Late-Night Hosts Slam Texas Officials for Snow Storm Blackout Crisis

Jimmy Kimmel, Trevor Noah, and other late-night hosts took aim at Texas officials on Wednesday for failing to prevent the ongoing blackout crisis during the state’s unprecedented snowstorms.

“The main reason Texas has plunged into darkness is that its natural gas industry has been crippled by this storm,” Noah explained in his Daily Show monologue. “And that might — might — have been preventable, except that Texas deregulated its power supply in the Nineties, which was clearly not the wisest decision. I mean, trust me, as a man who lived through the Nineties, you should probably rethink most of the decisions you made in that decade.”

Noah also slammed conservatives and fossil fuel advocates for blaming the crisis on wind power and, bizarrely, the Green New Deal — created by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — which currently remains just a climate proposal.

“This just shows you, no matter what happens, no matter how far removed she is from the problem, conservatives can and will always find a way to blame the boogeyman, A.O.C.,” Noah said. “Rick Perry could have broken his arm as a kid and he would have blamed it on A.O.C.”

Kimmel also referenced the scapegoating around the Green New Deal, “which doesn’t even exist yet,” and mocked Tucker Carlson for promoting the idea that windmills were to blame for the power outage in Texas.

“Windmills are actually holding up disproportionately well by comparison, so don’t believe anything Con Quixote says,” Kimmel quipped.