“In a rational and moral world, the catastrophe of the Los Angeles fires, fueled in part by climate change, would be one of many climate ‘Pearl Harbors’ that might help wake up the public to the urgent need for climate action.” (- Joe Romm, last week)
“Is it just a coincidence that the worst of the worst happened in California, the Climate State? The Green State? The DEI State? Joe, the mainstream is not buying your ‘Climate Ate My Homework’ reasoning.” (below)
Just add “policy” in two places in Romm’s quotation above, and substitute “inaction” for “action” at the end, and his conclusion can be fixed. But who is Joe Romm? And what is his track record? I have tangled with Angry Joe for decades (I am a ‘sociopath’ to him) and can address these questions.
Who Is Joe Romm?
Joe Romm has been a trenchant voice for climate alarm and forced energy transformation (wind, solar, batteries, efficiency) for many decades. [1] I have challenged him ever since the 1990s when his energy-efficiencies dreams led him to praise Enron (“a company I greatly respect”) and its most fraudulent division, Enron Energy Services.
I continued to spar with him until the ‘indispensible blog‘ Climate Progress (Center for American Progress) went defunct. (My suspicion is that his emotional, virulent style–“stunning” for the liked; “heads exploding” for the disliked–grew tiresome.)
His exaggerations are legion, including We Don’t have 12 Years to Save the Climate. We Have 14 Months, (July 2019). But go back to his “Mideast Oil Forever?” (The Atlantic Monthly, April 1996), analyzed here, where Joe (and his coauthor Charles Curtis) stated:
… let’s start by examining the likelihood that an oil crisis will occur in the coming decade. Forecasting is always risky, especially where oil is concerned, but consider what a variety of experienced energy hands from every point on the political spectrum have said in the past year alone [many experts quoted–all errant].
That “energy crisis” never happened except for government energy/climate policy increases prices and reducing reliability. The first two oil crises came from price and allocation controls–the third never came from an absence of the same.
And in Romm’s 2007 book, Hell and High Water:
We have no room for error…. Barring a major reversal in U.S. policies in the very next decade, come the 2020s, most everyone will know the grim fate that awaits the next fifty generations. [The alternative to inaction] is a [later] massive, sustained government intervention into every aspect of our lives on a scale that far surpasses what this country did during World War II.
Joe Romm Today
Joe Romm is an expert! Currently a senior research fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media (PCSSM), Romm describes himself as
Former Acting Assistant Secretary of Efficiency and Renewables, Speaker, 2x TEDx, author, “The Hype About Hydrogen.” Economist Paul Krugman: “I have learned a lot of what I know about energy economics from Joe Romm.”
And:
2024 Ban Ki-Moon Award for Environmental Leadership, 2009 TIME magazine “Hero of the Environment” & Rolling Stone one of “100 people reinventing America.” Former Acting Assistant Secretary of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. CNN host Van Jones called me “The communicator’s communicator” after reading my book “How to Go Viral and Reach Millions.” Bill McKibben said, “Joe Romm understands the secret of making things go viral.”
And:
Author of 10 books, including “Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know” (Oxford University Press) which New York magazine called “The best single source primer on the state of climate change.”
Never shy, often wrong. Romm’s professional life is as an expert versus the ill-informed public. The premise of climate alarmism and wind/solar/energy/efficiency to save the planet from fossil fuels (really CO2, the nonpollutant) is Romm’s multi-decade theme.
The Latest?
“In a rational and moral world,” Romm states regarding the southern California fire box,
the catastrophe of the Los Angeles fires, fueled in part by climate change, would be one of many climate “Pearl Harbors” that might help wake up the public to the urgent need for climate action. But in our world, the initial flame of disinformation that the fossil fuel companies lit over half-century ago to delay action on climate change has spread like wildfire until it’s a firestorm of falsehoods.
What disinformation! Is it just a coincidence that the worst of the worst happened in California, the Climate State? The Green State? The DEI State? Joe, the mainstream is not buying your “Climate Ate My Homework” reasoning.
“What Is the Difference Between a Psychic and a Climate Science Denier” (March 25, 2014), (expunged, but reviewed here)
I know what the similarities are between psychics and deniers. They both use unscientific methods, generally make stuff up with no evidence to support their views, and have consistently been debunked when scrutinized. What is the difference between a psychic and a climate science denier? In fairness, psychics sometimes guess the right answer.
Earth Day post:
With 7 billion people going to 9 billion, much of the environment is unsavable … the relatively stable environment and climate that made modern human civilization possible will be ruined, probably for hundreds of years … with permanent Dust Bowls in Southwest and around the globe. And that means misery for many if not most of the next 10 to 20 billion people to walk the planet (expunged, but reviewed here).
Enough said … for now.
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[1] Romm, on the other hand, correctly dismisses new nuclear capacity, hydrogen, and carbon capture & storage. He also calls a spade a spade when it comes to the failure of climate mitigation policies. But climate alarm and industrializing the living space with wind, solar, and batteries–and energy-usage bans–is where this authoritarian lives.
LOL
Joe Romm and Michael “Piltdown” Mann hired and employed by Penn !
I haven’t laughed this hard since the last time I watched Amy Goodman on “Democracy Now!”
For a place that’s supposed to be full of smart people, Penn is astoundingly stupid.
Deep Ecology religion is at work with the ‘ate my homework’. In today’s New York Times:
“I want us to stand up for an Earth that was created with perfect balance, with beauty and mystery and a divine artistry. An Earth that was put here not for our consumption and our greed but for our nourishment. An Earth that has so much to teach us, and that needs protection, now more than ever.
We have thrown an entire planet out of balance, and now we are suffering the consequences — weather patterns so severe we have no idea how to combat them, and the resulting fires, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, more severe than anything we’ve known before.”
Pattis Davis, “The Dream of California Is Up in Smoke.” January 12, 2025.