Fact checkers: No, Biden did not ‘manipulate the weather’ in an ‘attack on Texas’

As long as social media exists so will conspiracy theories, and the latest one to go viral is a claim that President Joe Biden was behind the winter storm that devastated parts of Texas and left people freezing in the cold with no power.

According to Scott L. Biddle in a post from this Saturday, “weather manipulation and controlling the Jetstream has been going on for years.” He then cited a comment from Biden during the final presidential debate where he said that a “dark winter” was coming due to what he said was the former Trump administration’s lack of plan to combat the coronavirus pandemic. But according to Biddle’s post, Biden was actually referring to something more sinister.

“Joe Biden’s ‘Dark Winter’ statement was not a random thought, it was a foreshadow of what was to come,” Biddle wrote. “Texas is the only state to have its own, entirely independent electric grid separate from the rest of the United States. This is warfare, an attack on Texas by altering the Jetstream, seeding the clouds, and ultimately causing the storm that blacked out over 4 million people. Sound crazy? Too hard to believe? Believe it.”

“If Texas is on an independent power grid system, how did it fail?” the post continued. “Every system has a flaw, A lot of Texas runs on wind turbines and solar power. All the wind turbines are frozen to a stop, all the solar panels are covered with ice and snow, Texas’s flaw is cold weather – their biggest weakness is being used against them.”

As if it needed clarifying, the folks over at Politifact pointed out that this claim is not true.

First off, the claim that Biden was cryptically predicting the disaster in Texas is easily debunked, considering that all one has to do is watch the video from the debate to know he was referring to the surging pandemic. But the claim about Texas’ power grid was also false.

“In 1970, the state created the Electric Reliability Council of Texas to avoid regulation from the federal government. The electric grid is not subject to the jurisdiction of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission,” reports Politifact’s Daniel Funke.

“‘Cloud seeding,’ on the other hand, is a real technique that’s sometimes used to produce moisture in drought-prone areas. Aircraft inject particles into clouds to encourage water droplets to freeze around them. In the right conditions, the process can create snow,” Funke writes.

“Again, that’s not what is happening in Texas and many other parts of the country.”

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Sky Palma

Before launching DeadState back in 2012, Sky Palma has been blogging about politics, social issues and religion for over a decade. He lives in Los Angeles and also enjoys Brazilian jiu jitsu, chess, music and art.