Chris Hayes Blasts Fox News for ‘Culture War Idiocy’ of Blaming Green Energy for Texas Blackouts: ‘It’s a Lie Like Donald Trump Won the Election’

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes offered a through dismantling of a nascent right-wing media narrative that an over-dependence on green or renewable energy is the primary cause of the catastrophic blackouts in Texas.

On Tuesday night, Hayes began his show by running through a series of clips from Fox news programs and opinion shows from within the past 24 hours, all of which blamed everything from frozen windmills to faltering solar panels for the massive power outages after record low temperatures across that state.

“This is an awful situation, it’s driven by a complex confluence of factors,” Hayes noted. “But of course Fox News and other Republicans saw some kind of suffering, some kind of problem somewhere and immediately without missing a beat right away tried to turn it into a culture war, in this case against those damn hippy liberals and their clean energy.”

When California suffered through rolling blackouts this past summer, Hayes pointed out that conservative media and Republicans politicians mocked “liberal California” for pursuing foolish energy policies.

“Imagine how stupid you would have to think your audience is, the contempt you have to hold them in, to look into the camera and try to sell them on the idea that windmills don’t work when it’s cold,” Hayes shot back at that idea. “After Texas, Iowa is the state with the most wind power in the country. If you’ve ever been to Iowa in the winter, I can tell you from personal experience, it gets pretty cold in Iowa. Denmark gets nearly half of its energy from wind power. I don’t know if you’ve looked this up, anyone over at Fox News, but Denmark, very cold place in the winter.”

In fact, the MSNBC host pointed out, the agency that controls the electric grid in Texas has explained that frozen wind farms are the “least significant factor” to the massive blackouts. In a Bloomberg article, one of the agency’s senior directors said the primary culprits for the millions of people without power were frozen instruments at natural gas, coal, and even nuclear power plants, many of which failed to winterize their facilities.

“It is just a lie that wind turbines, green energy, are the root causes of the problems in Texas right now,” Hayes railed. “It is a lie like Donald Trump won the election, a lie like there was widespread voter fraud, a lie pumped into millions of people’s brains as they watch TV. And let’s be clear, this is probably as consequential a lie as any about the election because energy and how we produce it is the single biggest issue this country will face in the medium term.”

“Republicans and right-wing media, they want to take every policy issue and turn it into some painful culture war idiocy,” he continued. “The fossil fuel companies want this too. They want to turn into a culture war like the libs don’t want you to have power. We have an opportunity, we have a choice collectively as a country. We don’t have to have politics about where we get our energy divided along the lines of abortion or policing. There’s no reason for that to be connected. We can create a modern energy infrastructure that is more resilient to climate change and also cheaper and also serves people better, and also can withstand extreme weather events, and also doesn’t heat the planet until we are in dire straits. We can do all that. In fact there’s lots of great news happening on that front. But the biggest obstacle will be these charlatans who will take every opportunity to lie to people for profit and for power.”

Watch the video above, via MSNBC.