“We need to defeat climate deniers like Ann Marie Buerkle and Dan Benishek to restore the place of science on Capitol Hill.”
– Gene Karpinski, president, League of Conservation Voters, quoted in Jennifer Yachnin, “Enviros Target Climate Deniers in Latest Ad Campaign” (sub. req.) Greenwire, July 24, 2012.
All but the most impartial and inflammatory participants in the climate-change debate disdain the term “denier” to characterize so-called climate-change skeptics. Climatologist Judith Curry, chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, for example, has complained:
… Continue ReadingSomebody needs to research the sociology and psychology of people that insist that anyone that does not accept [anthropogenic global warming] as a rationale for massive CO2 mitigation efforts is a “denier.” The complexity of skepticism (ranging from multiple aspects of the science, to the impacts that can be attributable to AGW and whether or not they are “dangerous” to the policies proposed for CO2 mitigation) seems to be completely missed by all of the “scholars” writing articles about ‘deniers’.
Consider the preconceptions that surface in your mind when you read the name “Enron”. Chances are that they are negative, and not particularly nuanced — fraudulent business activity, tarnishing the idea of free markets by trying to manipulate them using the political process, and so on.
If that’s true for you, then you are probably in a pretty similar mental space to mine when I started reading Rob Bradley’s Edison to Enron: Energy Markets and Political Strategies. Rob’s detailed and thoroughly researched book is a well-told analysis of the valuable and interesting regulatory and business history that formed the backdrop of Enron’s spectacular failure.
Samuel Insull, Father of Modern Electricity
The name of the book is somewhat misleading, because the first third of the book focuses not on Thomas Edison but on Samuel Insull.…
Continue Reading“I want to build something that is environmentally forward-thinking. I’m not building a satellite dish so I can watch the Knicks game.”
– Alec Baldwin, quoted in “Actor Tilts at Windmill,” Wall Street Journal, July 16, 2012.
“‘We’re behind big wind,’ [Mike] Bergey [of Bergey Windpower] said, with small-turbine technology having advanced just a couple of iterations from its early days, while the more mature big-wind technology has pushed forward eight or nine times. A little more help on the R&D front — some of that government solar money, say — would be appreciated, he said.”
– Peter Danko, “Alec Baldwin Turbine Puts Small Wind In Spotlight,” Ecotech Institute, July 20, 2012.
Alec Baldwin, the Hollywood movie star, has worked to preserve the charm and character of the Town of East Hampton on Long Island (Suffolk County, New York).…
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