Tucker Carlson: The great Texas climate catastrophe is heading your way

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Tucker: Elites pushing 'green energy' are out of touch with America

'Tucker Carlson Tonight' host slams the Green New Deal after a winter storm freezes Texas wind turbines

The Green New Deal has come, believe it or not, to the state of Texas. How's it working out so far?

Well, the good news is all that alternative energy seems to have had a remarkable effect on the climate. Sunday night, parts of Texas got the temperatures that we typically see in Alaska. In fact, they were the same as they were in Alaska. So global warming is no longer a pressing concern in Houston. 

The bad news is, they don't have electricity. The windmills froze, so the power grid failed. Millions of Texans woke up Monday morning having to boil their water because with no electricity, it couldn't be purified.

The ironically named Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which oversees the grid, had no solution to any of this. They simply told people to stop using so much power to keep warm. So in Houston, hundreds of shivering Texans headed to the convention center like refugees to keep from freezing to death. Some Texans almost certainly did freeze to death. Later this week, we'll likely learn just how many more were killed as they tried to keep warm with jury-rigged heaters and barbecues and car exhaust.

DEADLY TEXAS WINTER STORM LEAVES MILLIONS WITHOUT POWER AMID FRIGID TEMPERATURES

That happens every time when the power goes out; even advanced societies become primitive and dangerous, and people die. We've seen it happen repeatedly in California for years now, rolling blackouts in a purportedly First World state that is slipping steadily into chaos.

But who saw that coming in Texas? 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.

Rather than celebrate and benefit from their state's vast natural resources, politicians took the fashionable route and became recklessly reliant on so-called alternative energy, meaning windmills. Fifteen years ago, there were virtually no wind farms in Texas. Last year, roughly a quarter of all electricity generated in the state came from wind. Local politicians were pleased by this. They bragged about it like there was something virtuous about destroying the landscape and degrading the power grid. Just last week, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott proudly accepted something called the Wind Leadership Award, given with gratitude by Tri Global Energy, a company getting rich from green energy.

So it was all working great until the day it got cold outside. The windmills failed like the silly fashion accessories they are, and people in Texas died. This is not to beat up on the state of Texas -- it's a great state, actually -- but to give you some sense of what's about to happen to you.

BIDEN EXECUTIVE ORDER WANTS STUDY ON RESETTLING THOSE 'DISPLACED' BY CLIMATE CHANGE

Here's President Biden last month:

BIDEN, JAN. 27: In my view, we’ve already waited too long to deal with this climate crisis ... That’s why I’m signing today an executive order to supercharge our administration['s] ambitious plan to confront the existential threat of climate change.  And it is an existential threat. 

"Climate crisis", "existential threat", "ambitious plan". You hear those phrases a lot and you'll notice that they are all suspiciously non-precise. So what do they mean for you? Will they mean higher energy prices? For starters, gas prices are already up, in case you haven't noticed. Electricity will follow. Higher costs hurt the weakest, inflation always does, but it's worse than that. Green energy inevitably means blackouts. Someday that may change as technology progresses, but as of right now and given the current state of technology, green energy means a less reliable power grid. It means failures like the ones we're seeing now in Texas. That's not a talking point, that is true. It's science. So of course, they're denying it.

Here's our new climate czar taking a quick break from spewing carbon in his private jet to lecture the rest of us about a topic he personally knows nothing about: Private sector jobs and how more windmills are going to generate tons of them:

KERRY'S PRIVATE JET USE SHOWS HOW HARD IT IS TO ACTUALLY CUT EMISSIONS: CLIMATE AUTHOR

JOHN KERRY, JAN. 27:  The president of the United States has expressed in every comment he has made about climate the need to grow the new jobs that pay better, that are cleaner than -- I mean, you know, you look at the consequences of black lung for a miner, for instance, and measure that against the fastest growing job in the United States before COVID [which] was solar power technician ... And similarly, you have the second fastest-growing job pre-COVID was wind turbine technician. This is happening.

The old plan, you'll remember, was coding. All the guys in pickup trucks were going to learn to code and run the Internet after we sent their jobs to China. In the end, of course, we just imported people from China to code, so that didn't actually happen. But John Kerry has another idea: High school-educated rural people are going to be wind turbine technicians. So what they used to do with transmissions, whatever that was, they're going to do with windmills; put bearings in them or lube them or something.

Now, it's possible that John Kerry actually believes that. Maybe he's never been within 20 feet of a wind turbine. He definitely doesn't live near one. They don't have wind farms in Aspen or Martha's Vineyard and they're not getting them. John Kerry himself once fought to keep wind farms out of sight of his summer house on Nantucket. That's hypocritical, but it's not surprising.

People who support wind farms, as a rule, live very far from wind farms. People who live near wind farms have a totally different view, and why wouldn't they? How would you like a massive power plant in your backyard humming and buzzing and chopping up birds? That's what a wind turbine is. If you're ever in rural America, go see one for yourself. You'll be shocked by how awful it is once you get up close. Your first thought may be, "This is supposed to be good for the environment."

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Wind farms are one of those ideas you can only support if you don't know too much about them, and maybe that's why there's never been mass popular support for them.  No large group of citizens has ever demanded that some Goldman Sachs company destroy the natural environment with Chinese-made windmills that don't work when it's cold out. Wait, more expensive and much less reliable? Ugly, inefficient and made by people who hate us? And we can kill endangered species? I'd like some of that. In fact, make it a double.

No one anywhere has ever said that, but it doesn't matter because green energy is the ultimate inside game. A tiny number of people profit from it due to government subsidies and regulated prices. Everyone else gets a moral lecture about climate change and anyone who complains about any of it gets called a Nazi by Cory Booker.

The problem is that demagogues like Cory Booker have no earthly idea what a wind farm is. They don't know how to run a power grid, or anything else, for that matter. They talk, they brag, but they don't build anything, much less fix or maintain it. They can't, they have no skills. If you don't believe that, take a look at what they have done to our cities.

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Not a single major American city is prettier or more functional than it was in 1950. The parks that previous generations so lovingly built are filled with vagrants and junkies. The monuments they constructed are covered with spray paint. Public transportation is a disgrace. It's filthy, the streets are dangerous. Are you really surprised that Cory Booker was once the mayor of Newark, N.J.? You shouldn't be.

Cory Booker couldn't fix your ice maker, much less understand your wind farm. None of these people can. It's bad enough that they control the sociology department over at your local community college. But the power grid? No way. They can't get within a hundred yards of it.

This article is adapted from Tucker Carlson's opening commentary on the Feb. 15, 2021 edition of "Tucker Carlson Tonight".