“Mr. Pickens was an early exponent of the peak oil theory, which held that the world would soon run out of oil to pump. The rise of fracking, which made hard-to-reach oil accessible, upended the theory.” (Washington Post, below)
“’It’s been valuable to have Boone as part of the team,’ said Carl Pope, who was executive director of the Sierra Club at the time, in response to the oilman’s backing of alternative energy sources. Former Vice President Al Gore also backed Mr. Pickens’s alternative energy campaign.” (New York Times, below)
Business leaders can help or hurt the capitalist system with their actions and rhetoric. Swashbuckling T. Boone Pickens (1928–2019) gained a reputation as a disrupter, shaking up a stodgy oil major (Gulf Oil, now part of Chevron), among others.…
[Editor note: A ‘clarification and apology’ associated with this post is here. The author failed to note that Andrew Dessler also stated, “I debate in the peer-reviewed literature.”]
…“Doesn’t the wholesale reordering of our society demand at least a little bit of public debate? We think so.” (Heartland Institute)
“In a public debate, advocates can use all kinds of rhetorical tricks, as well as outright lies, to advance their cause. There’s no way to counter them in that forum.” (Andrew Dessler)
“All of the noise right now from the climate change denial machine, the bots & trolls, the calls for fake “debates,” etc. Ignore it all. Deniers are desperate for oxygen in a mainstream media environment that is thankfully is no longer giving it to them. Report.
This concludes the discussion/debate between ethanol proponent Marc Rauch and ethanol critic Michael Lynch. Part I was yesterday.
Lynch: Do ethanol blends burn cleanly? At one point, you say “ethanol is clean” but then later you admit “ethanol is hardly dirty”, which is precisely my argument. That it can be burned indoors is not evidence of its cleanliness, since kerosene lamps have long been used, and many people still have wood-fueled fireplaces. The faults you take with my citations from the EPA website treats them as if they were the only research on the question, rather than the only articles I cited. The EPA website has numerous links to studies showing that ethanol causes some types of emissions, such as formaldehyde, to increase, I did not choose to cite more than a couple. …