• Max Schulz demonstrates how economics is typically used in the energy debate: “There’s an unavoidable problem with renewable-energy technologies: From an economic standpoint, they’re big losers.” As though the “economic standpoint” is some static, univocal thing. Douchebag.
• A nice report from Brookings on a woefully under discussed topic: Double Jeopardy: What the Climate Crisis Means for the Poor.
• National Geographic has an in-depth examination of the horror that is Alberta’s oil sands program. Excellent journalism, albeit the stuff of nightmares.
• Shockingly, the oil and gas industry opposes the Obama administration plan to eliminate some taxpayers subsidies for the oil and gas industry.
• A while back, Holman Jenkins, a Wall Street Journal columnist and member of the editorial board, characterized Obama’s concern over climate change as a “soppy indulgence,” and said of climate science: “We don’t really have the slightest idea how an increase in the atmosphere’s component of CO2 is impacting our climate, though the most plausible indication is that the impact is too small to untangle from natural variability.” Stuart Gaffin, an actual climate scientist at Columbia University, responded in a blog post, pointing to actual science. In turn, Jenkins retrenched in a blog post of his own, with a bunch of absurd harumphing and misdirection. Gaffin responded again, decimating the smoldering remains of Jenkins argument with a torrent of scientific citations.
This is typical of many other exchanges between ideologues and scientists about climate. The galling thing, with this one as with most of them, is that the scientists are correct, by any reasonable assessment, and yet the ideologues can just go on saying whatever they want, in widely read editorials. There simply is no winning here. It’s really hard to see what the scientists should do.
