The fossil fuel industry’s disinformation machine turned on before the lights even went out.
As a massive winter storm rolled towards Texas, it was accompanied by a barrage of lies about how renewable energy — and “frozen wind turbines” in particular — was to blame for potential blackouts.
It began over the weekend, as posts about the blackouts began to pick up momentum on right-wing social media. One image that went viral showed a helicopter supposedly de-icing a wind turbine in Texas. A tweet with the photo from a fossil fuel publicist — because, really, who else? — has now been liked nearly 88,000 times.
As more and more right-wing accounts began to share the image, it soon jumped over into the political arena. Texas Republican Senator John Cornyn retweeted the picture on Monday. By Tuesday, Montana Republican Senator Steve Daines and conspiracy-minded Congresswoman Lauren Boebert were out with their own posts promoting the story. What do these politicians have in common? Boebert and Daines have both received extensive fossil fuel contributions, while Cornyn was the top recipient of oil and gas money in Congress over the last two years.
In reality, the “frozen wind turbine” was a complete fabrication. The photo wasn’t actually taken in Texas, but in the Uljabuouda mountains in Arjeplog, Sweden in 2013. As Brian Kahn explained in a piece for Earther, the picture has for years been a favorite meme for far-right climate deniers to spread anytime there’s a cold snap. (None of the politicians who shared the image have yet to issue a correction).
By Monday, the “renewables caused the blackout” story was already gaining steam in right-wing media outlets. In nearly all those cases, the “experts” being cited by these outlets could be traced back to the fossil fuel industry.
By Tuesday, the disinformation had made another jump, this time to the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. In a piece called “The Deep Green Freeze,” the editorial board wrote that “Power shortages show the folly of eliminating natural gas — and coal.” It concluded with the ominous warning, “The Biden administration’s plan to banish fossil fuels is a greater existential threat to Americans than climate change.”
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That’s, of course, absurd, and our politicians and news outlets shouldn’t be parroting Big Oil’s talking points. What Texas is currently experiencing is the combined threat of the climate crisis and our over-reliance on fossil fuels. Moving towards a smart-grid powered with renewable energy won’t just cut our emissions, it will make our energy system more resilient and better able to handle the ongoing impacts of the climate crisis.
The current crisis in Texas, and the way the fossil fuel industry and its backers have swooped in to take advantage of the situation in order to spread climate denial and anti-renewable energy talking points, is a perfect case study in how a disinformation machine operates.
Let’s be clear about what’s really going on in the Lone Star state right now. These temperatures are notthat unusual in the grand scheme of weather changes over decades. It may even be that the freezing temperatures are actually connected to global warming, with climate change leading to changes in the Arctic jet stream that allow freezing weather to escape the polar regions and break down south.
It’s also important to note that this severe cold snap across Texas has frozen instruments at natural gas, coal, and nuclear facilities.
Along with the limited supplies of gas on hand, the situation has caused a lack of power supply, leading to some 30 to 35 gigawatts of total power outages across the state — almost all from non-functioning gas power plants. Sure, some wind turbines and solar facilities have also been affected, but all through Monday while gas plants were freezing, wind turbines and solar panels actually exceeded expected power delivery.
In short, the failure of fossil fuels is what’s causing the blackout.
It’s not enough to just to push back on the fossil fuel industry’s propaganda on a case-by-case basis (there are very few effective ways to combat a lie once it’s spread across the internet). We need to actually dismantle the industry’s disinformation machine — or at the very least, throw a few wrenches in the gears.
As the Texas example is showing us, we can’t wait to “fact-check” climate disinformation once it’s already spread. We need to be out in front, putting the truth on offense. Reality is on our side: from now on, let’s make the fossil fuel industry respond to us, not the other way around.
RedditOfUnusualSize on February 17th, 2021 at 20:59 UTC »
Well, because "elite" and "Democrats" and "liberal" are slurs in the Republican vocabulary to describe "people I don't like, who I want to demonize for everything that goes wrong in my life". It's not meant to signify anything real.
Back in 2008 or 2009, my racist aunt once launched into a spiel about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and how Democrats had tanked the housing market, which had hurt her. To which I said "wait a minute, why are you blaming Democrats and Bill Clinton for that? Republicans controlled the House, the Senate and the Presidency for four years between 2002 and 2006, and the Senate and the Presidency from 2006 to 2008. At no point in the last six years of Bill Clinton's presidency did the Democrats have full control. So how is it that Democrats can possibly have full responsibility for this, while Republicans bear none? If they'd wanted to change Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's policies, nobody would have been able to stop them."
And at this questioning, my racist aunt's mind basically Ctrl+Q'ed in front of me, and she stopped for a moment while it rebooted, and then she got a combination of angry, defensive, and spitting a lot of garbage about RINO's. Which was just her way of onion-peeling to the next level of deflection. Because she wasn't trying to determine facts and assess guilt or innocence. She was just angry, wanted something to be angry about, and wanted someone to be to blame for making her angry. Fox News provided the focus and the target. The point wasn't the facts. The point was the emotional validation.
This is no different. The mere fact that Democrats have not held power since the 1990's in Texas doesn't mean anything, because it's not about facts. It's about the need for angry emotional toddlers to lash out at something that isn't them, and blame that other for their problems. The fact that the target of the anger literally didn't have the power to do what they are angry about them doing is incidental to the emotional catharsis found in blaming those damn Democrats, rather than blaming myself for being foolish enough to believe Republican propaganda.
Infernalism on February 17th, 2021 at 20:50 UTC »
The Republicans running Texas chose not to winterize our power grid. It cost money, so they pocketed the difference and blamed the failure on wind turbines, because a lot of Texans will believe a bald-faced lie.
uping1965 on February 17th, 2021 at 20:09 UTC »
Because it makes people afraid of alternative energy.