Cleaned-up Coal: Part of Fossil Fuel Sustainability
By Stephen Heins -- November 2, 2026“The climate conversation rarely pauses to ask why the scrubber success is treated as invisible. One reason is rhetorical convenience: once the entire fuel is defined as the problem, partial technological answers become unwelcome.”
In the climate debate, coal is treated as if it still belches the same smoke it did in 1970. This is a major error. Modern coal plants combine a variety of technologies before and after combustion, as well as monitoring systems to verify compliance with today’s environmental laws with criteria pollutants (see Appendix A). As with petroleum, coal today is an environmental product, part of the increasing sustainability of fossil fuels.
Scrubbers, selective catalytic reduction, and the rest of the air-pollution control suite (see Appendix B) are rarely mentioned. That silence is not neutral. It erases one of the clearest engineering successes of the past thirty years and flattens a complicated fuel into a single villain.…
Continue ReadingJohn ‘Halloween’ Holdren Remembered (exaggeration, failed prognostications should not be forgotten)
By Robert Bradley Jr. -- October 30, 2026Ed. Note: John Holdren is a fading name in the climate/energy debate. But he was Paul Ehrlich’s protégé and coauthor in the 1970s, and he had a two-term (eight year) appointment (2009–2017) as President Obama’s top science advisor. Holdren infamously politicized the third U.S. National Climate Assessment (2014), the sixth assessment of which promises to be more balanced under new authorship. Holdren dismissed Robert L. Bradley Jr. in a 2003 email exchange as “lacking both discernible qualifications in the real world and the ability to tell a good argument from a bad one,” perhaps an example of expert failure.
“Some form of ecocatastrophe, if not thermonuclear war, seems almost certain to overtake us before the end of the [twentieth] century.”
Doom and gloom—and subsequent real-world falsification—hallmark the long career of John P.…
Continue ReadingData Centers Soar Despite Opposition
By Steve Goreham -- October 29, 2026“The data center hyperscalers, Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and others, are spending over $750 billion this year constructing data center infrastructure, with spending expected to approach $1 trillion next year. This amount equals the total U.S. annual spending on kindergarten through twelfth-grade education.”
Headlines ring daily about data center protests. Cities and states pass bans on data center construction. News outlets warn that the data center boom, driven by artificial intelligence, must come to a halt. But data center construction continues to soar with demand exceeding supply. But location matters; physical proximity to end-users reduces data travel time for real-time applications such as video streaming, online gaming, financial trading, and autonomous systems.
Protests Mount …
On July 18, 142 data center protests across 42 states were held, organized by HumansFirst. The Data Center Rejection Database of journalist Robert Bryce counts over 300 data center rejections in 2026.…
Continue Reading