“[My] early writing was from a viewpoint that there was an ocean of BTUs beneath our feet, and what was high cost and supplemental today would become low cost and conventional later. I ‘trusted’ human ingenuity. I turned out ‘right’ for the wrong technological reason: horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing.”
Any intellectual is interested in what is written about him or her, whether it be in the newspaper or an essay, book, or doctoral dissertation. In my case, being of 66 summers, and having a lot of scholarship under my belt, I do not worry much about the momentary ad hominem stuff. But for the record, I am eager to correct with facts and interpretation as needed.
This brings me to a dissertation, “Limits and Cornucopianism: A History of Neo-Liberal Environmental Thought, 1920–2007” (New York University: 2019).…
“What we are seeing in my county right now is that developers are coming in and asking for 50 acres to put up a solar [or] wind farm…. If the developers got their way in all my surrounding townships, we would have 12,000 acres of solar on some of the best farmland in the United States. It’s monstrous.”
It is still possible to get two sides of the story regarding renewable energy. You just need to read the bottom half first. And correct a few things.
I was reminded of this when reading a pro-renewable piece by Stacy Gittleman, “The Role of Wind and Solar in the Future of Power” (August 24, 2021), the cover story of Downtown Newsmagazine.
Backdoor is better than nothing to shake up the puff narrative.…
“Hey assholes. We’ve been telling you for decades that this was going to happen if we didn’t reduce greenhouse gas emissions. You didn’t listen and now it’s all happening. We hope you’re happy. Enjoy the heatwaves, intense rainfall, sea level rise, ocean acidification, and many other things, you fucking morons.” (below)
It was supposed to be a funny. But really, it is a candid commentary of an agenda-driven, frustrated climate scientist/activist at a world that is (correctly) demoting rigid alarmism for realism.
Professor Andrew Dessler is the smartest guy in the climate room. He is, by his own account, hot headed. He says rude things about even the most polite of his scientific adversaries, not unlike his infamous cohort, Michael Mann. Dessler’s predictions are exaggerated, even falsified (here’s one on Texas weather from a decade ago).…