Past Due Time For Bill Gates To Shut His Great Reset Piehole

finance.yahoo |  Billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates on Wednesday rebuked a claim made a day before by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott that put the blame for that state's massive cold-weather power outage on the failure of renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar.

In fact, extreme weather like the winter storm that swept across the country in recent days will become more likely as climate change worsens, Gates told Yahoo Finance, advocating instead for an expansion of renewable energy as part of his call for the U.S. to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050.

On Tuesday, Abbott blamed the outages on wind turbines and on the Green New Deal, a plan for combating climate change that the Texas governor called "a deadly deal for the United States of America."

Bill Gates, who has been emitting ten thousand times more greenhouse gases than the average person for decades, wants us to believe that he really cares about climate change and the solution is for him to start more companies and make more money off other people's labor.

— Dubula (@killerguerilla) February 16, 2021

“Our wind and our solar got shut down, and they were collectively more than 10 percent of our power grid, and that thrust Texas into a situation where it was lacking power on a statewide basis. ... It just shows that fossil fuel is necessary,” Abbott told Sean Hannity in an interview cited by the Washington Post.

When asked about the blame directed at wind energy by Abbott, Gates said, "He's actually wrong."

"You can make sure wind turbines can deal with the cold," adds Gates, the former Microsoft (MSFT) CEO and author of a new book entitled, "How to Avoid a Climate Disaster.” "[The extreme cold] probably wasn't anticipated for the wind turbines that far South. But the ones up in Iowa and North Dakota do have the ability to not freeze up."

The storm struck a large portion of the U.S. on Monday, bringing snowfall and ice that caused power outages for millions of people. Overall, more than 150 million people came under a winter storm warning, the National Weather Service said.

'The extreme events are coming more often'

The cold blast hit especially hard in Texas, where as of Tuesday 4 million households lacked power, the Washington Post reported. Some conservatives blamed frozen wind turbines for the power outage but wind energy contributes a fraction of the state's power in the winter, the Post pointed out.

The loss of power caused by blackouts of thermal power plants — which mostly rely on natural gas — outpaced the loss caused by frozen wind turbines by a factor of five or six, the Post reported.

"Actually, the main capacity that's gone out in Texas is not the wind, it's actually some of the natural gas plants that were also not ready for the super cold temperatures," Gates says.