Late Night Has Beef With Conservatives Pouncing on Texas Windmills

Many late night hosts are taking time off for Presidents' Day, but not Jimmy Kimmel and Trevor Noah, both of whom took issue Wednesday with the wrongful blame being placed on renewable energy as Texas' power grid is overwhelmed.

• "I know people were praying for Texas to go blue, but not like this," joked Noah of the Daily Show. "I mean, this is the state that prides itself on its oil and gas industry, and now, that industry has failed spectacularly." "This just goes to show you, you can't put profits over quality and safety," he added, per the New York Times. "Money's not worth a whole lot if you have to burn it to keep warm."
• Yet "these guys are so desperate to just let fossil fuels off the hook, that they’re blaming AOC and the Green New Deal—which, by the way, hasn’t even happened yet," Noah continued, speaking of the climate proposal co-sponsored by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. "Conservatives can and will always find a way to blame the boogeyman, AOC," he added. "Rick Perry could have broken his arm as a kid and he would have blamed it on AOC."

• Texas' Republican leaders "did a lot of mocking California when our power went out" so now Gov. Greg Abbott "has been working hard to somehow push the blame to Democrats and the Green New Deal, which doesn’t even exist yet," Kimmel similarly observed. He then cut up a Fox News segment in which Tucker Carlson claimed frozen wind turbines were to blame. "Don't believe anything Don Quixote says," said Kimmel.
• The Jimmy Kimmel Live host then turned to the vaccine rollout, noting President Biden's promise that "the vaccine will be available to every American who wants it by the end of July. And then we can get back to spreading the old stuff—herpes, gonorrhea, and good times!" he quipped. Noah said people were looking forward to "doing normal things again" like "not thinking about the welfare of the people who deliver their packages."

(More late night host stories.)