“The Trump folks seem to believe that anything that has Obama’s fingerprints on it, no matter how sensible, they’re going to rescind, revoke and demolish, and it makes no sense at all.”

“[The climate conundrum] is scary and I’m not sure we’re gonna be able to turn it around.”

– John Holdren, December 2017.

This is Part II of a transcribed interview with John Holdren, leader of the energy/climate Malthusian school, by Climate One. Yesterday’s post critically assessed Holdren’s views on federal energy research and development, the Paris withdrawal, and China’s energy policy. Today’s post looks at his views on most other issues in the “energy sustainability” debate.

Holdren quotations are below in red, followed by my rebuttal comments indented in black (subtitles added).

Technology Boom in Renewable Energies

“… there have been huge improvement in battery technology.…

“Very few scientists dispute a link between man-made CO2 and global warming. Where it gets fuzzy is the extent and time frame of the effect. One crucial point of contention is climate ‘sensitivity’—the mathematical formula that translates changes in CO2 production to changes in temperature. In addition, scientists are not sure how to explain a slowdown in the rise of global temperatures that began about a decade ago.”

– Stefan Theil, “The Backlash Against Climate Scientists,” Newsweek, May 27, 2010.

An article in Newsweek eight years ago, “The Backlash Against Climate Scientists,” rings true today–if not more so.

When seen from today’s perspective, Theil’s 450-word piece underscores how slowly climate science is really moving, where the more you know, the more you find out you don’t know.…

[Editor note: This exchange at the R-Street Institute website (no longer visible) is posted here and here.]

“From the Club of Rome to the present–with scientific models and articles in Science magazine from the ‘consensus’–the verdict has been wrong, wrong, wrong, and trending wrong. And this is before even considering (non-libertarian) public policy of taxes, tariffs, equity adjustments, private/public cronyism, etc.”

So why have neo-Malthusian natural scientists been so incorrect for so long? We have nearly a half-century of (falsified) doom-and-gloom.

Josiah Neeley of R-Street, once a critic of climate alarmism and wind power (see yesterday), is now desperately trying to make a case to libertarians and conservatives that the climate is in crisis and a carbon tax (and all the global government that goes with it) is necessary.…

“Climate alarmism cannot be understood outside of the long-standing, long-debunked Malthusian view of man as a market failure, a planetary failure. The last half-century’s litany of alarm marches on, with one failed prognostication morphing into another.”

“The Planet Doesn’t Have Time for This,” screams the headline of a recent New York Times Sunday Review. “President Trump is in charge at a crucial moment for dealing with the climate crisis,” the subtitle reads. “We may never recover.”

The article by Bill McKibben begins:

President Trump’s environmental onslaught will have immediate, dangerous effects. He has vowed to reopen coal mines and moved to keep the dirtiest power plants open for many years into the future. Dirty air, the kind you get around coal-fired power plants, kills people.

and ends:

We can hope other world leaders will pick up some of the slack.