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hatrack

(59,589 posts)
Wed Feb 24, 2021, 09:31 AM Feb 2021

GQP, Fux News & All The Rest Busy Building Renewable Energy As The Next Front In The Culture War

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Regardless, the Republican leadership in Texas, abetted by rightwing media outlets and a proliferation of false claims on social media, has sought to pin the crisis on wind turbines and solar panels freezing when the Lone Star state needed them most. “The Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America,” Greg Abbott, Texas’s governor, told Fox News last week, in reference to a plan to rapidly transition the US to renewable energy that currently only exists on paper. “Our wind and our solar got shut down … It just shows that fossil fuel is necessary.” Abbott subsequently walked backed these comments but others have been less hesitant to use the crisis to attack renewables. Sid Miller, Texas’s agriculture commissioner, stated that “we should never build another wind turbine in Texas” on Facebook, while Tucker Carlson, the prominent rightwing Fox News host, said “windmills” were “silly fashion accessories” prone to failure.

Fox News blamed renewables for the blackouts 128 times in just a 48-hour period last week, according to Media Matters. The distortions were amplified by social media, with a picture of a helicopter de-icing a wind turbine widely shared on Twitter and Facebook, even though the photo was taken in Sweden in 2014. A YouTube live stream by the conservative commentator Steven Crowder blaming the blackouts on “the failures of green energy” has been viewed about a million times, while the Texas Public Policy Foundation used paid Facebook adverts to urge people to “thank” fossil fuels for keeping them warm while assailing “failed” wind energy.

The scorn heaped on renewables has echoes of the blackouts suffered by California during devastating wildfires last year, which caused several prominent Texas Republicans such as Dan Crenshaw, a member of Congress, and Senator Ted Cruz, who last week fled his stricken home state for sunny Cancún, to mock California’s shift to cleaner energy.

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Keenan said that much like how the US reacted to the 9/11 attacks by escalating its national security activity, the country now needs a similar level of response to the climate crisis by first taking basic steps, like weatherizing infrastructure and keeping reserve power in store, that Texas’s free-market grid system neglected to do. America has now “reached a turning point where the costs of disasters far exceed the amortized costs of upfront investments in resilience”, Keenan said. “Part of the impetus here is an acknowledgment that the status quo is unsustainable and we need to adapt our infrastructure and our way of life.”

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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/feb/24/texas-renewable-energy-culture-wars

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GQP, Fux News & All The Rest Busy Building Renewable Energy As The Next Front In The Culture War (Original Post) hatrack Feb 2021 OP
What failed in TX was their electric power grid which relies on coal and gas not renewable energies. Botany Feb 2021 #1

Botany

(70,539 posts)
1. What failed in TX was their electric power grid which relies on coal and gas not renewable energies.
Wed Feb 24, 2021, 09:39 AM
Feb 2021

I would imagine Texas homes and businesses that had solar or wind power still had
electricity or the capacity to make electricity.

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