WorldNetDaily’s Bob Unruh was in a stenographic mood in a Feb. 16 article:
Fox News host Tucker Carlson is blasting the “green energy” components of the Texas power grid for catastrophically failing in this week’s cold weather, leaving nearly 4 million homes without electricity.
The windmills that generate a good portion of the electricity used to heat homes were frozen.
“Who saw that coming in Texas?” Carlson said.
“If there’s one thing you would think Texas would be able to do, it’s keep the lights on. Most electricity comes from natural gas and Texas produces more of that than any place on the continent. There are huge natural gas deposits all over the state. Running out of energy in Texas is like starving to death at the grocery store: You can only do it on purpose, and Texas did.”
[…]Carlson said the Democrats’ “Green New Deal” has “come, believe it or not, to the state of Texas.”
But the Green New Deal does not exist in law anywhere in America, so it cannot possibly have “come to Texas.” Nevertheless, Unruh continued to uncritically quote Carlson:
He pointed out that rather than Texas depending on its own “vast natural resources,” politicians “took the fashionable route and became recklessly reliant on so-called alternative energy, meaning windmills.”
He said the change has come over the last few years, and it was all working just fine “until the day it got cold outside.”
“The windmills failed like the silly fashion accessories they are, and people in Texas died.”
As we’ve pointed out, wind turbines in northern states operate just fine during the winter, so there was obviously another issue: failure on the part of Texas’ power companies to properly winterize their wind turbines. Further, natural gas-fueled power plants also failed because they too weren’t properly winterized. So Carlson (and, thus Unruh) blaming wind power alone for Texas’ power issues is utterly false.
Unruh actually did note that — but not until the very end of his article, which he then tried to mitigate by adding, that “some of the closures were because power had been cut to the facilities.” He apparently didn’t ask why a power plant wasn’t using some of the power it generated to keep itself running.
Unruh also made an error of fact that apparently had nothing to do with Carlson, claiming that “Windmills make up about 25% of the state’s energy production at this time of year.” In fact, as an actual news outlet reported, only 7 percent of the forecasted winter capacity at the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages most of Texas’ grid, was wind.
Is it time for WND to issue yet another correction? It would seem so.