… the prospect of cheap, inexhaustible power from fusion is “like giving a machine gun to an idiot child,” Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich says. Laments Washington-based author-activist Jeremy Rifkin, “It’s the worst thing that could happen to our planet.”
So what do Big Government, anti-freedom eco-activists really want?
This is the perennial question regarding nuclear power, which is really the only scalable low-to-no CO2-emitting choice for electrical generation. When recently asked this question by a political economist friend who only tangentially follows energy, I went to Google to find the Paul Ehrlich quotation above. And lo-and-behold, I found a whole article around it!
Paul Ciottin’s, “Fear of Fusion: What if It Works?” appeared in the Los Angeles Times on April 19, 1989. It is certainly worth revisiting in its entirety some 32 years later.
…I have noted many times how the old hometown Houston Chronicle had gone from Left to Hard Left on energy and climate policy in the last decade or more. (Also see here and here.)
I am been a victim, with enough op-ed rejections (as in no response) to discourage me from submission.
But from time to time, I write a letter-to-the-editor on some egregiously biased energy piece. Chris Tomlinson, whose mind is about as closed and pen as vitriolic as they come (bitterness?), gets my goat in particular.
Dry Hole
And so several weeks ago, I sent this letter in, which got no response or publication regarding: “Conservative group takes on climate change” by Chris Tomlinson (Houston Chronicle, July 5, 2021).
…The latest Republican interest in climate change activism remains a far cry from 2008 when a televised commercial had Newt Gingrich on a couch with Nancy Pelosi extolling cap-and-trade “to address climate change.”
The lack of interest is not because conservatives are anti-science or uneducated.
” … there can be no near term CO2 solution without changes to the Chinese plan. It will only get worse, while we impose increasingly harsh penalties on others with diminishing returns.”
“Thanks captain obvious on the China data point. What’s your beef? Tariffs? Counter-veiling duties? Unequal market access? Pretending to be middle income country? Human rights? Corruption? Market manipulation? Disdain for property rights? Closed-competition? State-control. Or, something else? What exactly are you getting at?”
Imagine if you could listen in to what the climate alarmists/forced energy transformationists are really thinking. Behind closed doors, with their hopes and fears in the open, one commiserating with the other. Some lifting up others. And trying to prevent defections to a lost cause amid a sea of ecological tradeoffs and contradictions.
It is not easy being green.
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