“Chris Skates, a top energy advisor to Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin, said he figures he helped emit millions of pounds of carbon dioxide in a 30-year electric utility career, adding ‘and I am damn proud of it.'”
– Quoted in Inside Climate News, September 26, 2019.
“Southern State Energy Officials Celebrate Fossil Fuels as World Raises Climate Alarm,” an article is titled in Inside Climate News (September 26, 2019). The subtitle adds:
The message from the industry-supported meeting: Push as much deregulation as possible while Trump is in power and never apologize for promoting oil, gas and coal.
“There was a sense of defiance in the hotel’s meeting rooms,” James Bruggers wrote. The author seems shocked that
…[Kentucky Governor Matt] Bevin, a Republican and the host of the meeting, was dismissive of 16-year-old Greta Thunberg, calling the young Swede who has inspired a global climate movement and who spoke at the UN on Monday, “remarkably ill informed.”
“Climate science should be less political, while climate policies should be more scientific. Scientists should openly address the uncertainties and exaggerations in their predictions of global warming, while politicians should dispassionately count the real benefits as well as the imagined costs of adaptation to global warming, and the real costs as well as the imagined benefits of mitigation.”
“Let pure reason, not totalitarian prejudice, hold sway once more in the groves of academe, the corridors of power and the public square!”
The emotionalization and politicization of the physical science of climate change has inspired the formation of a new international organization, The Global Climate Intelligence Group. This intellectual endeavor follows a petition from more than 500 climate specialists in the European Climate Declaration to the secretary general of the United Nations to reject the hysteria from children and others proclaiming doom.…
In his book (p. 178), Andrew Dessler defines adaptation as “responding to the negative impacts of climate change.” The proper definition is to anticipate and adapt to climate change, to capitalize on the positives and to mitigate the negatives.
This series on Andrew Dessler’s Introduction to Modern Climate Change has urged better and fairer treatment of the non-alarmist side of the climate debate for the author’s 3rd edition (in process).
Part I, “Suggestions for More Interdisciplinary Scholarship, Less Advocacy,” documented how this science text was an advocacy book and failed the scholarship standard of presenting opposing views fairly for consideration. Some contentious areas of debate were ignored and others caricatured. Professor Dessler is revealed to be a deep ecologist in that “when it comes to climate, change is bad.…