… the prospect of cheap, inexhaustible power from fusion is “like giving a machine gun to an idiot child,” Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich says. Laments Washington-based author-activist Jeremy Rifkin, “It’s the worst thing that could happen to our planet.”

So what do Big Government, anti-freedom eco-activists really want?

This is the perennial question regarding nuclear power, which is really the only scalable low-to-no CO2-emitting choice for electrical generation. When recently asked this question by a political economist friend who only tangentially follows energy, I went to Google to find the Paul Ehrlich quotation above. And lo-and-behold, I found a whole article around it!

Paul Ciottin’s, “Fear of Fusion: What if It Works?” appeared in the Los Angeles Times on April 19, 1989. It is certainly worth revisiting in its entirety some 32 years later.…

” … there can be no near term CO2 solution without changes to the Chinese plan. It will only get worse, while we impose increasingly harsh penalties on others with diminishing returns.”

“Thanks captain obvious on the China data point. What’s your beef? Tariffs? Counter-veiling duties? Unequal market access? Pretending to be middle income country? Human rights? Corruption? Market manipulation? Disdain for property rights? Closed-competition? State-control. Or, something else? What exactly are you getting at?”

Imagine if you could listen in to what the climate alarmists/forced energy transformationists are really thinking. Behind closed doors, with their hopes and fears in the open, one commiserating with the other. Some lifting up others. And trying to prevent defections to a lost cause amid a sea of ecological tradeoffs and contradictions.

It is not easy being green.…

“I keep saying to you, some of us are trying to … help the U.S. adapt to a climate you knuckleheads can’t seem to understand is changing rapidly because of your profession. Compete in a world where U.S. is an equal partner in opportunity. Not perish as a result of some delinquency.” (Williamson, below)

“There is no climate crisis. You can walk across the street and not notice the accumulated temperature change that is ‘killing’ the planet. Adaptation to weather requires wealth and a LOT of affordable, reliable energy.” (Bradley, below)

I actively challenge and trade thoughts with the members of the Church of Climate. I find much gratifying support from third parties–but encounter angry, emotional critics who throw everything they can at me.

Enter one Tim Williamson, an “infrastructure, efficiency and renewable energy expert” in the Baltimore/DC area.…

“… as we suffer through the hellish summer of 2011 … one lesson from the book is clear: Get used to it.” (Andrew Dessler)

A decade ago, the Texas A&M climate alarmist Andrew Dessler, long followed at MasterResource for his exaggerations and bad temperment, wrote an op-ed for the Houston Chronicle: “Texas is Vulnerable to Warming Climate” (July 10, 2011; updated August 17, 2011).

How does Professor Dessler’s op-ed read today? The short answer: not very well. The mad scientist should chill with some A/C (72^o, not 78^o) and focus on the real here-and-now problem: the state’s overbuilt wind and solar capacity that has wounded the Texas electrical grid (as in price spikes and greenouts).

Here is Dessler’s opinion-page editorial with my comments.…