MSNBC presenter Chris Hayes condemned Fox News and right-wing media for falsely blaming wind turbines as the cause of the debilitating power outages plaguing Texas, and accused ‘these charlatans’ Tuesday of pushing ‘painful culture war idiocy’ in an effort to demonize clean. energy.
With much of Texas drenched in darkness as historic winter storms rage, demand for electricity has skyrocketed and right-wing media has assigned the lion’s share of the blame to the state’s wind farms. Referring to images of frozen wind turbines, Fox News has linked Joe Biden’s pursuit of green energy to the Texas catastrophe, even though the state derives the vast majority of its energy from fossil fuels.
Starting his primetime MSNBC program by summing up the devastation in the Lone Star State, Hayes noted that more than four million Texans were without power amid freezing temperatures on Tuesday.
He then turned his attention to those who wanted to exploit the issue for political gain.
“This is a terrible situation. It is driven by a complex combination of factors, from extreme weather to an electrical infrastructure that is woefully underdeveloped to the idiosyncrasies of the aggressively deregulated and independent Texas energy market, ”he noted.
But of course Fox News and other Republicans saw some kind of suffering, some kind of problem and immediately – without missing a beat – immediately tried to turn it into a culture war, in this case against those damn hippie liberals and their clean energy, Added the progressive MSNBC host.
Hayes played a montage of Fox stars blaming the deadly outages only on windmills while claiming that wind power doesn’t work in freezing temperatures, and Hayes pointed out how utterly pointless those claims were.
“Imagine how stupid you would have to think your audience is, the disdain you have to keep them in, to look into the camera and try to sell them on the idea that windmills don’t work when it’s cold,” he exclaimed. “After Texas, Iowa is the state with the most wind energy in the country. If you’ve ever been to Iowa in the winter, I can tell you from personal experience that it gets pretty cold in Iowa. “
Add to this that Denmark, a country with very cold winters, gets half of its energy from wind, the Everything in host then quoted the senior director of Texas’ Electric Reliability Council as saying earlier on Tuesday that ice forcing some wind turbines to stand still was the “least significant factor” in the Texas power outage.
“It’s just a lie that wind turbines and green energy are the main causes of the problems in Texas right now,” said Hayes, comparing the “Big Lie” claim that the election was “stolen” from former President Donald Trump. .
“Let’s be clear, this is probably as consistent a lie as it was about the elections because energy and the way we produce it is the biggest problem this country will face in the medium term,” he continued.
While observing that power grids are “ complicated ” and “ mysterious, ” Hayes said there is an occasional disaster that reminds us that the power grid is the “ foundation of modern civilization – and that it is also key to climate change. to win.
“Republicans and right-wing media, they want to take any policy issue and make it a painful idiocy of the culture war,” Hayes said. And there is interest in doing it. The fossil fuel companies want that too. They want to turn into a culture war, like the libs don’t want you to have power. “
While saying there is no reason why we can’t “create a modern energy infrastructure that is more resilient to climate change and is also cheaper and also serves people better,” Hayes concluded that the “biggest obstacle will be these charlatans who will take every opportunity to lie to people for profit and for power. “