Above photo: Downtown Houston lit up on Feb. 15, 2021 while the rest of the city is in darkness. Twitter.
What’s really going on with renewable energy, fossil fuels, and the blackouts in Texas?
As you may have seen on social media, a group of climate deniers, right wing politicians, and fossil fuel industry mouthpieces are spreading a bunch of disinformation about how wind and solar energy is to blame for the current blackouts in Texas.
This is a lie.
In reality, the blackouts in Texas are a fossil fail: the result of our over dependence on a fossil fuel energy system in the era of climate disruption.
Fossil Free Media has pulled together a set of talking points that you can use to share the truth about what’s going on in Texas and pushback on the fossil fuel industry’s disinformation campaign.
Talking Points
The blackouts are a result of our over reliance on fossil fuels.
The cold weather in Texas froze equipment at natural gas, coal, and nuclear power facilities. That’s the main reason for the blackouts.
The stories that you’re hearing about lots of wind turbines freezing up is fake news. The photo of a helicopter deicing a wind turbine that’s making its way around the internet is from Sweden in 2013. Don’t fall for it.
Sure, some renewable energy facilities are also experiencing problems, but according to regulators that’s only accountable for less than 13% of the missing power. The rest is fossil fuels and nuclear power.
A modern, clean energy system would be better able to meet these challenges.
Think about it: if we had a more distributed energy system with lots of solar panels and wind turbines, it would be more resilient to impacts like this.
A distributed energy system creates more redundancy, meaning more options to turn to when things go wrong.
If more homes had their own solar panels and battery systems, they’d be better able to handle these sorts of blackouts.
Retrofitting our homes and making them more energy efficient would also make them cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter, making them better able to handle these extremes.
We need to modernize our energy system: exactly what the fossil fuel industry and their allies have been lobbying against.
Scientists have been warning us for decades that global warming would result in more extreme weather, including the types of events that we’re seeing right now in Texas.
But instead of helping us rise to the challenge, the fossil fuel industry and their political allies have denied the problem existed and lobbied against solutions.
Now they want you to believe that they’re the only ones that can solve the problem — a problem they helped create!
We have the technology we need to make our energy system cleaner, cheaper, more efficient, and better able to handle the threats that climate change will continue to bring — but we can only do it if we stop letting the fossil fuel industry block progress.
Solutions like a Green New Deal are exactly what we need to face these challenges.
Building a modern clean energy system that can handle the challenges of climate change would create millions of jobs here in the United States.
The Green New Deal is all about modernizing our energy system so that it’s cleaner and more-reliable than our aging fossil fuel system.
President Biden’s push to get 100% clean electricity will help us make the improvements we need to handle challenges like these.
The fossil fuel industry, meanwhile, has no plan: they just want to drill for more gas and oil so they can make a profit, poisoning our planet in the process.
If we keep relying on fossil fuels, the climate crisis — and these extreme weather events — will only get worse.
The lies you’re hearing about renewable energy are part of an active disinformation campaign being run by right wing activists and fossil fuel fanatics.
Think about it: the fossil fuel industry has been lying about the climate crisis for decades. Of course they’re going to lie about what’s causing these blackouts.
The industry always does this and lies about renewables during the midst of blackouts. They did the same thing when California experienced blackouts, even though the real cause was poor planning — and the extreme heat caused by climate change!
This myth about the failure of renewables started with fringe voices on social media before being picked up by climate deniers and fossil fuel industry mouthpieces.
The politicians who are promoting these lies are in bed with the fossil fuel industry. Texas Senator John Cornyn, who has been actively sharing this disinformation, has received more money from oil and gas companies over the last two years than any other member of Congress.
The photo of a helicopter deicing a wind turbine that’s making its way around the internet is from Sweden in 2013. Don’t fall for it.
The fossil fuel industry wants you to forget it’s causing the climate crisis.
It’s the burning of fossil fuels that is helping cause this whole crisis in the first place!
Climate change is messing up weather patterns in the Arctic, driving cold air down across the United States.
Extreme weather events are already the leading cause of power outages and if we don’t deal with the climate emergency, it’s only going to get worse.
The fossil fuel industry is trying to use this crisis to its own advantage so it can keep profiting while the rest of us pay the price.