The week
Texas Governor backs down Fox News comments on Green New Deal, says gas, coal failed Texas freeze
While millions of Texans were left without power in sub-zero temperatures on Tuesday night, Texas. Governor Greg Abbott (R) went to Fox News and told Sean Hannity that the failure of the state’s power grid “shows how the New Green Deal would be a deadly business for the United States of America”. Abbott said that “our wind and solar have been shut down,” which “has put Texas in a state of power outage across the state.” The main culprit for the power cuts in Texas are the failures in the natural gas sector, so on Wednesday Abbott reversed his comments. “I was asked on a TV show about renewable energy, and I answered that question,” said Abbott. “All the sources of energy that the state of Texas has been compromised, be it renewable energy, like wind or solar, but also, as I mentioned today, access to energy generated by coal, access to energy generated by gas, have also been compromised. “Throughout 2020, 40 percent of Texas energy came from natural gas-powered plants, 23 percent from wind turbines, 18 percent from coal and 11 percent from nuclear power, according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which manages the Texas power grid. But in winter, only about 7 percent of the ERCOT’s capacity was designed to come from wind sources. “Texas is still powered by fossil fuel” and it is obviously silly to suggest that “Republicans who run the state accidentally adopted a Green New Deal that eliminated fossil fuels and destroyed the reliability of the network,” writes Michael Grunwald in the Politico. “The real problem in Texas is the weird climate and, unfortunately, climate change is creating a much weirder climate” – a phenomenon that Texas Tech climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe calls a “global stranger”. Abbott, explaining the flaws in the Texas network, claimed on Wednesday that “this is a cold front that occurs once every 120 years to which we have to respond.” But “today, only a fool expects a hundred-year drought or flood or snowfall event to happen once every hundred years,” said Grunwald, and Texas – and America – need to prepare accordingly. More stories from theweek.comTrump comes out of hidingThe Texas power grid failed mainly due to natural gas. Republicans are blaming wind turbines. Rush Limbaugh estate: an internal guide