Emily, What you are going through is so rampant in the climate community and a topic of much discussion and concern…. Next week we are hosting an online workshop with an “ecopsychologist” to help folks with climate anxiety….”
There is a lot of talk about climate anxiety these days. Climate activists are witnessing a tripartite boom in oil, gas, and coal, while record wind and solar generation is limited by cost, siting resistance, and intermittency. Bad news all around–for them.
Realists among the climate alarmists/forced energy transformationists have realized that consumers/voters are ultimately going to choose the most economical, reliable energies, politics aside. And with their deep ecology notion of no more than a 1.5°C warming above the pre-industrial, time is running very short under the most optimistic of scenarios.
Emily Aiken Bows Out
Enter Emily Aiken, the publisher of HEATED, “a newsletter for people who are pissed off about the climate crisis.”…
“The pledges to reach net zero emissions made by many countries, including China and India, should have very strong implications for coal – but these are not yet visible in our near-term forecast, reflecting the major gap between ambitions and action.” (International Energy Agency, below)
The father of energy economics made it official back in 1865. “Coal, in truth, stands not beside but entirely above all other commodities,” wrote William Stanley Jevons:
It is the material energy of the country—the universal aid—the factor in everything we do. With coal almost any feat is possible or easy; without it we are thrown back into the laborious poverty of early times.
Another writer of the day added:
…Coal is everything to us. Without coal, our factories will become idle, our foundries and workshops be still as the grave; the locomotive will rust in the shed, and the rail be buried in the weeds.
With the remake of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels (2014) on deck (mid-April release scheduled), Fossil Future … could not come at a better time given the energy crises from anti-fossil fuel policies leaving consumers at the mercy of the momentary output of the wind and sun.
History might well record Alex Epstein as the First Philosopher of Energy. How to think correctly amid the politicization of all-things-climate is a quest that only one person has really tried to master. And it starts not with deep ecology notions but on the premise of human betterment, now and over time.
With the remake of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels (2014) on deck (mid-April release scheduled), Fossil Future will join Steven Koonin’s Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters (2021) as a best seller on the reality of energy and climate.…