colorado, who earlier this year introduced a measure to block re-entry into the Paris climate agreement.
Boebert mentioned a photo shared repeatedly this week on social networks for wind turbines that she said was in Texas and apparently being thawed by helicopter with a substance derived from fossil fuels. However, the image was unmasked by the Gizmodo website: the photo was from a turbine test in Sweden seven years ago.
In Kansas, one of the few states that relies heavily on wind power, the blades of some turbines have also froze. However, as in Texas, the biggest problem was that the state’s cold temperatures prevented the supply of natural gas to power plants that burn fossil fuels.
This has not stopped some Republicans from targeting green energy as the main culprit.
“The wind turbines are frozen. Solar is useless, ”wrote Mike Thompson, a Kansas state senator, on his Facebook page. “That is why the expansion of renewable energies is dangerous.”
Thompson, in an interview, called coal “our savior” and said the country needs to adopt fossil fuels. “To end everyone at their own risk in a deep freeze like this,” said Thompson, a former television meteorologist and climate change denier.
Kansas State Representative Brandon Woodard, a Democrat, recalled how on Monday, with the epic chill outside his door, he was sitting in his apartment in two layers of sweatpants and wrapped in blankets when he went. alerted by a rolling blackouts email to a constituent.
“I hope you can explain to me how the state will prevent these so-called continuous interruptions from becoming a norm,” the email said.
Woodard said the email, combined with this week’s deep freeze and power outages, should serve as a wake-up call for lawmakers to act.
“That’s why we need to have conversations about how to be resilient to deal with climate change patterns,” said Woodard. “I don’t think it’s the last time that we’re going to see continuous blackouts.”
Lisa Friedman contributed reports.