Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumGQP, 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, Texass 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, Texass 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 Californias 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 Texass 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
Botany
(70,539 posts)I would imagine Texas homes and businesses that had solar or wind power still had
electricity or the capacity to make electricity.