Environment & Energy

...journalist of the type who has driven into climate change with reactionary "renewable energy will save us" horseshit.

The full paper is open sourced, and is written by three authors at Carnegie Mellon University, not some dumb shit journalist who might have lost his job if he took a science course and passed it with a grade of C or better.

Cleaning up while Changing Gears: The Role of Battery Design, Fossil Fuel Power Plants, and Vehicle Policy for Reducing Emissions in the Transition to Electric Vehicles Matthew Bruchon, Zihao Lance Chen, and Jeremy Michalek Environmental Science & Technology 2024 58 (8), 3787-3799

The corresponding author, Dr. Jeremey Michalek, has over 145 scientific publications, and his top ten papers have been cited well over 3000 times, his full output having been cited 7,523 times overall.

Jeremy J. Michalek

If someone wishes to write Dr. Michalek, whose h index is 42, to tell him that the scientific paper I cited reminds them of a 2008 article by a journalist in Slate his email is available. I wouldn't expect Dr. Michalek to take such a correspondence seriously.

Email: jmichalek@andrew.cmu.edu

I certainly don't take people seriously who criticize scientific publications - which is not to say such publications are infallible; they are not - by pointing some journalist's bullshit they read online in 2008. For the record, week 39 of 2008 (382.68 ppm, week beginning 9/28/2008), compared to week 39 of 2024, (421.95, week beginning 9/29/2024) involves CO₂ concentrations 39.27 ppm higher, measured in climate time, the degradation of the planetary atmosphere, the rate of which is accelerating, not decelerating despite trillions of dollars squandered uselessly on solar and wind.

The whole time since the publication, and actually much longer, way before 2008, I've been listening to stuff about how we didn't need nuclear energy because wind and solar were so great.

In my case, it actually goes back to 1976:

Of course, I could, and sometimes do, cite the famous paper from the "genius" antinuke Amory Lovins who told us we didn't need nuclear energy (in 1990 he predicted nuclear energy would lead to nuclear war) because, as he first opined in 1976, so called "renewable energy" is so great, especially when coupled to conservation. Of course, he wasn't writing in a scientific journal - or at least a physical science journal, which probably wouldn't have published his unreferenced tripe, but rather in Foreign Affairs.

Speaking only for myself, and no one else, it amazes me almost as much that people took that flake seriously as the current situation in which the orange criminal who wants back in the White House is taken seriously.

People took the nitwit Lovins seriously, and apparently still do, as he continues to issue oracles from his bourgeois green McMansion at Snowmass, just outside of that swell cocaine heaven Aspen. For a fee, one can tour his paradisical "renewable energy" home.

One hears these sorts of specious things, this with the fucking planet on fire where it isn't underwater because of extreme weather events, and one just really can't believe it.

I do think that armchair scientifically ill equipped critics of the scientific paper via would be better served moaning all about how doing what can seriously be done to slow, even arrest, if not reverse, extreme global heating, is "too expensive." They have no comment on whether the natural gas that prevents obviating the unreliably of wind and solar, recorded as extreme global heating driving extreme global weather is "too expensive." Who cares if we have to rebuild cities destroyed weather continuously?

As for me, holding this anti-science claptrap in the contempt it surely deserves, I'm something of an outlier, although I am very pleased that the Biden administration is correct in claiming to be the administration that is pushing for the largest sustained push to accelerate civil nuclear deployment in the United States in nearly five decades.

Joe Biden, in terms of energy policy, if not everywhere with respect to energy, but certainly in this case, his support for nuclear energy, will be recorded as being on the right side of history, snide comments from the peanut gallery notwithstanding.