QAnon Congresswoman Theorized California Wildfires Were Started By Giant Space Laser

A recently unearthed post from embattled Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Facebook page shows the Georgia Republican theorized that solar energy collected in space and beamed back to Earth is what sparked California’s worst wildfire.

Greene posted the bizarre solar energy theory as the 2018 Camp Fire raged in Paradise, California, and became the deadliest and most destructive blaze in state history.

“[T]here are too many coincidences to ignore,” Greene claimed in her post.

″[O]ddly there are all these people who have said they saw what looked like lasers or blue beams of light causing the fires, and pictures and videos,” she said in a claim widely debunked as complete nonsense.

HuffPost notes: “It’s a fool’s errand to try to make sense of Greene’s ‘research,’ as she called it, but it goes something like this: The Northern California utility provider PG&E partnered with a company called Solaren Corp. in 2009 to buy solar space energy captured on satellite solar panels. (That much is true.) But Greene suggested that lasers beaming the energy back to the Earth missed their mark and started a wildfire. She also suggested the fire-setting was intentional as a way to clear land for California’s stalled high-speed rail project.”

False claims about lasers and wildfires have been promoted over the years on social media and YouTube by QAnon supporters and others. (Greene is a QAnon follower.) See: https://t.co/7rXUp6SbGV; https://t.co/2fnosj992s

— Eric Hananoki (@ehananoki) January 28, 2021

“A state investigation into the deadly wildfire did lay the blame on PG&E, but laser beams from outer space had nothing to do with it. In fact, the system Solaren was planning to launch for PG&E in 2016 never even came to fruition, Wired reported in 2019,” the outlet reports. “In reality, investigators found that the cause of the blaze was negligence by PG&E regarding one of its power lines amid dangerous weather conditions, which scientists have linked back to climate change.”