“We have no room for error…. Barring a major reversal in U.S. policies in the very next decade, come the 2020s, most everyone will know the grim fate that awaits the next fifty generations.”

“[The alternative to inaction] is a [later] massive, sustained government intervention into every aspect of our lives on a scale that far surpasses what this country did during World War II.”

Dr. Exaggeration… Dr. Doom… Dr. Wrong. Part I yesterday examined Joe Romm’s 1996 co-authored piece in The Atlantic Monthly, “Mideast Oil Forever?” Today’s post examines quotations and predictions from Romm’s book, Hell and High Water (Morrow: 2007).

The book’s opening quotation comes from James Hansen. “We are on the precipice of climate system tipping points beyond which there is no redemption.” And then Romm’s opening:

Imagine if inland United States were 10℉ hotter, with many states ravaged by mega-droughts and the widespread wildfires that result.

“To the extent that the Gulf’s recapture of the dominant share of the global oil market will make price increases more likely, the U.S. economy is at risk…. Since 1970 sharp increases in the price of oil have always been followed by economic recessions in the United States.”

 – Charles Curtis and Joseph Romm, “Mideast Oil Forever?”  The Atlantic Monthly,  April 1996.

“This notion that the environmental movement — or any other major play in the media landscape — is pushing non-stop apocalyptic messages like a broken record is one I debunked ….”

– Joe Romm, “A Critique of the Broken-Record Counterfactual Message of the New York Times on Environmentalists and Scientists,” ThinkProgress,  April 29, 2012.

Joe Romm, the climate-alarmist doyen of ThinkProgress (Center for American Progress), has long been subject to rebuttal at MasterResource.…

[Editor Note: Last October, Joe Romm at ThinkProgress published a post, September sets alarming global temperature record and negates a favorite denier talking point. In his words: “September 2017 smashed multiple climate records, alarming scientists and further negating a favorite talking point of climate science deniers.” In this post, Romm updates readers on recent monthly temperatures in light of the ‘global lukewarming’ position.]…

“[I]t is both pleasing and strange to see Joe Romm don a free market, pro-consumer, pro-taxpayer hat when it comes to nuclear. His (post-modernistic) dream is that wind power, solar power, and negawatts can usher in a post-fossil-fuel era. In reality, however, fossil fuels will replace nuclear to a large degree.”

“Perry Just Made Taxpayers Invest in a $25-billion Nuclear ‘Financial Quagmire.’” So read the headline of a recent post by Joe Romm (Center for American Progress). His subtitle: “Nuclear plants are money losers, but Perry is loaning billions more to the last new one being built.”

It is strange. Nuclear is the only scalable CO2-free electrical generation source known to man. Although it is the most expensive way to boil water (and hopelessly uneconomic compared to natural gas- and even coal-fired power), a stubborn, quasi-religious segment of the Climate Malthusians refuses to bulge.…