Blame the Greens

 In Texas a propaganda war has broken out over the cause of its electrical power collapses.

“This shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America,” Texas Governor Greg Abbott told Fox News. Abbott faulted renewable energy sources for Texas’s “situation where it was lacking power on a statewide basis”. 

His lieutenant governor, fellow Republican Dan Patrick, however, told Fox News  that the problems were not attributable to green energy. “We had a breakdown everywhere,” Patrick said,

“The Green New Deal has nothing to do with our problems in Texas,” said Daniel Cohan, associate professor of engineering at Rice University.  “...Natural gas systems failed to provide those plants with a reliable supply of fuel.” 

“There is no Green New Deal in Texas, nor has there ever been,” said Joshua Rhodes, an energy research associate at the University of Texas at Austin. “Any investment in renewables has been because private companies have seen the opportunity to make money, which is core to the Texas ethos.” He said that gas supply issues and freezing water pipes appear to be the main issue when it comes to loss of capacity at power plants, and that the recent blackouts are no excuse to question the durability of alternative energy.