[Note: Sunday posts at MasterResource will include best-of reposts from this blog, best-of posts or op-ed’s from other writers, and other general material.]
Robert Bryce is a straight shooter and exactly the type intellectual that is needed as a rethink slowly emerges from the current politicized energy fare. He himself has changed his mind on vital issues, just as Julian Simon and Bjorn Lomborg did before him. Indeed, as Bryce mentions in the op-ed to follow:
Perhaps the best argument against any effort to cut carbon dioxide levels (read: fossil fuel use) comes from Freeman Dyson, a renowned professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University. In August 2007, Dyson wrote an essay for Edge that forced me to change my thinking about energy use and climate issues. (For the record, Dyson is a sceptic on climate change. In his essay, he makes that clear: “My first heresy says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models.”)
But the essence of Dyson’s essay isn’t about the science of global warming. Instead, it’s about energy use and equity–and the need to keep those issues in mind when discussing climate change.
Please read Bryce’s op-ed in the Guardian, “James Hansen’s War on Coal.” Bryce, who also recently published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal realistically looking at the limits of renewable energy, which he reports on here.
Check out Bryce’s website. Go hear him give a speech somewhere. Try to arrange a debate between Robert and an energy/climate alarmist in your city or town–and be sure to get out the crowd. That might be the best way for energy realism to triumph over energy hyperbole. The good guys and gals are winning intellectually; now is to time to begin winning politically.