[Editor Note: It was during the Thanksgiving weekend 11 years ago that the Climategate’s unsettling oeuvre was first being disseminated and analyzed. This post summarizes some remembrances from that period.]

“The conflict between the two ideas about how science should be conducted–a closed system dominated by gatekeepers, or a more chaotic but less hierarchical open system–is the dominant story of the [Climategate] emails over more than a decade.” – Fred Pearce, The Climate Files (2010), p. 13.

“There is no doubt that these emails are embarrassing and a public-relations disaster for science.” – Andrew Dessler, “Climate E-Mails Cloud the Debate,” December 10, 2009.

Climategate lives in infamy. Then, and now, it is a case study of agendas driving science rather than science driving agendas.

A decade ago, climate alarmists and friends (including Dessler above) went into damage control.…

“In terms of sunk cost and opportunity cost, Trump is the one for liberty. Job #1, after all, is to defeat Biden/Harris or Harris/Biden.” (Bradley, below)

“But these are extraordinary times, and perhaps ‘all things considered, the other guy’s worse’ is a profound compliment. That’s why this libertarian is voting for Donald J. Trump, and recommending that my fellow opponents of the welfare-warfare state do the same.” (D. Dowd Muska, below)

It is fair to say that Donald Trump has upended politics and the Republican Party in the last five years or more. But he has also fractured the libertarian movement too, with some turning into Never Trumpers, even Trump Haters, namely David Boaz, gatekeeper at Cato, and Tom Palmer of Atlas Network.

In contrast, I appreciate the many openings Trump has provided to free-market groups coast-to-coast, border-to-border.…

“‘Trump says that climate change is a hoax, but Biden acts like climate change is a hoax,’ [Green Party nominee Howie] Hawkins said. ‘I wonder if he really understands the issue,’ he mused.”

“‘We’ve been pretty much blanked out of the media,’ he said. ‘We’re not part of the conversation.’ … ‘I’ve got nothing, pretty much nothing, certainly from cable, the big three cable networks.'”

If Green Party Presidential nominee Howie Hawkins did not like Joe Biden’s energy and climate platform months ago, Hawkins has a lot more complaining to do this time around. In search of electoral votes in swing states, Shifty Joe has endorsed fracking on private land, rejected the Green New Deal, and apologized to the oil industry for his sin of talking about an energy transition.

In Green Party Presidential Candidate Says Progressives Are Going Too Easy on Biden (September 10, 2020), Chantal Da Silva documented the bridge-too-far between Biden’s camouflaged energy program and the Green Party’s open proposals.…

 “Civilization’s advance can be seen as a quest for higher energy use required to produce increased food harvests, to mobilize a greater output and variety of materials, to produce more, and more diverse, goods, to enable higher mobility, and to create access to a virtually unlimited amount of information.” (Smil, Energy and Civilization, quoted below)

“Fortunately, basic numbers don’t lie, and what they convey is that, in the context of market economies, past Promethean writers proved much more right than their opponents.” (Desrochers, below)

Pierre Desrochers (Department of Geography, Geomatics and the Environment, University of Toronto Mississauga) is one of the world’s leading scholars in the fields of energy and sustainable development. A generation ahead of Desrochers is Vaclav Smil, a renowned expert in energy history and technology whose profuse writings document his energy worldview–at least most of it.…