abbott-cowboy-hat.jpg
FOX NEWS
Viral

Texas Governor Greg Abbott Is Getting Roasted For Blaming Power Outages On The Green New Deal While Millions Of Texans Freeze

Nearly four million Texas residents are without power after a brutally cold winter storm blanketed the state with snow and ice, shutting down groceries, gas stations, and hospitals. There are numerous reasons for the outages that have left people without power since Sunday, including historically low temperatures, corporate mismanagement, and the state being isolated from the rest of the country’s grid (everything is more chaotic in Texas). But Governor Greg Abbott is only focused on one: wind turbines.

“This shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America,” Abbott told Fox News’ Sean Hannity on Tuesday. “Our wind and our solar got shut down, and they were collectively more than 10 percent of our power grid, and that thrust Texas into a situation where it was lacking power on a statewide basis.” He continued, “It just shows that fossil fuel is necessary for the state of Texas as well as other states to make sure we’ll be able to heat our homes in the wintertime and cool our homes in the summertime.”

Except wind turbines aren’t the issues, and neither is the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez- and Bernie Sanders-backed Green New Deal. Everywhere from Wisconsin to Antarctica uses wind turbines, and they’re able to keep up with electrical demands when temperatures drop below zero. The real issue, according to the Washington Post, is “a financial structure for power generation that offers no incentives to power plant operators to prepare for winter. In the name of deregulation and free markets, Texas has created an electric grid that puts an emphasis on cheap prices over reliable service.” Also:

But while some wind generators did go offline as turbines iced over, the state’s largest grid, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, said the shortage was driven by a failure not of renewable sources but of traditional “thermal” sources: coal, nuclear and especially natural gas. Energy experts said that gas lines supplying gas-fired plants may have frozen or that supplies to the plants may have been limited as gas was prioritized for homes that rely on gas for their heat.

In other words, the opposite of what Abbott — whose campaigns have been heavily funded by the fossil fuels industry — said. Cool. Speaking as someone who lives in Texas, I am currently warming myself to the roasting the governor is getting on Twitter.

https://twitter.com/andyroddick/status/1361872820037242882