Beto O’Rourke Slams Texas Leadership After Governor Blames Power Outages On Energy Companies

Texas Governor Greg Abbott has launched an investigation into the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, blaming energy companies for the mass power outages across the state. However, former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke slammed the governor over his decision and insisted state leaders were the reason millions of residents were left without electricity amid the harsh winter storm.

On Tuesday, O’Rourke shared a series of tweets calling out Abbott over not preparing for the damage caused by the snowstorm.

“Texans are suffering without power because those in power have failed us. As with Covid, a natural disaster has become far deadlier due to the inaction & ineptitude of Abbott and Texas’ Republican leadership. This didn’t have to happen and doesn’t have to continue,” he tweeted.

O’Rourke added, “While they focused on bathroom bills, ‘show me your papers’ legislation, and fighting with sports teams over the Star Spangled Banner, 30 million Texans were left vulnerable to uncontrolled COVID spread, a bungled vaccine rollout, and now this ‘rolling’ power blackout.”

During a Tuesday interview on NBC, O’Rourke went on to insist state leaders had no excuse for the outages and accused them of not taking the time to come up with a plan to protect the state.

“State leaders don’t get to say that they didn’t see this coming. Energy experts and State House Dems, among others, were warning of this for years,” he said.

“Abbott chose to ignore the facts, the science, and the tough decisions and now Texans will once again pay the price.”

More than four million people have been without power since generating stations went offline on Monday, Fox News reports.

Since then, around 10 people have died and freezing temperatures are expected to continue to hit Texas on Wednesday, further covering already hard-hit areas.

The Washington Post noted the blackouts across Texas were caused by the state’s failure to prepare for cold weather due to its typical mild winters. However, during a Tuesday interview with Sean Hannity, Abbott falsely blamed frozen wind turbines and the state’s energy supplier for the massive outages.

“This shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America,” Abbott said.

“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.”

Criticism of Abbott’s response to the winter storm comes as he prepares to run for his third term as governor.