“The news reporters give you public-relations fluff; the editorialists give you facts.”

Noam Chomsky, MIT’s famously anti-American professor of linguistics, used to say to his audiences something like: All my evidence comes from an ultra-Left source—The Wall Street Journal.

Audiences would laugh, but the joke was on them. Students of journalism know well that the Journal’s conservative reputation is based entirely on its editorial page. Its news pages, studies have shown, can tilt further to the Left than even the New York Times or the Washington Post.

Never was that schism more clearly displayed than on December 11, 2020.

A lead news headline screamed that the biggest “Green” companies were becoming larger corporations than the major oil companies. “The New Green Energy Giants Challenging Exxon and BP.”…

 “Civilization’s advance can be seen as a quest for higher energy use required to produce increased food harvests, to mobilize a greater output and variety of materials, to produce more, and more diverse, goods, to enable higher mobility, and to create access to a virtually unlimited amount of information.” (Smil, Energy and Civilization, quoted below)

“Fortunately, basic numbers don’t lie, and what they convey is that, in the context of market economies, past Promethean writers proved much more right than their opponents.” (Desrochers, below)

Pierre Desrochers (Department of Geography, Geomatics and the Environment, University of Toronto Mississauga) is one of the world’s leading scholars in the fields of energy and sustainable development. A generation ahead of Desrochers is Vaclav Smil, a renowned expert in energy history and technology whose profuse writings document his energy worldview–at least most of it.…

“The energy stuff [in the 2009 bill] … was ginormous…. Ten years earlier, [President] Clinton pushed a five-year, $6 billion clean energy bill that went nowhere; at the time it was seen as preposterous and unrealistic, and it was. And here, 10 years later, $90 billion in the guy’s first month in office. Plus it leveraged another $100 billion in private money.”

– Michel Grunwald [Author, The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era (2012)], quoted here.

A matter of contention in this year’s Pandemic-related stimulus bills has been extraneous ‘Christmas Tree’ items such as targeted subsidies to wind, solar, batteries, electric vehicles, energy efficiency, “grid modernization,” and carbon capture and sequestration. (Note that such subsidies would be in addition to what is already received as other businesses.)…

This is the final installment of the course syllabus of Pierre Desrochers’ Energy and Society class.

Part I explored the course description as well as the videos and readings from the first two weeks of the class; Part II covered carbon-based energy. Part III yesterday was on electricity generated from non-carbon sources (Hydro, Nuclear, Renewables, Biomass).