Millions of Texans endured freezing temperatures with no heat, electricity, sanitary water, or food after a devastating cold front wreaked havoc on the state's insufficiently winterized power sources, booting nuclear, electric, gas, and wind power plants offline.
The state's predicament is unique, as the majority of Texas is not on the national power grid, but an independent grid with less integration of out-of-state power sources, along with different standards of regulation and oversight.
But because a small number of the power sources to shut down were wind turbines, many Republicans are falsely claiming that the calamity in Texas is due to a disproportionate reliance on wind power.
Wind turbines are a growing form of renewable energy championed by advocates for U.S. climate policy, helping offset the imminent disasters posed by the climate crisis. As a result, the green technology has been slammed by Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, whose quixotic obsession with "windmills" went viral during his presidency.
The Republican Governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, went on Fox News, where he blamed the humanitarian crisis on the Green New Deal—a climate policy overhaul championed by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) which hasn't been passed or enforced in Texas or nationally.
Watch below.
Abbot said:
"This shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America. Texas is blessed with multiple sources of energy such as natural gas and oil and nuclear, as well as solar and wind. But you saw...our wind and our solar got shut down, and they were collectively more than 10 percent of our power grid."
The Governor went on to say the debacle was proof that fossil fuels are necessary, but the energy sources Abbott was defending saw nearly double the outages of the state's renewable energy outages.
According to the Texas Tribune:
"An official with the Electric Reliability Council of Texas said Tuesday afternoon that 16 gigawatts of renewable energy generation, mostly wind generation, were offline. Nearly double that, 30 gigawatts, had been lost from thermal sources, which includes gas, coal and nuclear energy."
In fact, wind turbines surpassed expectations throughout the storm.
Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez, an architect of the Green New Deal that Abbot slammed, responded to his comments on Twitter.
Just a couple of days later, Ocasio-Cortez announced an initiative from Team AOC to raise funds for Texas relief efforts.
By the next day, they'd raised over $2 million.
Meanwhile, others praised her rebuke of Abbott.
Abbott's comments on Fox News were met with widespread backlash, including from onetime Senate candidate from Texas, Beto O'Rourke, who organized hundreds of thousands of wellness check-ins on the ground during the crisis.
Nearly 40 deaths so far have been attributed to the crisis in Texas.
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