On Sunday night, before following Saturday Night Live and others in mocking Republican Senator Ted Cruz for attempting to vacation in Cancun while his home state of Texas was in crisis mode—with millions out of power and dozens dying—Last Week Tonight’s John Oliver focused on the highly-paid fabulists over at Fox News who have been parroting the fiction that green energy is largely to blame for Texas’ power crisis.
“Texas saw a full-blown humanitarian crisis this week, with many losing electricity and access to clean water, hospitals having to evacuate patients, and dozens of deaths,” said Oliver. “And if you watched Fox News, there was one culprit for all of this: green energy. Because multiple hosts placed the blame firmly on frozen wind turbines—and none more loudly than this guy.”
He then cut to Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who exclaimed, “The windmills failed, like the silly fashion accessories they are, and people in Texas died,” later arguing, “Green energy means a less reliable power grid—period. It means failures, like the ones we’re seeing now in Texas. That’s not a talking point, it’s not a political slogan, we’re not taking money from ExxonMobil to say it. Again, that is true. It’s science.”
“OK, first: we know ExxonMobil’s not paying you. Almost no one is. Your show’s lost so many advertisers you’re basically being bankrolled by a man in a sexual relationship with a pillow [Mike Lindell],” cracked Oliver. “Second, just because you loudly insist something is science doesn’t make it science. That’s science. And finally, calling windmills ‘silly fashion accessories’ is just absurd. The only time you could conceivably make that claim was when The Bachelor contest Deandra dressed up as a windmill for her night one entrance.”
Those windmill claims were repeated by Texas Governor Greg Abbott on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program—only they’re far from true. As Oliver explained, “That’s horseshit. Texas only relies on wind power for about 25 percent of its electricity. The vast majority comes from thermal heat sources like natural gas, coal, and nuclear, and all of those were utterly hobbled by the cold this week. Even if every wind turbine in Texas had kept spinning, the state still would have been in deep shit.”
Furthermore, most of Texas runs on its own power grid separate from the rest of the country—and state leaders designed this specifically to avoid federal regulation. This meant that Texas “was limited in its ability to import energy from neighboring states,” offered Oliver, and it led the power provider Ercot to struggle to meet surging demands. The state of Texas also left it to the energy companies to decide whether or not to winterize their facilities to protect themselves against storms.
“Sometimes, when you’re the only one doing something, you might be a pioneer,” said Oliver, adding, “and sometimes, you might be an idiot.”
