Ed Note: This (re)post from two-and-a-half years ago is reproduced below (verbatim) given its continuing relevance to the climate debate today.
A recent piece in Climatewire by Scott Walderman, “‘Doomerism’: Why scientists disagree with Biden on 1.5 C,” begins:
Damned. Lost. Done. President Joe Biden keeps saying the world as we know it will be gone if global temperatures rise beyond 1.5 degrees.
Which led Michael Mann (a leading climate scientist/activist) to complain that Biden’s pitch was “misleading and unhelpful.” Mann continued:
It indeed feeds doomerism since there’s a very real possibility that we will fail to limit warming below 1.5 C. If we miss that exit ramp, we don’t continue headlong down the fossil fuel highway. We get off at the earliest possible exit.
“Doomerism” Everywhere?…
“… the outcome of doing nothing to combat climate change [is] simply horrific. That is why I find your phrase – We are winning the debate intellectual and politically for good reasons – somewhat alarming.” (- Martin Palmer, below)
All I have wanted in the climate policy arena is open debate. And on social media, LinkedIn has provided that to me. I now have nearly 13,000 followers who seem to enjoy my posts and ‘counterpunches’ against the omnipresent alarmists and apologists for wind, solar, and battery industrialization.
From time to time, I repost exchanges I have with the other side for the historical record. The future will be interested in what is to us the present. To this end, here is an exchange with an adversary, Martin Palmer, self-described as
…Passionate about the Climate Threat of human extinction.
Update: The ALEC model legislation is final and approved now. It’s also been enacted in New Hampshire and proposed in Illinois and in the U.S. Senate by Tom Cotton (S.3585 – “A bill to amend the Federal Power Act to exempt consumer-regulated electric utilities from Federal regulation, and for other purposes.”)
…“Consumer Regulated Electric Utilities can act just like regulated utilities, but they cannot sell or supply power to residential consumers and they must be islanded from, or not connected to, regulated electric systems.”
The new year brings new opportunities to build upon the free market reforms of 2025 by scaling back statism. This is particularly important in the area of U.S. electricity policy, where the work of Travis Fisher and Glen Lyons (Advocates for Consumer Regulated Electricity) is particularly important.