White House upset at blackout claims
President Barack Obama’s team wants the world to know his environmental policies had nothing to do with the rolling blackouts blanketing Texas this week.
White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer swung back late Friday at conservative media and lawmakers who have pinned the blame on Obama for the lights going off across the Longhorn State amid extreme cold temperatures and high winds.Continue Reading
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the lead regulatory agency in the region, says that weather was to blame for the mechanical failures at more than 50 power plants around the state.
“As valuable as the Internet can be in helping to spread information, most people know that you can’t believe everything you read, and they should check the source before relaying every alarming story they read,” Pfeiffer wrote on the White House blog.
“One such story is going around the Internet over the past two days claiming that the Obama administration is somehow responsible for the rolling blackouts in Texas that have caused terrible hardship for so many Texans,” he added. “The source is questionable and the story is unquestionably false.”
Friday, the Drudge Report prominently displayed several mainstream media reports about energy shortages across several Western states and linked to a story from prisonplanet.com claiming the Texas blackouts were “a direct consequence of the Obama administration’s agenda to lay siege to the coal industry, launch a takeover of infrastructure under the contrived global warming scam, and help usher in the post-industrial collapse of America.”
Rush Limbaugh mocked news reports Mexico had been importing power to Texas during the emergency and argued that federal red tape had stopped construction of new electric utilities.
“It’s not just in Texas, that’s everywhere,” Limbaugh said, according to a transcript on his website. “And, folks, let me tell you something: If Obama gets his way, rolling blackouts will be the new norm. What do you think ‘green energy’ is?”
Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) piled on with a statement calling the blackouts an unacceptable safety risk that’s the result of federal energy policies run amok. “We have the desire, the resources, the knowhow and the will to build new plants, but federal red tape has blocked construction,” Barton said.
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