“To think you are smart enough to control nature and you must force people … to obey? That is the same kind of despotic behavior we have seen out of the worst tyrants.”
– Joe Bastardi (quoted below)
A recent E&E News article, “Fringe weatherman advised Abbott before deadly Texas storm” (February 25, 2021), is the latest marginalization job on a “climate science critic.” Author Scott Walderman begins his piece as follows:
Days before a historic snowstorm crippled his home state, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) sought advice from an unusual source: Joe Bastardi, the go-to weather forecaster of Fox News host Sean Hannity.
The hit piece (against Bastardi, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, and Abbott) goes downhill from there with ad hominem.
Here are the Bastardi quotations in Walderman’s piece:
…By Bastardi’s telling, the conversation with Abbott wasn’t groundbreaking or controversial.
“Even though it was once embraced by some environmentalists, ethanol has turned out to be much better at providing common ground for wildly disparate presidents than cutting greenhouse gas emissions.”
“From a greenhouse gas emissions perspective, the renewable fuel standard has been a bust.”
“In 2022, the current renewable fuel standard will lapse, and Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency will have to decide whether to maintain federal support for this hangover of the oil-soaked Bush era.”
– Tom Philpott, “Why Won’t Joe Biden Let Ethanol Die Already?” Mother Jones, February 16, 2021.
Progressives and D.C. environmentalists are very confused about energy. They don’t like nuclear, the only scalable alternative to fossil fuels. They dislike hydro power too, choosing some other priorities for dams other than CO2 reduction.
And on the transportation side, they don’t like the “renewable” alternative to gasoline and diesel, farm crop ethanol.…
“It’s unfortunate that the Georgetown [100 percent renewable] experiment went so quickly from being a success story to being something of a cautionary example,” said Adrian Shelley, director of the Texas office of Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy group.
“Gore wasn’t available for an interview with E&E News last week to discuss the electric situation in Georgetown [Texas].”
It was supposed to be green and cheap, a 25-year fixed-price contract for solar and wind beginning in 2018. Instead, as one news story in October 2019 reported: “After losing tens of millions of citizens’ money on a green energy gamble, city officials are trying to escape their self-inflicted mess.” How? By filing a lawsuit against its solar provider Buckthorn Westex to cancel its 25-year contract. A countersuit by Buckthorn followed.…