The week

Texas governor falls back Fox News comments on Green New Deal, says gas coal failed freeze in Texas

While millions of Texans were without electricity in freezing temperatures Tuesday night in Texas. Governor Greg Abbott (R) went on Fox News and told Sean Hannity that the state power grid failure “shows how the Green New Deal would be a fatal deal for the United States of America”. Abbott said “our wind and sun have been turned off,” which “put Texas in a situation where there was a nationwide lack of electricity.” The main culprit for the blackouts in Texas are outages in the natural gas sector. On Wednesday, however, Abbott went back to his comments. “I was asked a question about renewable energy on a television show and I responded to that question,” Abbott said. “Every energy source that the state of Texas has compromised, be it renewable energy like wind or sun, but, as I mentioned today, access to coal power, access to gas power has been compromised.” For all of 2020, 40 percent of Texas’ s energy came from from natural gas, 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. In winter, however, only around 7 percent of ERCOT’s capacity should come from wind sources. “Texas is still fossil-fueled,” and it is obviously silly to say that “the Republicans who run the state accidentally passed a Green New Deal that eliminated fossil fuels and destroyed the reliability of the electrical grid,” writes Michael Grunwald at Politico. “The real problem in Texas is freaky weather, and unfortunately, climate change is creating much freakier weather” – a phenomenon that Texas Science climate researcher Katharine Hayhoe calls “global weirdness.” Abbott stated Wednesday that this is a one-off cold front that we must respond to every 120 years. But “today, just a fool would expect a hundred-year drought, flood, or snowfall event to occur every hundred years,” Grunwald said, and Texas – and America – must prepare accordingly. Other stories from theweek.com5 include hilarious cartoons about Mitch McConnell’s impeachment process.

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