“The Trump folks seem to believe that anything that has Obama’s fingerprints on it, no matter how sensible, they’re going to rescind, revoke and demolish, and it makes no sense at all.”
“[The climate conundrum] is scary and I’m not sure we’re gonna be able to turn it around.”
– John Holdren, December 2017.
This is Part II of a transcribed interview with John Holdren, leader of the energy/climate Malthusian school, by Climate One. Yesterday’s post critically assessed Holdren’s views on federal energy research and development, the Paris withdrawal, and China’s energy policy. Today’s post looks at his views on most other issues in the “energy sustainability” debate.
Holdren quotations are below in red, followed by my rebuttal comments indented in black (subtitles added).
Technology Boom in Renewable Energies
“… there have been huge improvement in battery technology.…
“The private sector will never do the amount of fundamental research that society’s interests require because you cannot tell in advance the nature of fundamental research…. The companies can’t tell whether there’ll ever be any return.”
– John Holdren, December 2017 Interview.
Less than one year ago, John Holdren, Obama’s beginning-to-end science adviser, and now Professor of Environmental Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, spoke of his concerns about Trump energy policy in a Climate One podcast from San Francisco.
Holdren quotations are below in red, followed by my rebuttal comments indented in black (subtitles added):
Government R&D as Savior
Holdren: “Well I think the biggest damage that the Trump administration is doing is first of all reducing or proposing to reduce very drastically investments in clean and efficient energy research and development by the government.…
“The impact of ethane is perhaps the most remarkable development in the remarkable story of the shale revolution. Less than three years ago, ethane was a largely unwanted byproduct of oil and gas drilling …. But today, ethane is feedstock for nearly half of U.S. plastics production and a valuable export to chemical companies around the world.”
– Jordan Blum, “How the Ethane Molecule Changes the Gulf Coast — and the World,” Houston Chronicle, September 15, 2018.
“Resources are highly dynamic functional concepts; they are not, they become, they evolve out of the triune interaction of nature, man, and culture, in which nature sets outer limits, but man and culture are largely responsible for the portion of physical totality that is made available for human use.”
– Erich Zimmermann, resource economist (1951) [1]
Methane.…