Environment & Energy

Your remarks about my personality reflect a filter. I definitely hold a less than generous view of people whose scientific ignorance, of say, the second law of thermodynamics, for one example, which underlies the battery and hydrogen based fossil fuel greenwashing that goes on around here, the implications of mass to energy ratios for another.

At the end of my life I am certainly selective on my social relationships, who I value and those who I hold in a range between distaste and outright contempt.

Where one falls in that range is a function of the level of hypocrisy for one thing. We are all hypocrites to some extent. I am. I drive a hybrid car that gets excellent gas mileage for instance, but I am aware of the enormous moral cost of batteries, the human slaves who labor under horrific conditions to mine cobalt for batteries, the the general unsustainablily of the car CULTure in general. The car requires fossil fuels to run, and even if it has the lowest carbon intensity of any car on the PJM grid, it is still a dirty device.

My environmental views have always been guided by respect for wilderness. I have never had an ounce of respect, none, for people who look at wilderness and see an opportunity for land development for short lived industrial energy plants strewn across millions of square kilometers, trashed riverine and riparian zones. I also consider the oceans to be a valuable wilderness. For another example, I am aware of the carbon retention of the desert ecosystem's root matrices that all of our antinukes think should be rendered with bulldozing into solar industrial parks.

Thus I have even less respect for clowns crying crocodile tears for climate issues while applauding the destruction not only of benthic zones on continental shelves, but also the upper oceanic layers of water as proposed in this latest example of rotely applauded nonsense. Whence the wire to connect this shit? Whence the metal to make it?

I have spent most of my life in science. In my private life I more or less live and breathe it. I don't have a "few friends" who are scientists. Almost everyone I know in my professional life is a scientist. Not all of them are nice people, nor do they need to be nice people to do good science.

They only needed to do good science to be good scientists.

None other than Issac Newton, for example, was an asshole on a personal level. He took personal pleasure in signing death warrants of counterfeiters in his honorary role as Warden of the Mint. Albert Einstein was a terrible psychologically abusive husband to his first wife, who was a good scientist herself.

One can take a certain level of satisfaction in who doesn't like oneself. I do, right here at DU.

My views on energy have been formulated outside of my professional life, and are based on tens of thousands of hours over close to 40 years of work in the primary scientific literature, attendance at high level scientific meetings and lectures and personal reflections calculations and discussions. If there are dilletants with superficial knowledge whining and crying that they don't like me, who drool with disrespect for my efforts while musing illiterately that we should tear the shit out of the planet's seas and land for short term bourgeois unsustainable affectations related to so called "renewable energy," this will in no way offend me.

Nor does it dissuade me from my profound admiration for the work of the finest minds of the 20th century, who discovered nuclear energy, a tool with the potential, with all its risks understood, to save the world, only to have their work trashed and demeaned by intellectual Lilliputians.

I have no apologies for what I do here, nor my scientific knowledge nor my choices about whom I chose to respect or decline to respect. In turn, I am unmoved by those who hold me in barely disguised contempt, and again, can indeed take some satisfaction, indeed pleasure, from it.

No one in the antinuke cults should hold their breaths expecting me to apologize for my personality. They'll die faster than the planet they've done do much to kill.

Have a nice day.